How the Yandex ‘Russian bots’ lie fell apart

The real “hybrid war” is being waged by European leaders against their own people Did Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers destroy the Kremlin’s pro-MAGA bot army? Or are Vladimir Zelensky and his European patrons insulting their citizens with remedial-grade propaganda? RT takes a trip down the rabbit hole.

Ukrainian forces hit three Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google) data centers with long-range drones between October 8 and 11.

Yandex confirmed that operations were “completely halted” at the facility struck on October 8, and temporarily halted at the center struck on October 11.

This much is true, but the story that followed veers into NAFO fiction.

How did the ‘Russian bots’ story begin? A Cloudflare graph posted by on X by Jeremiah Fowler, October 8, 2026 On October 8, American cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler posted a Cloudflare graph showing a dramatic drop in “bot traffic” after the first Yandex center was hit.

As Yandex is primarily a search company, its bots crawl the internet indexing content for users.

All search engines function in this way, but Fowler – either through malice or ignorance – conflated this search bot activity with social media bot activity, claiming that the drop in traffic could “disrupt the midterm elections in the US.” The story spread, hitting the mainstream media on October 11 when Tom’s Hardware published an article claiming that “Russian disinformation bot traffic” had been “nearly eliminated” after the strikes.

The word “disinformation” was later pulled from the headline, but the tale had already taken on a life of its own.

That same day, an AI-created graph began circulating, claiming that “Russian bots” were making 56% fewer posts in support of Germany’s right-wing AfD party in the aftermath of the strikes.

The graph, which was unsourced and had one axis unlabeled, measured the “decline in activity of Russian bots” up to October 15, four days in the future at the time it appeared online.

An image posted on X by Tomas Zdechovsky, October 11, 2026 Regardless, the graph was shared by a Green Party councillor in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, and by Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky.

“This is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets,” Zdechovsky wrote on social media.

“So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down.” Who spread the lie? By October 12, the story had been reported by Germany’s Der Standard and Focus.