Yandex hit by Ukrainian drones, doubts raised over pro-AfD bot drop

Between 7 and 11 October 2026, Ukrainian drones struck three Yandex data centres in Russia: in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, in Kaluga and in Vladimir. Yandex confirmed the damage. The Sasovo centre and the one in Vladimir were shut down completely, while several modules were disabled in Kaluga. The company has not said when operations might resume.

The day after the last strike, Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský posted a graphic on X that purportedly showed a sharp drop in online activity tied to the AfD, Germany's far-right party. The graphic shows two declines, of 30 and 56 percent, and links the figures to the attacks on Yandex's infrastructure. Zdechovský captioned the post "If confirmed", signalling that the information was not yet verified.

The post spread widely, drawing hundreds of thousands of views. Several online articles picked up the claim that part of the digital propaganda favouring the AfD came from bots hosted on the Russian servers that were hit, and that this activity stopped along with the data centres.

Independent checks

Checks carried out by fact-checking sites do not confirm the link. The graphic circulated by Zdechovský does not state the data source, the collection method or the list of accounts counted. Its timeline runs to 15 October, four days after the post went up, and it is unclear whether this represents real data or an estimate.

A comparison with control data on German-language posts over the weekend of the attack shows that AfD-linked traffic fell by 19.3 percent. That drop was larger than the CDU's, which fell 17.8 percent, but smaller than the SPD's, down 36.8 percent, and the Greens', down 28.6 percent. The AfD therefore did not register the sharpest decline among the German parties observed.

Bot traffic from the Yandex network measured by Cloudflare, which fell to as little as 0.4 percent of the peak recorded over the previous two weeks, also does not equate to a drop in social media activity. According to experts cited by the fact-checkers, that traffic consists mainly of automated crawlers and Yandex cloud services, not accounts posting political content on platforms such as X.

What remains confirmed is the attack on the Russian data centres, with concrete consequences for Yandex's services. What is not shown is that a Russian bot network supporting the AfD was hosted in that infrastructure, or that its activity actually stopped.