Russian data center attack did not silence far‑right posts

The claim that Ukrainian strikes on Russian bot farms caused right-wing or MAGA social media activity to decrease is unproven.

“Russia has become a victim of its own policy . . . this triggered a worst-case scenario,” said Alena Epifanova, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. Ukrainian drones also struck a Sberbank data centre in Balakovo, Saratov region, overnight. Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender and IT giant, confirmed the attack but said all services were operating normally. Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings. Russians have struggled to access their Yandex emails, open work files or book taxis.

At the same time, all Sberbank systems and services are operating normally," Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of Sberbank’s Executive Board told reporters following the overnight attack. However, Russian outage-monitoring services reported a surge in complaints from Sberbank users across the country, citing problems with the bank’s application and access to accounts.

Ukraine proved the point inside Russia this past week. President Trump and his national security team should take note before an enemy tries the same thing here. On October 8, a Ukrainian drone attack forced Yandex, the technology company often called "Russia’s Google," to suspend operations at its Sasovo data center.

Did attacks on Russian data centers reduce bot activity around Germany's AfD? A viral graph claims they did. But it contains significant inconsistencies and provides no evidence to support the claim.

A viral story has been circulating on social media over the past few days: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian technology company Yandex’s data centers knocked out large numbers of Russian propaganda bots. The theory was boosted by prominent politicians—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for example—and picked up by prominent liberal commentators. Some have made the claim that pro-Trump MAGA accounts and accounts promoting Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have suddenly gone quiet.

The world saw a huge drop in right-wing ... centers in Russia. Evidence points towards Russia being behind large bot operations to promote MAGA, the AfD, Reform, and other pro-Russian extreme parties in the West....

Researchers tracking thousands of political and suspected influence accounts have found no major decline in AfD, MAGA or Russian disinformation activity after Ukraine struck Yandex data centres. Their findings directly challenge a viral narrative built on unrelated Cloudflare crawler data and an anonymous chart that circulated widely despite obvious inconsistencies.

Particularly disruptive for Russians was the attacks’ effect on digital financial services. Yandex is so integrated into everyday payments that when its digital wallet application, Yandex Pay, went down, it warranted its own explanation from company leadership. “All your money is safe,” Dima Pirogov, CEO of Yandex’s FinTech Division, said in a statement posted to the company’s social media platforms on Sunday.