Ukrainian drones hit Yandex’s largest data center, in Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan region, on October 8, 26 days before the November 3 midterm. The Sasovo site houses two of the three supercomputers that train Yandex’s AI models. Strikes on October 9 and October 11 disabled modules at Yandex’s Kaluga center and shut down its Vladimir center. By Sunday, Yandex Cloud’s status page listed at least 84 services offline. Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes answered a month of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, attacks Russia’s Defense Ministry had called “a forced digital detox.”

Yandex is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers about 70% of search queries in Russia, according to the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, which titled its 2024 report on the company “From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool.” Two months into the invasion, a Yandex image search for Bucha returned postcard views of the town. The director of Yandex News resigned in 2022 and called the company “a key element in concealing information” about the war, and in February 2024 the Russian business was sold to a fund with close Kremlin ties. The Sasovo supercomputers train the models behind Alice, the assistant inside Yandex Browser, which has 71 million monthly users, and a 2026 study by the research group Policy Genome found Alice endorsed Kremlin narratives in 86% of its Russian-language answers. Leaked documents from the Social Design Agency, the Presidential Administration contractor behind the Doppelganger network of cloned Western news sites, describe a program to poison AI answers in targeted countries.

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. That count covers every automated program on Yandex’s servers that sends requests to websites, its search crawler among them, and nobody outside Yandex can see which of them went dark. Facebook users in Denmark and Reddit users tracking r/Conservative reported pro-Kremlin posting dropping with it. A Reddit user relayed reports from Danish Facebook users of a sharp fall in posts under Danish names saying “Russia isn’t the enemy.” On Reddit, where one user’s count found three accounts supplying half of r/Conservative’s daily posts, another user noted that the two most active accounts skipped a single day last fall: November 1, after Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, lost power overnight on October 31 during a Ukrainian drone attack. No researcher has published a count of Kremlin-linked accounts before and after October 8. The last map of the Kremlin’s English-language networks, by the Swedish forensics nonprofit Qurium in 2024, put Doppelganger’s servers in two Frankfurt data centers and one in Moscow through the St. Petersburg host Aeza Group; Russian police raided Aeza in April 2025 and the United States Treasury sanctioned it in July, and where those networks sit today is unmapped.

On September 18 The New York Times reported that United States intelligence found the Kremlin had authorized a covert online campaign for the midterm, and that every example researchers had attributed to Russia attacked a Democratic Senate candidate:

Jon Ossoff in Georgia
Sherrod Brown in Ohio
Roy Cooper in North Carolina
Troy Jackson in Maine
Chris Pappas in New Hampshire
Mary Peltola in Alaska
Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan
James Talarico in Texas
Joshua Turek in Iowa

The United States government dismantled its own defenses against that campaign in 2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in February 2025. Congress let the State Department’s Global Engagement Center expire in December 2024, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed its successor office in April 2025. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard shrank the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency pushed out more than a dozen officials who had monitored foreign election influence. I laid this out in my August Watchdog Report on the midterms.

The newest peer-reviewed count found a few thousand Americans spreading most of the fake news American voters saw. Sahar Baribi-Bartov, Briony Swire-Thompson and Nir Grinberg of Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute matched 664,391 registered voters to their Twitter accounts for a paper in Science in May 2024 and found that 2,107 of them produced 80% of the fake news shared during the 2020 election and reached 5.2% of registered voters on the platform; older Republican women were overrepresented among them, and their volume came from manual, persistent retweeting.

That count is the last one the platforms allowed: Twitter ended free research access in February 2023 and priced the enterprise tier at $42,000 a month, Meta shut CrowdTangle on August 14, 2024, and no election-scale measurement of the 2024 election exists. The Kremlin now writes propaganda with AI and plants it where AI chatbots read. Josh Goldstein of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and Michael Tomz of Stanford tested AI-written propaganda on American readers for a 2024 paper in PNAS Nexus: 43% agreed with the claims after reading the AI version, against 47% after the real articles from covert foreign campaigns and about 25% after reading neither. NewsGuard, the news-rating company, reported in March 2025 that the Moscow-based Pravda network had published 3.6 million articles in 2024 aimed at the data AI chatbots draw on, and that the 10 leading chatbots repeated its claims 33% of the time. Bloomberg counted the fabricated stories of Storm-1516, a Kremlin operation, in the first quarter of 2026 at more than double the previous year’s pace. Meta announced the end of its American fact-checking program on January 7, 2025.

For Putin, these successful strikes represent a powerful blow to his ability to control narratives among the public.

The fact is, Ukraine can bomb the Kremlin’s information machine because its servers sit in buildings inside Russia. The campaign aimed at U.S. midterm elections sits on servers no published investigation has located since Russian police raided Aeza in April 2025, and since February 2025 no FBI task force has looked for it. Ukraine hit that machine three times in four days, at its own cost, in the fifth year of defending its own existence.

Thank you, people of Ukraine.

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Meta, which shut CrowdTangle and ended fact-checking

X, which ended research access and sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate for counting anyway, a suit a federal judge dismissed in March 2024 as an attempt at “punishing the Defendants for their speech”

Alphabet, whose YouTube paid $24.5 million in September 2025 to settle the president’s lawsuit over his 2021 suspension, with $22 million of it earmarked for a White House ballroom.

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