"This is revealing": Kyiv destroys Russian data centers, pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot activity collapses on social media

It's a variation of the butterfly effect: Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers have had repercussions on the other side of the world, on a North American continent preparing for highly charged parliamentary elections. This Sunday, the shutdown of three data centers hosting a large portion of Russia's cloud services led, according to many observers, to a dramatic drop in bot activity on American and European social networks, particularly X, owned by Elon Musk.

The social network X is manipulated by numerous anonymous and automated accounts, known as bots: this problem is widely documented, particularly in the United States. In July 2024, the Department of Justice, then under the control of the Biden administration, announced a large-scale operation, shutting down a network of more than 1,000 accounts on X attributed to Russian intelligence services, in the context of a presidential campaign that would lead to Donald Trump's return to the White House.

According to US court documents, the system was developed starting in 2022. Software was used to generate fictitious identities and automated behaviors. The published messages aligned with the Kremlin's interests and were disseminated in the United States and Europe. At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a study of 350,000 messages in the United States estimated that 20% of them had been published by bots.

Yandex hit in Russia

The practice hasn't disappeared over time. At least, not until this weekend. Responding to an attack on its own data centers, Ukraine decided to retaliate proportionally. Three Russian data centers were hit by strikes attributed to Kyiv: first in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region; then in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow; and finally, this Sunday, in the Vladimir region, east of the capital.

These three data centers, among the 10 largest in the country, are used by Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google. The attacks damaged the cloud infrastructure of the Russian tech giant.

"Following a drone attack, the infrastructure of the Vladimir data center was damaged," the company stated on Telegram. "Data center operations have been completely disrupted. The remaining infrastructure resources are unstable and the platform is down."

Meanwhile, Cloudflare, a technology and cybersecurity company, observed a near-total collapse in bot activity originating from Yandex infrastructure: a drop of over 99% compared to the previous week. This decline coincides precisely with the moment when the data centers were taken offline by Ukrainian airstrikes.

Speculation in the United States

The connection was quickly made, particularly in Europe. In Germany, support for the AfD on social media fell by 56%. "If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centers are affected, and online activity around the AfD suddenly collapses," pointed out Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky. "So much talk about German patriotism... until the connection from Russia breaks down." In the UK, traffic to the conservative website Reform UK has also plummeted since the data center attack.

In the United States, this drop also fueled speculation about the consequences of the attacks for Russian online influence operations. Many internet users pointed out that pro-conservative reactions were less frequent under each post.

"This is a quick analysis, and no doubt more data will come in, but it seems certain, based on today's evidence, that a lot of pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot work depends directly on Russian data centers," pointed out Timothy Snyder, a former Yale history professor who went into exile in Canada after Donald Trump's return to the White House.

Will this slowdown in activity influence the midterm elections, which are in their final stretch? The vote is scheduled for November 3rd, and current polls predict a Democratic sweep, potentially leading to a victory in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Perhaps unintentionally, Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking from Kyiv, may have provided a very useful boost to the American Democratic Party.