I'm seeing a lot of totally unevidenced slop that [guy I dislike]'s support has collapsed after Ukraine blew up a datacentre.
In general most accusations are confessions, pay attention to people who use words like disinformation and misinformation. They want to control other people's speech.
More of this, please. I'm tired of state actors sowing division alongside political pundits, all for the purpose of distracting from the class warfare being waged against the American people.
I'm really interested in this, too. Class warfare extends to most of the West. We live in an era of unprecedented propaganda efficiency getting effectively weaponized to divide and conquer us. It's enabling the unthinkable to happen.
Even as someone who believes that the datacenter strikes reduced Russian propaganda traffic, I don't think this article does anything to support that idea. It has the known Yandex traffic drop. It has some conjecture about what might be lurking within that yandex traffic and then never gives us any evidence.
It mentions the r/conservative accounts, but tells us about a day they skipped a year ago when attacks happened. And the rest is the same. Nothing ties this to the current data center attacks. This is basically just propaganda in the direction I like. I hate it. Right now I basically have to back up my gut feeling about this current event with prior incidents.
This author seems content with that, but I'm not. Being content with that is a good way to be complacent and nod along to things that either aren't true or give your adversary more credit than they deserve.
I agree. Kudos for refusing to accept assertions which feel agreeable and directionally right yet are weakly supported. The vested interests gaming the news cycle and social media are growing increasingly sophisticated and now LLMs let them scale orders of magnitude at much lower cost.
Gleaning some semblance of nuanced, balanced reality has never been easy but in recent years it feels much harder. None of the handful political perspectives, media outlets or public policy institutions I felt I could usually trust are still reliably trustworthy. They've either been partially co-opted by special interests or have just grown muddled and conflicted on some issues. Even the ACLU, an org which for decades was so principled on free speech it marched in support of the KKK's right to speak, now feels some legal speech is too 'problematic' to be heard. Staying rigorously consistent now requires questioning everything, especially things specifically designed to appeal to my biases or emotional sensibilities.
I see no evidence presented here or elsewhere that this attack stopped Russian "bots" rather than just search engine crawlers
If the strongest "evidence" is anecdotal reports that pro-Russia posting on Reddit decreased that seems more like Redditor confirmation bias and delusion than proof of a propaganda bot farm co-located with Yandex
> Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine
Proof from within TFA:
> Yandex is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers about 70% of search queries in Russia
> The director of Yandex News resigned in 2022 and called the company “a key element in concealing information” about the war
> the assistant inside Yandex Browser, which has 71 million monthly users, in a 2026 study by the research group Policy Genome found Alice endorsed Kremlin narratives in 86% of its Russian-language answers
> Cloudflare, the internet security company that fronts a large share of the world’s websites, measured automated requests from Yandex’s network at 0.4% of their two-week peak after the Vladimir strike
So, it’s used by most people in Russia, it regurgitates disinformation, and the attack seems to have depressed its use.
That Yandex is censored and is down was obvious, doesn't need to be a sensationalist article. Potentially useful development tho.
However there was a flurry of posts that troll farm (conflated with "bots") activity dropped and consequently support for parties/people/politicians they don't like has dropped. Which ironically was propaganda.
Russia is outclassing Ukraine in every aspect relevant to waging war: demographic potential, industrial base, economic resilience, technological advance. Hence, Ukraine has already lost this war. The fact that Ukraine sometimes succeeds in damaging or destroying some data centers is absolutely irrelevant to the final outcome of this war of attrition.
This is a war of attrition, the goal is to minimize losses of Russian troops and maximize destruction of Ukrainian troops and infrastructure. The goal is not to take land, that what the west doesn't understand. At some point Ukrainian lines will crumble and then everything will unfold quickly.
> Why'd they initially plan to capture Kiev in 3 days then
They went in with 90k troops, that barely enough to "take" even a smaller city like Kiev. The goal was to enforce a political outcome to this acute crisis outside of a total war. Initially, this succeeded with the peace talks in Istanbul and Russian troops retreated. Finally, the West (Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, Biden) promised full NATO support for Ukraine and Zelensky smashed the peace treaty into the trashcan. That's when the Ukraine army started its counter-offensive and pushed the Russians far back into the eastern parts of the Donbass. That's when Russia commenced to a slow and grinding war of attrition with the goal of removing the russophobic Zelensky regime propped up by the West.
