Ukraine Just DE-RUSSIFIED the World

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Become a Member Today and Unlock EXCLUSIVE Videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKfak8fBm_Lhy4eX9UKxEpA/join  Following Ukrainian deep strikes on three of Yandex’s five massive data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir, an unexpected secondary effect has emerged: the collapse of Russia’s global bot army. With automated bot traffic dropping to just 0.4% of pre-strike levels, political parties like the UK’s Reform and Germany’s AfD have seen their online engagement plunge, while millions of anti-Ukrainian bot posts have vanished in Poland and Israel. Discover how Ukraine’s targeted strikes on Russia’s tech giant disrupted Kremlin influence operations—and why new 160 km/h Starlink restrictions are reshaping the next phase of drone warfare.  ⏱️ CHAPTERS: 00:00 - The Digital Collapse: Yandex Strikes & The Global Fall of Russian Bots 01:38 - European Impact: UK Reform Engagement Crash & Bot Traffic Drops to 0.4% 02:59 - Regional Disinformation Drops: Poland, Israel, & Germany's AfD Engagement Plunge 05:07 - Zelenskyy at the Warsaw Security Forum: Confirming the Bot Disappearance 06:41 - The Four Pillars of Russian Cyber Influence & Election Interference 12:17 - Yandex's Ruined Infrastructure: 6-Month Repairs & Cloud Offloading 15:10 - The October 14 Starlink Dilemma: 160 km/h Velocity Cap & Operational Impact 16:51 - Strategic Reckoning: Digital De-Russification & Belated Kremlin Defenses  Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join  #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis #themilitaryshow  SOURCES / ATTRIBUTIONS: https://pastebin.com/CACE0BdC

Transcript

00:01On October 8th, Ukraine carried out a strike unlike any other we've seen so far.

00:05The target was a data center owned by Russia's search and internet giant Yandex.

00:11An entire Russian internet network was plunged into chaos.

00:15But what we've seen in the aftermath as Ukraine continues to take aim at Russia's tech infrastructure

00:20is something that nobody could have expected, except for Ukraine itself.

00:24In the wake of the Yandex strike, we're seeing the de-Russification of the entire world.

00:30As bold a claim as that may seem, the web has been one of Russia's most powerful tools of influence

00:35for years.

00:36Now, that's all gone.

00:37The rise of Ukraine's drones has caused the fall of Russia's bots.

00:41It started small.

00:43As Yandex's data centers fell, and there were more after the initial October 8th strike,

00:48reports started trickling in that automated traffic that stemmed from Russia's tech giant's network seemed to be falling.

00:54Whispers of a quieter political internet started doing the rounds,

00:58as anecdotal evidence started appearing that there was far less discord on social media.

01:04Inflammatory posts designed to rile web users were on the downward swing.

01:08Less support for Kremlin-friendly movements, politicians, and social media pages was being seen.

01:14It's almost as if hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people had chosen to go offline all at once.

01:21Of course, it wasn't people that had been taken offline.

01:24It was a digital army of Russian bots that were created for several purposes,

01:28all of which boiled down to enabling Russia to exert its influence in the online space.

01:33Soon, the evidence that the bot army had weakened massively started to flow in.

01:38But before we tell you more, if real, human-made military reporting matters to you,

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01:51Reports have started emerging from all over Europe that confirms those early whispers.

01:56Traffic is down for many of the causes that Russia clearly supports.

02:00According to the London Economic, the UK political party Reform has seen its social media engagement

02:06drop significantly in the wake of the Yandex strikes.

02:08That fall-off comes in the wake of bot traffic from the Yandex network,

02:12dropping to 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests that network has sent in the weeks prior

02:18to Ukraine's strikes.

02:20The outlet brings up the example of Richard Tice, who is Reform's deputy leader.

02:25As of October 11th, Tice has nearly 400,000 followers on X.

02:29However, in the wake of the Yandex strikes,

02:31three posts that Tice made on October 11th have yet to hit triple figures for comments or reposts.

02:37One of those posts doesn't even have 10,000 views for an account that is supposed to have 400,000

02:43followers.

