OMITTED

What the news leaves out.

← Omitted front page

Zelensky Claims Ukraine Drone Strikes Crippled Russian Disinformation

4 sources · updated 2026-10-13
Left 75% Center 0% Right 25%
3 left · 0 center · 1 right

What happened

Over several days in early October, Ukrainian drones struck three data centers operated by Yandex, a Russian technology company often compared to Google. On October 7, a strike in Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan region caused a fire that forced Yandex to shut a facility housing two of its three supercomputers used to train artificial intelligence; no injuries were reported. On October 9, drones struck a second center in Kaluga and partially disabled it—Ukrainian arms maker Fire Point claimed its FP-1 long-range drones—and Russian state media later reported that a third facility in Vladimir, east of Moscow, home to the remaining supercomputer, had been knocked out completely. Cloudflare data showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network falling sharply (Daily Wire cited a drop to 0.4 percent of a recent high; NetBlocks put Yandex Cloud traffic at about 30 percent of normal), and services including Yandex Pay went offline, affecting users in Russia and neighboring countries. Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum by video, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said social media had seen fewer bots, less hate, and fewer provocations after the strikes.
Sourcing check · Fully on the record · 4 articles

2 of 2 articles cite a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report.

What these terms mean and how they're counted
On the record · names a source 2 of 2
On the record means the article cites a source by name for the story's main claim: a person, or an institution speaking officially, such as a company statement or a named agency's spokesperson. The opposite is an unnamed source. The count is how many of the counted articles cite at least one such source; the names are everyone named across them, each once however the articles spell it. Here: Valdemar Osted, Volodymyr Zelensky and antibot4navalny
Primary evidence · cites a document or data 0 of 2
Primary evidence means the article cites a record you could check yourself: a court filing or ruling, a dataset or report, a recording or transcript, an official statement or press release, market data. A quote is not a document. The count is how many articles cite one. Here: None cited.
Credits another outlet 0 of 2
The article says the story comes from another outlet's reporting (“first reported by Reuters”). Those articles relay the story; they are not independent confirmation. Here: Each article presents its own reporting.
Unnamed sources 0 of 2
The main claim is attributed to people who are not identified: “people familiar with the matter”, “officials said”. The count is how many articles do this.
How it developed
When the first report landed and whether it named anyone; when the first named source and the first document appeared. Here: First report Oct 13, 09:35 UTC by Daily Wire, naming its source.
Not counted 2
Opinion, analysis and video pieces, and articles too short to assess. Every count above is out of the counted articles. An article republished under a new headline is one article.
This is about who is cited, not whether the story is true. Each source below says what it names. How we count
Omitted — what each side leaves out

Unpacked

Readers are getting two different answers to whether the drone strikes silenced Russian influence bots. Left-leaning coverage reports that the circulating Cloudflare drop tracks Yandex web crawlers, not social-media troll farms, and that bot activity from Russia at large remained largely unchanged after the attacks. Right-leaning coverage does not report that Russia-wide finding. It opens on the Ukrainian president's claim that hate and division fell once the data centers went down, quoting Zelensky on "fewer bots." The language splits on what those bots were. Right-leaning coverage writes of "bot armies." Left-leaning coverage calls the measured traffic "automated Yandex web crawlers" used to index websites. Did any social platform record a drop in known Kremlin-linked accounts after the strikes, or only a fall in crawler requests to the open web?
Bottom line

You could finish Daily Wire thinking Yandex going dark took down Kremlin troll farms. It never reports that bot traffic from Russia at large stayed largely unchanged.

The receipts — 3 facts one side's coverage lacks
  • Bot activity from Russia at large remained largely unchanged around the data center attacks contextin The Verge · absent from right-leaning coverage
  • A circulating diagram of the alleged bot drop included a data point logged for October 15, a future date contextin The Verge · absent from right-leaning coverage
  • The Sasovo facility hit on October 7 held two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its artificial intelligence numberin Daily Wire · absent from left-leaning coverage
The Left View
The Verge argues that viral Cloudflare charts of a post-strike drop in “bot” traffic are being misread as proof that Kremlin troll farms went silent. Citing troll-farm researcher antibot4navalny, it says the chart “has nothing to do with social media” and instead tracks automated Yandex web crawlers used for search indexing and similar tasks, is limited to Yandex-based traffic rather than Russia-wide bot activity—which Cloudflare data show “remains largely unchanged”—and that those crawlers have both mundane and malicious uses. A separate diagram, shared by European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský as evidence that activity around Germany’s AfD plummeted, is flagged by computer scientist Raphael Wimmer as likely AI-generated, including a data point dated October 15 and an unverified origin; Wimmer asked that politicians, journalists, and scientists “please stop sharing unverified images.” The piece also notes that most Yandex-operated systems, including Yandex Pay, still appeared offline.
The Right View
The Daily Wire frames the strikes as Ukraine taking the fight to Russia’s servers and reports that Zelensky believes the attack “knocked the Kremlin’s online smear operation for a loop,” citing his claim that it “suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms” because “there were fewer bots,” and that “it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from – if they disappeared when Yandex went offline.” It treats Moscow’s “digital dirty tricks” as established, pointing to France’s partial attribution of 2023 Paris Star of David graffiti unrest to Russia’s Doppelgänger network (1,095 linked bot accounts, 2,589 posts on X) and to Kremlin-backed fake American personas used to inflame U.S. politics. It acknowledges Kyiv outlet Hromadske’s caveat that Cloudflare’s figures track automated web requests, including crawlers, and do not count troll accounts or their posts, and concludes that Kyiv “clearly dealt a heavy blow to Russia’s digital backbone” while leaving open “whether it silenced the Kremlin’s troll farms.”
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is technical: antibot4navalny and Cloudflare-context reporting indicate the circulating drop measures Yandex crawler requests, not social-media troll farms, Russia-wide bot traffic did not fall in parallel, and at least one widely shared AfD chart is unverified and possibly fabricated. The right’s strongest argument is the coincidence Zelensky and others described—an apparent easing of hostile, divisive activity on platforms when Yandex went dark—together with a documented record of Russian bot networks and the undisputed physical damage to Yandex’s data centers and supercomputers. The central unresolved tension is whether that outage and the crawler-traffic collapse actually disrupted Kremlin influence operations on social media, or whether observers inferred a troll-farm takedown from infrastructure and search-bot metrics that do not measure those accounts.

4 sources

More stories

The week's bottom lines, in your inbox

One email a week: the five stories that mattered and what they actually mean. Free.