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Ukraine strikes Russia’s data centres: will this reduce Kremlin’s online election meddling?
Ukrainian drone strikes have disabled or severely damaged multiple data centres belonging to Yandex, Russia’s dominant tech company, in a tit-for-tat campaign that has disrupted the firm’s cloud services, AI tools and automated web traffic.
The strikes form part of an escalating exchange of attacks on digital infrastructure. In late September, Russian drones and missiles targeted data centres and internet exchange points in Kyiv, disrupting connectivity for tens of thousands of households and affecting air-raid alert systems. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described subsequent Ukrainian actions against Yandex facilities as a “symmetrical response.”
Russia 🇷🇺 bombed multiple data centers in Kyiv, Dnipro or Odesa these last few weeks and proudly showed footage about it
Now, Ukraine is bombing Yandex data centers and causing much more harm to Russia than Russia did to Ukraine.
This is another example of symmetrical war. In… pic.twitter.com/yAXzcUN3FQ
— Clément Molin (@clement_molin) October 12, 2026
Confirmed or reported strikes hit a Yandex data centre in Sasovo (Ryazan region) around 8 October, another in the Kaluga region the following day, and a larger facility in the Vladimir region on 11 October. Yandex acknowledged significant damage, service outages and the loss of operational capacity at some sites, including infrastructure used for its AI models.
Cloudflare Radar data shows a sharp decline in automated (“bot”) traffic originating from Yandex’s network (AS13238). After the later strikes, this traffic fell to a small fraction of recent peaks. NetBlocks and Yandex’s own status reports confirmed broader disruptions to Yandex Cloud and related services. The observed drop aligns with the timing of the attacks.
However, specialists tracking online influence operations caution against equating the Cloudflare metric with a collapse in social-media bot or troll activity. The Cloudflare data primarily records automated requests such as web crawlers used by search engines to index the internet, not accounts that post, amplify or comment on platforms such as X. Accounts that monitor coordinated inauthentic behaviour, including those cited by major news organisations, have stated that the networks they track were not disrupted by the Yandex outages and that the Cloudflare chart does not measure social-media posting bots. Some analysts have also noted that sophisticated influence operations are unlikely to rely primarily on Yandex’s domestic infrastructure.
Public commentary has linked the strikes to declines in online activity around specific political topics. Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shared a chart and remarked that activity related to Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) appeared to fall after the data-centre hits, describing the timing as potentially “telling.” Similar suggestions have circulated regarding pro-Trump content.
These claims have not been independently verified with transparent methodology, and some observers have questioned the provenance and accuracy of the circulating graphs. Historian Timothy Snyder and others have speculated that portions of pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot activity may have depended on Russian data centres, but such statements rest on correlation rather than demonstrated causation.
If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. 📉
So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down. 🤔🇷🇺 pic.twitter.com/hEPJkIVtA3
— Tomáš Zdechovský (@TomasZdechovsky) October 11, 2026
The broader context is a war in which both sides have begun treating data centres and communications infrastructure as legitimate targets. Russia has framed some of its strikes on Ukrainian facilities as directed at military-linked systems; Ukraine has presented its actions as reciprocal. Physical damage to large data centres is difficult and costly to repair under wartime conditions, and the strikes have already affected ordinary Russian users of Yandex services. Whether they also degrade the Kremlin’s ability to run or support online influence campaigns targeting foreign elections depends on factors that remain opaque: the extent to which any such campaigns used the affected Yandex infrastructure, the availability of alternative hosting, and the resilience of other Russian or proxy networks.
For now, the confirmed effects are the disruption of Yandex’s services and a measurable drop in automated traffic associated with its network. Any reduction in election-related meddling would require separate, verifiable evidence of diminished activity by coordinated influence accounts—evidence that has not yet been publicly established. The episode underscores the growing vulnerability of civilian digital infrastructure in the conflict and the ease with which technical data can be interpreted, or over-interpreted, in political terms.
Caption: Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shared on X a chart and remarked that activity related to Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) appeared to fall after the data-centre hits, describing the timing as potentially “telling.”