02:44We see similar patterns in the X posts of Reform's spokesperson for Home Affairs Zia Yusuf.

02:49And even Reform's leader, Nigel Farage, saw his supposed 2.3 million followers only muster up 60,000 views

02:56for a clip of him announcing Reform's intended asylum policy proposal.

03:00This is the same Farage, who on October 12th claimed that Ukraine is one of the world's most corrupt countries

03:05and that the UK should take a keen look at the support that it provides to the country.

03:10We don't think we need to put the pieces of all of this together for you.

03:13Even a two-year-old could solve this particular jigsaw.

03:16In its report on the aftermath of the Yandex strikes,

03:19the Kyiv Post points out that commentators in both Poland and Israel

03:22have reported that there seems to be far fewer inflammatory accounts posting comments.

03:27Such comments are particularly absent on the pages of Kremlin-friendly movements in the country, the outlet adds.

03:32Poland in particular has experienced issues with this type of online political discourse.

03:37In August, the Polish Institute of International Affairs conducted a study of online posts in the Polish language

03:43that contained hateful terms directed at Ukrainians.

03:46All of these posts, and there were 364,000 of them, were made between May and July.

03:52Combined, these posts managed to generate 1.2 million interactions,

03:56be they shares, comments, or general reactions.

03:59These are the sorts of posts that are mysteriously disappearing in Poland.

04:03Yet more evidence that Yandex and the Kremlin were up to something suspicious before Ukraine's attacks.

04:08In Israel, we're seeing similar decline in posting activity,

04:11particularly when it comes to support of far-right opinions.

04:14In an October 11th Telegram post, a former Ukrainian lawmaker named Borislav Bereza

04:20noted that Israeli elections are coming up.

04:23But today a miracle happened, Bereza declared.

04:26After Ukrainian drones hit another Russian Yandex data center in the Russian Federation,

04:30the expert community in Israel noticed that a huge number of active users

04:34who had previously systematically written comments in Russian and Hebrew

04:38had disappeared from their social networks, he added.

04:41Over and over, we see the same story playing out.

04:44We have one more for you before we move on.

04:46On October 11th, Tomáš Zdokovsky, who is a member of the European Parliament for the Czech Republic,

04:51posted an interesting graph to Facebook.

04:54In it, we see posting activity related to Germany's AFD political party decline enormously,

05:00first by 30% and then by 56%.

05:03If this is confirmed, it's clear.

05:05Russian data centers were attacked,

05:06and activity surrounding the AFD on social media has dropped sharply, Zdokovsky said.

05:11The AFD, or Alternative for Germany party, is another far-right group, per Sky News.

05:17It runs on platforms that generally oppose Eurozone policies,

05:20with a particular focus on deporting immigrants and, as Sky News puts it,

05:24seeking closer ties to Russia.

05:26That would apparently extend to removing war refugee status from Ukrainians who are living in Germany,

05:31as long as the invasion of Ukraine remains concentrated in the east of the country.

05:35Again, the pattern is clear.

05:36And finally, as speculation ran rife, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed

05:41what the anecdotal and early statistical evidence all seemed to be demonstrating.

05:44A huge number of Russian bots have seemingly disappeared.

05:48When we started responding to Russia's operation against our data centers,

05:52and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers,

05:55it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,

05:58Zelensky declared at the Warsaw Security Forum.

06:01A lot of people, a lot of people noticed it,

06:04and there was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations,

06:07because there were fewer bots.

06:09And it's pretty clear where those bots were coming from, Ukraine's President added.

06:13Europe is not the problem, Zelensky says.

06:15It's very clear that it's Russia using dodgy digital practices

06:19to stoke various fires that cause so many issues online.

06:22What we're seeing in all of this is de-Russification,

06:25carried out in a different way than ever before.

06:26This isn't Ukraine liberating large amounts of territory or a series of nations

06:31implementing what the Kremlin likes to call anti-Russian policies.

06:34This is the exposure of a long game that the Kremlin has been playing for years.

