From Russia, with hate

Want to stop hate propaganda on a global scale? Take out a Russian data center.

That’s what Ukraine did.

Yandex is Russia’s biggest technology company. It’s often called Russia’s Google. It runs a search engine, and offers web browsers, cloud storage, maps and navigation. It’s even involved in online food delivery and Uber-style taxis. It has facilities across Russia, and is very, very pro-Kremlin.

In the past few days, Ukraine struck a Yandex data center containing two supercomputers in Sasovo, Russia, which is about 300 kilometres Southeast of the Kremlin. A second, bigger Yandex campus is found in Kaluga, a couple hours West of Sasovo. Ukraine hit that, too, and knocked it offline. A third Yandex centre was also hit last week.

The effect was instantaneous. Internet traffic and bots - that is, automated fake “humans” that work much, much faster than humans online - dropped off noticeably. Cloudfare, which tracks these things, found that bot traffic dropped nearly 60 per cent on October 8 - the day Ukraine hit Yandex with FP-1 one-way attack drones.

NetBlocks, another firm that tracks online activity, also showed a dramatic drop in Yandex network movement. Looking at it on a graph, you can see Yandex-sponsored activity fall off a cliff after the drone strikes.

It’s not newsworthy, really: if someone blows up a provider of Internet services, Internet activity is obviously going to drop off, too.  But what’s fascinating is the apparent effect the Yandex drone strikes had on the firehose of propaganda that has been coming out of Russia - aimed at Israel, Canada, the United States and Western democracy itself.

Fort example: DisinfoWatch, another Internet watchdog, has found that albertaseparatist.com and its related TikTok and YouTube accounts are linked to a Russian disinformation and propaganda operation, Storm 1516. Storm 1516 has been very active over the past six months, just as the October 19 referendum on Alberta’s position in Canada edges closer. All of the propaganda it has been pushing - about a separate Alberta, about Canada as a 51st state - were very visible before before the drone strikes, and a lot less visible afterwards.

So, web-watchers found “a distinct lack of separatist sentiment” online after the drone strikes. Graphics shared online showed a clear bot drop in pro-Alberta separatist messaging from October 8 to 11, when Ukraine hit back at Putin’s regime.

Similarly, France’s Le Parisienne analyzed the traffic, and reported  that there was noticeable decline in pro-MAGA propaganda, as well as far-Right German AfD propaganda, after Ukraine took out the three Russian data centres.

Yandex’s days-long collapse was felt on multiple fronts in the propaganda wars - pro-MAGA themes leading up to the U.S. midterm elections, pro-AfD themes in the aftermath of German regional Parliament elections. But it was perhaps most keenly felt with Russia’s information war against Jews and the Jewish state.

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