> Why do they have to recruit in prisons and offer ungodly recruitment bonuses then
The recruitment bonuses are actually quite good, that's why many Russians, especially from the poorer regions, agreed to participate. Every Russian family lost members in the Great Patriotic War, they know who they're fighting. Recruiting in prisons is actually not just a Russian thing, it also happens in Ukraine (where they're snatching people off the streets) and many other countries in conflict situations. That's really not unusual.
> Why does Putin maintain his maximalist goals and requests the entirety of the Donbass he failed to take as a precondition for a ceasefire then
The economically most important regions of the Donbass are by now already taken by Russia. There is not much between the western edges of the Donbass and Kiev. Russia has no interest in a ceasefire, as a ceasefire only provides time for the West to re-arm and prepare for the next attack on Russia. The west shits on Russia since the fall of the Soviet-Union.
> People been saying that for three years. Any time now, you just wait
That's true, but many people couldn't expect how much support in weapons and money the West was and is actually willing to provide to Ukraine. Without this support this war of attrition would be over by now.
>They went in with 90k troops, that barely enough to "take" even a smaller city like Kiev. The goal was to enforce a political outcome to this acute crisis outside of a total war. Initially, this succeeded with the peace talks in Istanbul and Russian troops retreated. Finally, the West (Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, Biden) promised full NATO support for Ukraine and Zelensky smashed the peace treaty into the trashcan. That's when the Ukraine army started its counter-offensive and pushed the Russians far back into the eastern parts of the Donbass. That's when Russia commenced to a slow and grinding war of attrition with the goal of removing the russophobic Zelensky regime propped up by the West.
This + the use of 'Great Patriotic War' shows you're not really worth arguing with, but still - you do know people can trivially look up and fact check the bit of fanfic you just wrote, right?
What's your problem with the 'Great Patriotic War'? I use this term intentionally all the time, because it represents the immense death toll the Russians had to endure the last time the West attacked the country in 1941-45.
We are talking about a number of around 25 million people killed on the Soviet side. You may go and search for a memorials (for the atrocities to the Russians on the eastern front) somewhere in Germany or allied axis countries (Romania, Hungary, Austria!, Spain!), just to recognize that there aren't any.
And I'm writing this as a German. The great killing on the eastern front is a black hole in Western history books. These are filled with "Band of Brothers", "Omaha Beach", "6. of June", "Battle of the Bulge"... But no one in the West really knows anything about e.g. the Siege of Leningrad with nearly a million civilian death (including relatives of Putin by the way).
People in the West really need to understand where Russians and Chinese people actually come from historically, the 'century of humiliation' absolutely is over.
Ukraine is propped up by the west with money and weapons, without that artificial lifeline the war would be over already. Nearly half the population has left the country, tax income and economic activity are diminished to an unsustainable level. There is no hope and future for poor Ukraine. The west (US, EU, NATO) is to blame.
Russia is entirely to blame for invading Ukraine and targeting civilains. Stop being an apologist for a war criminal and dictator. How many troops has Russia lost? How many Russians have fled their oppressive regime since the invasion began? How much economic activity has been lost with the West? How much military equipment has been burned up? Russia had to turn to China and North Korea for help.
People are not snatched off the streets in Russia, unlike in Ukraine. Putin is the elected president of Russia, while the Zelensky regime is a de facto and de jure dictatorship (by now).
> How many Russians have fled their oppressive regime since the invasion began?
Obviously, the Russian population has not halved as in Ukraine, so what are you even talking about?
> How much economic activity has been lost with the West?
A lot, but that's harming the West (EU) far more than Russia. The EU economies are de facto in recession, while the Russian economy is growing (on average in recent years).
> How much military equipment has been burned up?
A lot, but Russia is outproducing the West in nearly all military metrics, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Ukraine does not have any air defense left by now, because the West can't provide any. That's why cities like Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, etc. are successfully targeted on a daily basis.
> Russia had to turn to China and North Korea for help.
Not really, North Korea takes its chance to gain experience in warfare, training soldiers and testing its weapons. It's a rational thing to do from the perspective of North Korea, both sides gain a lot by this.