06:39The collapse of a plan that was designed for several reasons,

06:42all of which benefit the Kremlin by allowing it to spread its tendrils far and wide.

06:46Ukraine is pulling off digital de-Russification,

06:49and there are many reasons why this matters,

06:51all of which are revealed when you have an understanding of what Russian bots actually do.

06:55But before we dig deeper, you're watching The Military Show.

06:58We make videos to explain how power really moves,

07:01even when that power seems limited to the digital domain.

07:04If you like what you see, don't forget to subscribe and ring the notification bell

07:08so you don't miss any of our videos.

07:11There are four main reasons why Russia, via Yandex,

07:14maintains a massive army of online bots that post fake comments on every social media platform.

07:20First up, creating pro-Russia sentiment.

07:22We see that in the cases of reform and AFD.

07:25Both of which are political parties that take a sympathetic view of Russia

07:29and have seen their social media influence crash in the wake of the Yandex strikes.

07:33But this isn't a recent phenomenon.

07:35The world has known about Russia's use of fake online profiles

07:38to spread pro-Russian discourse for years now.

07:41Back in 2024, the US Justice Department conducted an investigation

07:45to which it identified 968 accounts created by an employee of RT,

07:50formerly known as Russia Today.

07:51RT is a state-run and controlled media conglomerate inside Russia.

07:56This RT employee created their network of bots, all of which used AI

08:00and were backed by the Russian Federal Security Service to pose as American citizens.

08:05These citizens would then distribute pro-Russian material online,

08:08making it seem as though support for Russia inside the US was higher than it actually was.

08:13This, in a nutshell, is the pro-Russia angle of the Yandex bots.

08:17Fake accounts, pretending to be real people, are created.

08:20Those people then spread all over social media,

08:23using AI to come up with and share posts supporting Russia.

08:26If the bot farm gets large enough, it starts to appear that a lot of people

08:30in a particular country support Russia over Ukraine.

08:33That then encourages real people to engage with the bots.

08:36Whatever fake posts are being spread are often taken as fact,

08:39leading to more pro-Russia sentiment.

08:41And with that pro-Russia sentiment comes the second reason Russia maintains this online bot army,

08:46as well as the other side of the pro-Russian coin,

08:49weakening support for Ukraine.

08:51Think back to the Polish study we mentioned.

08:54Hundreds of thousands of posts, all written in Polish by bots pretending to be real Polish people,

08:58and all directing virulent hate in Ukraine's direction.

09:01We have seen this sort of thing since the beginning of Putin's invasion.

09:05The European Digital Media Observatory highlights this problem,

09:08noting that Russian disinformation about Ukrainian Nazism, refugee violence,

09:13and claims that European countries treat these refugees better than their own citizens, is rife.

09:18Over the last two years, the observatory says,

09:21the increasing use of AI has led to a wave of videos,

09:24often little more than 15 seconds long,

09:26that are realistic enough to seem credible at first glance.

09:30Deeper observation shows otherwise,

09:32but many who see such anti-Ukraine videos won't look beyond those initial few seconds.

09:37Yet another example comes from Poland.

09:39In July, Polish social media was bombarded with AI-generated videos

09:43of supposedly Polish soldiers criticising Ukraine.

09:47These videos were fake.

09:48AI-generated voices and uniforms that didn't properly match

09:51what is used in Polish military were the giveaways.

09:54The US has also seen something similar in the doppelganger operation,

09:58through which Russia cloned websites and created fake social media profiles,

10:02all to weaken support for Ukraine.

10:04It's fair to say that the bots have been busy.

10:07But their Russian creators want to do more than influence opinions about Russia and Ukraine.

10:12They also want to directly interfere in the affairs of other countries,

10:16to the point that they have attempted to influence election results.

10:19This is reason number three for why Russia maintains its army of online bots.

10:24Again, the accusations have been coming thick and fast for years now.

10:28As far back as 2016, the FBI was on the hunt for nearly a dozen Russians

10:33that it's accused of interfering with US elections.

10:35These Russians allegedly created fake websites,

10:38carried out identity theft and laundered money.

