Researchers tracking Russian influence operations said they saw no meaningful drop in known Kremlin-linked bot clusters after Ukraine struck three of Yandex's five data centers since Oct. 8.
Cloudflare charts cited online were misread: the company said the decline reflected all automated requests on its network, not necessarily social-media manipulation, and could include Yandex search crawlers.
dTeam told BBC Verify pro-Kremlin operations including Storm-1516 and Matryoshka were still active on Tuesday, while Zelensky's office said his remarks referred to the online "atmosphere," not measured bot activity.
Yandex had already reported service struggles after the second strike, and Netblocks said the attacks caused broader cloud disruptions that affected ordinary users and websites relying on Yandex infrastructure.