Ukraine's Yandex Strikes: Experts Debate Impact on Russian Bot Activity

Debate is emerging over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's assertions that recent attacks on Russia's Yandex data centers effectively reduced Pro-Russian bot operations. Experts emphasize the critical need to distinguish between automated bots, social media trolls, and sophisticated influence campaigns. Professor Olga Belogolova, director of the emerging technologies initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, elaborated on this in a detailed LinkedIn post. Prof. Belogolova, who previously led Meta's policy efforts against influence operations, observed that many individuals interpreted data from network and cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare through a biased lens. "The narrative gained traction when a Cloudflare screenshot was circulated as evidence of silenced troll farms, showing a significant decrease in bot traffic," she noted. She added, "Their motivated reasoning led them to perceive the internet as cleaner, more welcoming, and less toxic." Prof. Belogolova, drawing on her experience in investigating and disrupting numerous malign influence operations and troll networks, stated, "They do not often host their infrastructure on Yandex." Furthermore, she highlighted that many were conflating and misusing technical terminology. "Bots are fundamentally different from trolls, as numerous tech researchers have already indicated; Cloudflare categorizes any non-browser, automated script as a bot," she explained. She pointed out that when a data center is taken offline, "its automated web-crawling and indexing traffic ceases as well." Cloudflare Radar, a division of the company, concurred that a nuanced approach is necessary when analyzing internet traffic data. "Bot traffic encompasses automated requests to websites within Cloudflare's network, such as crawlers and scripts, and does not necessarily reflect activity on social media platforms," a Cloudflare Radar post clarified, casting doubt on claims that Russia's social media trolls and disinformation efforts had been curtailed. On Thursday, Cloudflare provided further clarification regarding the Ukrainian attacks on Russian data centers. "Cloudflare data indicates that while search crawling was halted, malicious bots simply shifted to other networks," the company reported. "There was no evidence that the strikes disabled social media manipulation or otherwise disrupted malicious online activity." Nevertheless, Prof. Belogolova suggested that Russia likely still faced repercussions from the data center strikes. "Kinetic strikes on Russian tech infrastructure can disrupt Russia's digital economy and cloud services," she commented. "However, they are not a precise instrument for halting foreign influence operations."