10:41The first of those accusations, and possibly even the second,

10:44would have required bots.

10:45Fast forward to December 2024.

10:47In 2004, Romania's top court decided to scrap the country's presidential elections

10:51due to claims of Russian interference.

10:54That decision was made after the far-right politician,

10:57Karlyn Georgescu, somehow managed to top the first round of the elections,

11:02which was a surprise result that came out of left field.

11:05According to the Kyiv Post, documents were declassified

11:09that showed a massive wave of cyber attacks

11:11and fake social media promotion for Georgescu's campaign ahead of the election.

11:15The bots were at it again.

11:18Once more, we see this pattern of Russia's bots

11:20stoking the flames of the far-right.

11:22And now, in the wake of Ukraine's Yandex strikes,

11:25the UK's Prime Minister, Andy Burnham,

11:28has finally come out and said what many believed to be true for a decade.

11:32Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

11:35I've had the clear answer that yes, there was,

11:38Burnham said during an appearance on the Rest is Politics podcast, the BBC reports.

11:43His comments were followed up by Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty.

11:47He said that he wouldn't get into the specifics of the Brexit vote,

11:50but noted that Russia's information warfare was a key factor,

11:53which is likely why the country is spending almost $2 billion

11:56on propaganda campaigns in 2026 alone.

11:59All of this interference brings us to the final reason

12:01why Russia's bots have been on the rampage,

12:03and it links all of the other three reasons.

12:06Russia wants to sow the seeds of division.

12:09To Putin and his cronies, division is power.

12:12We see that in the constant testing of NATO's limits

12:15through hybrid warfare that has become commonplace throughout Europe.

12:18There, Putin wants to see if he can push some NATO allies

12:21into refusing to support other allies.

12:23We see the same thing with the bot army,

12:25which always tries to stoke fires and create support

12:28for causes that go against the norm in a nation.

12:30Whip enough people into a frenzy through fake posts,

12:33and you get the division that Putin seeks.

12:35You get a UK that has exited the European Union.

12:38You get far-right parties that espouse Russian causes

12:41and question Ukraine's legitimacy.

12:44Through the bots, Putin exerts soft power

12:46without having to leave his bunker,

12:48and ironically, without ever having to really learn about the technology

12:52that makes all of this possible.

12:54Perhaps that lack of knowledge is what has led to Yandex falling apart,

12:58taking the bots down in the process.

13:00If Putin truly understood how important these bots are to him,

13:04Russia would have stationed air defences at its data centres.

13:07It didn't, and now the price is being paid in the disappearance of the bots.

13:12All of this brings us back to Yandex.

13:15The company is struggling immensely in the wake of Ukraine's attacks.

13:19We only mentioned one of those strikes in the introduction to the video,

13:22but Ukraine has actually carried out three in total.

13:25Ukraine's drones hit Yandex centres in Sosovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir,

13:30which leaves Russia's largest internet services company with a major problem.

13:34It has five data centres in Russia.

13:37Three are in flames, and two more remain.

13:40How long will it be before Ukraine strikes again,

13:42and what remains of the bot army is taken offline?

13:44That's a question that remains to be answered.

13:47What we know now is that Yandex is struggling to get many of its services back online.

13:51According to the Russian outlet Kommersant,

13:53repairs to the damage that Ukraine has already done could take upwards of six months.

13:58That's a long time for the Russian bot army to be down,

14:01so Yandex is signing deals in a desperate attempt to decentralise,

14:04and ironically, do away with the web sovereignty that the Kremlin so values.

14:09According to the Kyiv Post, Yandex has already been forced to turn to its rivals,

14:13including K2 Cloud and VK Cloud.

14:15Transfers of customer data and applications are being moved to these other cloud providers

14:20just to keep them online.

14:21That will help everyday Russians who have lost services.

14:24But it's unclear if such transfers will allow Yandex to start generating the sort of automated

14:28traffic that we'd seen before Ukraine strikes.

14:31And that's the ultimate point.

14:33What Yandex claims to be, and what it really is, are two very different things,

14:37and Ukraine has just exposed the company.

