Western social media affected by Ukrainian strikes on Russian AI centers. By Brave AI.
Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers in late October 2026 have significantly disrupted Russian bot networks, causing a drastic drop in automated social media activity. (Yandex is Russia’s equivalent to Google.)
By targeting the infrastructure hosting 70% of Russian searches and training AI models, the strikes crippled the backend systems many propaganda bots relied on for coordination and deployment.
On the night of October 8, 2026, the Defense Forces of Ukraine successfully struck a data center in the city of Sasovo (Ryazan Oblast, Russia), which is one of the largest data processing and storage centers of the Russian IT company Yandex.
54.37341, 41.939628
#UkrainerussiaWar https://t.co/wVdKTRSfro— Absolutely reliable source (@absreliable) October 8, 2026
The outages affected the servers supporting bot farms responsible for spreading misinformation, manipulating public opinion, and amplifying divisive content across platforms like X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Researchers and users noted a dramatic decline in suspicious engagement, fake accounts, and coordinated posting campaigns, effectively silencing millions of suspected Russian bot accounts.
The Sasovo data center previously hosted two of the three Yandex supercomputers, which were used to train its YandexGPT large language model.
Jarosław Wolski (a lefty):
De-Russified internet (due to Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers) suddenly reveals wonders in the socials:
- support for AfD in social media has dropped by 56%.
- fewer “Polish” accounts inciting against Ukrainians
- fewer “Ukrainian” ones inciting against Poles
- support for MAGA online has sharply fallen.
Waiting for further measurable results of the sudden drops in support for Gaśniczakokacapów, AfD, Trump, etc.
How much of the Western — particularly US — politics is driven by Russian and Chinese bots and Pakistani influencers masquerading as Western citizens?
For instance, on Joanne’s blog (which allows comments) there are always a couple of what are almost certainly Chinese trolls — commenters who flare up at the appearance of anything that lowers the status of the CCP.
If any accounts you follow went off line for the last few days, they are probably Russian bots.
hat-tip David Archibald