Did Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres stop disinformation bots?

Claims that Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers successfully dismantled Russian disinformation networks lack empirical evidence despite widespread social media traction and endorsements from officials like President Volodymyr Zelensky. Investigations into viral graphs purportedly showing a decline in bot activity reveal significant flaws, including a "time-traveling" data set that predicted future dates and a Cloudflare graph that actually tracked non-malicious search engine web crawlers rather than social media bots. Disinformation experts Shayan Sardarizadeh of BBC Verify and Amil Khan of Valent confirm that authentic Russian influence operations remain active and unaffected, as these networks typically utilize residential proxies to bypass platform filters rather than centralized data centers. While the scale of Russian disinformation remains vast—evidenced by the recent removal of 13,000 inauthentic accounts linked to foreign interference—the Yandex strikes primarily impacted Russian search engine infrastructure rather than the decentralized architecture of state-sponsored bot farms.