14:39To the public, Yandex is Russia's version of Google.

14:42The company has reached almost every corner of Russia's technology market,

14:46the Moscow Times reports.

14:48And it runs many services similar to Google, such as Yandex Maps, Yandex Pay,

14:53a search engine, and the cloud computing service that is now being transferred.

14:57But behind this public-facing facade is the reality of Yandex.

15:01It's a tool for the Kremlin.

15:03Back in 2024, a massive stake in Yandex was purchased by Bank Resaya.

15:07That bank has been sanctioned by the Obama administration back in 2014 because it serves

15:13as the financial institution of choice for Putin and much of his inner circle.

15:17That alone shows us that Yandex is far from the private technology firm that it claims to be.

15:22Like so many massive enterprises in Russia, the Kremlin's sticky fingers are lodged deep

15:26into the Yandex pie, to the point where striking Yandex means attacking Putin's personal digital economy.

15:33In other words, this is another Kremlin asset gone, and in more ways than one.

15:37Russia has lost the bots, its people are experiencing chaos with their web-based services,

15:42and Putin is watching a state-supported company that serves as the backbone of much of his

15:47financial wheeling and dealing go under.

15:49Data transfers and servers coming back online don't solve the Yandex problem for Putin either.

15:55Ukraine just proved that it can strike data centers, and there are many more in Russia

15:59that could be potential targets.

16:01Even if Yandex gets its own data centers back online, it's not like they can be moved.

16:05They'll still be where they always were, just waiting for the next visit from Ukraine's

16:11drones.

16:11You get what you put into any endeavor.

16:14You see, Ukraine's Yandex strikes didn't come out of nowhere.

16:16They were a response.

16:17A measure of revenge meted out after Russia started to carry out attacks against Ukraine's

16:22data centers.

16:23It's almost as though the Kremlin has forgotten that Ukraine has long-range weapons of its

16:27own, and those weapons can be used to respond to anything that Russia does.

16:31Only in Russia's case, the damage is so much more severe.

16:35Service disruption is just the start.

16:37An entire campaign of online Russification is now under threat, all because the Kremlin

16:42started what amounts to a data center war.

16:45Russia has very quickly realized that it miscalculated in the wake of the Yandex strikes, and we can

16:49see that in the panicked responses of officials.

16:52On October 12th, the Moscow Times reported that Russia's Digital Development Minister,

16:56Maksut Shadayev, has been forced into a response.

17:00He called the strikes against Yandex unprecedented, ignoring the precedent that Russia set by attacking

17:05Ukraine's data centers.

17:07He went on to declare,

17:08The Digital Development Ministry, together with the Defense Ministry, is working on the

17:13issue of protecting these facilities.

17:15There is no word on what this protection will look like.

17:19It all feels very much like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

17:23Shadayev is vowing to protect data centers that have already been burnt to the ground.

17:27Whatever that protection ends up being, assuming it even materializes at all, Russia can't

17:32do anything to change the fact that it's just been exposed on a global scale.

17:36Ukraine has pulled off a level of de-Russification for the ages.

17:40Even if the fall of the bots is only temporary, it has happened, and it's there for the entire

17:44world to see.

17:45Links to Russia have already been made.

17:48If and when Yandex's data centers come back online, we imagine there will be much said

17:52about the inevitable surge in bot activity that results.

17:56Russia can no longer deny its dirty online tricks, and that may end up being one of the greatest

18:01victories that Ukraine scores in its fight against Russification.

18:05As worried as the Kremlin will be about the Yandex problem, it will also be concerned about

18:10issues it faces on Russia's streets.

18:12There have been riots in Moscow as Russian citizens turned against Putin in the wake of

18:17his sham elections.

18:18More fakery from Russia has been exposed.

18:21And you can find out more about that fakery and the anger that it triggered by watching

18:26our video.

18:28But before you go, if you enjoyed this video, consider subscribing and let us know your thoughts

18:32below.

18:33You can also become a channel member for access to exclusive content we don't publish publicly.

18:38And thank you, as always, for watching.

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