> People are not snatched off the streets in Russia
"The authorities in Penza, a regional capital of around half a million south-east of Moscow, got unlucky: one of the most recent enlistment round-ups of men in the region was filmed by the men’s furious wives. After the clip of men being forced off to war spread across social media, the local military commissar, the police and even the Defence Ministry had to scramble to explain themselves and brand the viral video “fake news”. But by all appearances, the round-ups in Penza region have been going on for at least six months."
The end of the message is pretty true, for the rest I don’t know how Russia compare to Ukraine/Otan in standard military-side
But the end of the war it’s going to be very probably winned by the Russian. Let’s be honest here, and even if I am not a military strategist, Ukrainian people is less than Russian people, and even in the case of field victory of Ukraine, ultimately the Russian is going to use nuclear weapons (and Otan doesn’t going to replicate, they cannot risk a MAD retaliation)
So I don’t know how the Ukrainian win the war because honestly it’s seem to be a lost cause
Ukraine has been bombing Moscow and Putin's residences and assassinating his friends without any nuclear retaliation so we can be reasonably (if not completely) sure that if the mafia boss were trigger happy we'd know it already.
The truth is that no one has any idea how the war will unfold and attrition can simmer a long time without any clear resolution or winner at all, even between seemingly unbalanced belligerents. See Iran vs Iraq, Saudi vs Yemen, USSR vs Afghanistan, etc. People who are too used to video game map painting tend to underestimate the capabilities of million-strong modern states engaged in an existential war - as the saying goes, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
The only conceivable way this resolves in the near future is if Putin gets offed somehow but given how mortally scared he seems to be of drones and his own elites it doesn't seem likely
I use Yandex search every day and did not notice any problem in search. So far I can only see automated e-mail fetcher stopped. So I check non-Yandex inboxes manually until they fix.
32 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadIn general most accusations are confessions, pay attention to people who use words like disinformation and misinformation. They want to control other people's speech.
It mentions the r/conservative accounts, but tells us about a day they skipped a year ago when attacks happened. And the rest is the same. Nothing ties this to the current data center attacks. This is basically just propaganda in the direction I like. I hate it. Right now I basically have to back up my gut feeling about this current event with prior incidents.
This author seems content with that, but I'm not. Being content with that is a good way to be complacent and nod along to things that either aren't true or give your adversary more credit than they deserve.
Gleaning some semblance of nuanced, balanced reality has never been easy but in recent years it feels much harder. None of the handful political perspectives, media outlets or public policy institutions I felt I could usually trust are still reliably trustworthy. They've either been partially co-opted by special interests or have just grown muddled and conflicted on some issues. Even the ACLU, an org which for decades was so principled on free speech it marched in support of the KKK's right to speak, now feels some legal speech is too 'problematic' to be heard. Staying rigorously consistent now requires questioning everything, especially things specifically designed to appeal to my biases or emotional sensibilities.
If the strongest "evidence" is anecdotal reports that pro-Russia posting on Reddit decreased that seems more like Redditor confirmation bias and delusion than proof of a propaganda bot farm co-located with Yandex
> Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine
Proof from within TFA:
> Yandex is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers about 70% of search queries in Russia
> The director of Yandex News resigned in 2022 and called the company “a key element in concealing information” about the war
> the assistant inside Yandex Browser, which has 71 million monthly users, in a 2026 study by the research group Policy Genome found Alice endorsed Kremlin narratives in 86% of its Russian-language answers
> Cloudflare, the internet security company that fronts a large share of the world’s websites, measured automated requests from Yandex’s network at 0.4% of their two-week peak after the Vladimir strike
So, it’s used by most people in Russia, it regurgitates disinformation, and the attack seems to have depressed its use.
Sounds good to me - what are you missing?
However there was a flurry of posts that troll farm (conflated with "bots") activity dropped and consequently support for parties/people/politicians they don't like has dropped. Which ironically was propaganda.
Why'd they initially plan to capture Kiev in 3 days then
>the goal is to minimize losses of Russian troops and maximize destruction of Ukrainian troops and infrastructure
Why do they have to recruit in prisons and offer ungodly recruitment bonuses then
>The goal is not to take land, that what the west doesn't understand.
Why does Putin maintain his maximalist goals and requests the entirety of the Donbass he failed to take as a precondition for a ceasefire then
>At some point Ukrainian lines will crumble and then everything will unfold quickly.
