NETANYAHU SAYS HOSTILE RUSSIAN ONLINE ACTIVITY FELL AFTER YANDEX STRIKES
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the effects of Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s Yandex infrastructure reached beyond Russia itself: according to his account, 60 percent of Russian-origin online activity directed against Israel disappeared afterward.
That is a striking claim about the international consequences of damage to Russian digital infrastructure. The figure remains Netanyahu’s assessment; its methodology, timeframe, and the precise activity measured have not been publicly established in the reporting available.
His remarks follow the earlier attacks on Yandex data centers, which disrupted services and forced the company to undertake recovery measures. They do not establish that another facility has just been attacked or that an entire data center was destroyed.
The distinction between different kinds of online activity also matters. Search-engine crawlers, automated accounts, coordinated propaganda networks, and ordinary users are not interchangeable. A reduction in one cannot automatically prove the disappearance of another.
Even with those limits, Netanyahu’s account raises an important question: how much hostile activity abroad depends on infrastructure operating inside Russia?
If independently substantiated, the reported decline would demonstrate that disrupting those systems can have consequences well beyond Russian payment apps, cloud services, and search results—including for countries confronting Russian information operations.