In brief
Social media videos claimed that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centres had cut down interference bots, but experts say there is no evidence for a drop in bot activity. The data that’s being shared comes from Cloudflare, which tracks all web traffic, not just social media bots. Russian influence operations – like Storm‑1516 and Matryoshka – are still active. Yandex, Russia’s Google‑like search engine, says it turned off some bots that crawl the web because its servers were hit. While internet services suffered, there’s no proof that the strikes disrupted the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns.
Zelenski’s claim that Ukraine’s attacks have snuffed out Russian bots has been flying around social media like a viral meme.
But when experts looked into the numbers, they found no sign that bot traffic on social platforms dropped after the strikes.
Much of the data being shared comes from Cloudflare, a company that measures all internet traffic, including normal “web‑crawling” bots that help search engines index sites. Cloudflare said the dip is not tied to social‑media bots, so it doesn’t prove the Kremlin’s influence armies were ground down.
Analysts from dTeam – the group that tracks Moscow‑linked influence operations – confirmed that the main bot groups, Storm‑1516 and Matryoshka, are still active on Twitter and other platforms. There’s no sign of a traffic drop from these accounts.
Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, has said it likely suspended its own web‑crawler bots after the attack because its servers struggled. These bots aren’t the same kind as the social‑media bots that spread disinformation; they’re simply scanning the internet for indexing.
So while Ukraine’s strikes disrupted internet services and yanked the infrastructure offline, the evidence suggests that the Kremlin’s bot-driven propaganda machine is still running. The viral claim, however, remains a useful reminder to fact‑check before jumping to conclusions on social media.