People been saying that for three years. Any time now, you just wait
They went in with 90k troops, that barely enough to "take" even a smaller city like Kiev. The goal was to enforce a political outcome to this acute crisis outside of a total war. Initially, this succeeded with the peace talks in Istanbul and Russian troops retreated. Finally, the West (Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, Biden) promised full NATO support for Ukraine and Zelensky smashed the peace treaty into the trashcan. That's when the Ukraine army started its counter-offensive and pushed the Russians far back into the eastern parts of the Donbass. That's when Russia commenced to a slow and grinding war of attrition with the goal of removing the russophobic Zelensky regime propped up by the West.
> Why do they have to recruit in prisons and offer ungodly recruitment bonuses then
The recruitment bonuses are actually quite good, that's why many Russians, especially from the poorer regions, agreed to participate. Every Russian family lost members in the Great Patriotic War, they know who they're fighting. Recruiting in prisons is actually not just a Russian thing, it also happens in Ukraine (where they're snatching people off the streets) and many other countries in conflict situations. That's really not unusual.
> Why does Putin maintain his maximalist goals and requests the entirety of the Donbass he failed to take as a precondition for a ceasefire then
The economically most important regions of the Donbass are by now already taken by Russia. There is not much between the western edges of the Donbass and Kiev. Russia has no interest in a ceasefire, as a ceasefire only provides time for the West to re-arm and prepare for the next attack on Russia. The west shits on Russia since the fall of the Soviet-Union.
> People been saying that for three years. Any time now, you just wait
That's true, but many people couldn't expect how much support in weapons and money the West was and is actually willing to provide to Ukraine. Without this support this war of attrition would be over by now.
This + the use of 'Great Patriotic War' shows you're not really worth arguing with, but still - you do know people can trivially look up and fact check the bit of fanfic you just wrote, right?
We are talking about a number of around 25 million people killed on the Soviet side. You may go and search for a memorials (for the atrocities to the Russians on the eastern front) somewhere in Germany or allied axis countries (Romania, Hungary, Austria!, Spain!), just to recognize that there aren't any.
And I'm writing this as a German. The great killing on the eastern front is a black hole in Western history books. These are filled with "Band of Brothers", "Omaha Beach", "6. of June", "Battle of the Bulge"... But no one in the West really knows anything about e.g. the Siege of Leningrad with nearly a million civilian death (including relatives of Putin by the way).
People in the West really need to understand where Russians and Chinese people actually come from historically, the 'century of humiliation' absolutely is over.
Ukraine will prevail.
People are not snatched off the streets in Russia, unlike in Ukraine. Putin is the elected president of Russia, while the Zelensky regime is a de facto and de jure dictatorship (by now).
> How many Russians have fled their oppressive regime since the invasion began?
Obviously, the Russian population has not halved as in Ukraine, so what are you even talking about?
> How much economic activity has been lost with the West?
A lot, but that's harming the West (EU) far more than Russia. The EU economies are de facto in recession, while the Russian economy is growing (on average in recent years).
> How much military equipment has been burned up?
A lot, but Russia is outproducing the West in nearly all military metrics, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Ukraine does not have any air defense left by now, because the West can't provide any. That's why cities like Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, etc. are successfully targeted on a daily basis.
> Russia had to turn to China and North Korea for help.
Not really, North Korea takes its chance to gain experience in warfare, training soldiers and testing its weapons. It's a rational thing to do from the perspective of North Korea, both sides gain a lot by this.
https://en.zona.media/article/2026/06/23/penza_raids
But the end of the war it’s going to be very probably winned by the Russian. Let’s be honest here, and even if I am not a military strategist, Ukrainian people is less than Russian people, and even in the case of field victory of Ukraine, ultimately the Russian is going to use nuclear weapons (and Otan doesn’t going to replicate, they cannot risk a MAD retaliation)
So I don’t know how the Ukrainian win the war because honestly it’s seem to be a lost cause
The truth is that no one has any idea how the war will unfold and attrition can simmer a long time without any clear resolution or winner at all, even between seemingly unbalanced belligerents. See Iran vs Iraq, Saudi vs Yemen, USSR vs Afghanistan, etc. People who are too used to video game map painting tend to underestimate the capabilities of million-strong modern states engaged in an existential war - as the saying goes, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
The only conceivable way this resolves in the near future is if Putin gets offed somehow but given how mortally scared he seems to be of drones and his own elites it doesn't seem likely