Your favourite story is lying to you. The Russian bots never went quiet — they were back within two days. Ukraine’s access to Starlink, however, remains throttled.
A long time ago in a timeline far, far away, when I was an honest-to-goddamned working journalist, I had a mantra I’d repeat to myself on every job: “Your favourite story is lying to you, and the more you love it, the more it lies.”
It was a way to remind myself to distrust the thing I most desperately wanted to believe.
Like the idea that a Ukrainian drone strike could snuff out an army of right-wing chodes and gibbering cookers. After Ukraine struck Russia’s Yandex data centres last week, everyone from Volodymyr Zelenskyy to pussyhat@freedomgrrl2001 to your grizzled correspondent here did a little victory dance when a graph emerged showing what appeared to be Russian troll traffic falling off a cliff.
But… record scratch. Your favourite story simply wasn’t true.
Those data centres were struck; nobody’s trying to take away that warm inner glow you can only get from burning Russian infrastructure. But it doesn’t mean your timeline was suddenly free of Putinbots wearing skinsuits fashioned from the appalling opinions of Creepy Uncle Kevin. He was still thirsting for Pauline and posting all about it. You just didn’t get his updates because you muted him somewhere around the third hour of his sweaty livestream from The March For White Australia back in August.
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As for what really happened when Ukrainian drones destroyed Yandex servers, the internet did what the internet does, even in deep-fried Absurbistan: it rerouted around the disruption. That happy little chart you might recall of Russian bot traffic falling off a cliff? That was just Yandex’s search crawler — a program that reads the internet so you don’t have to — dying. Cloudflare followed up later with research suggesting “malicious automation” (X’s legion of PatriotChud1770-style avatars and whatever OS they’re running on Malcolm Roberts cortical stack now) merely shifted to other Russian hosts within a day.
The first verified impact was an interruption of certain Russian news aggregator networks such as Pravda, briefly depriving the Russky Mir of unknown volumes of its popular content: Beloved President Putin Correctly Guesses Weight of Prize Boar Piglet at Tula Agricultural Fair as Special Military Operation Enters Triumphant Fifth Year of Being Completed in Three Days. Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation did find shitposts from suspected Russian bot accounts falling 84% the day of the first strike, but they were back to pre-strike levels two days later. And as TechRadar pointed out, the impact was a bad day all round for the Russian internet, with banks, retailers and news sites all suffering slowdowns and outages.
It’s always tempting to imagine Russian information operations as some infernal machine humming away under a giant onion dome deep in the Kremlin. But the Kremlin has gone the way of every modern government and outsourced the work. Disinformation is mostly provided by Russian PR firms, run by Kremlin-friendly political operators, taking their orders from Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko.
They replicate Western news sites to disseminate false information via paid influencers and useful idiots. They deploy the bots you find stinking up your timeline to amplify specific messaging. Campaigns can even run on rented infrastructure in foreign jurisdictions, which makes the servers a bit difficult to shut down by bombing them. Not impossible, mind you. The Iranians have proved you can bomb pretty much anything you put your mind to, even if a superpower would prefer you didn’t. But somewhere in most Western militaries, even now, there’s a lawyer who’ll want to know why the Air Force just flattened a Moldovan strip mall, and “It was shitposting” isn’t going to tick his boxes.
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If Kyiv’s long-range strike campaign had a legitimately significant consequence, it was entirely unintended. On October 10, Elon Musk posted on X that “Zelensky has gone too far” after Donald Trump went off about Ukraine hitting Russian oil refineries. France24 reported that Musk went on to describe the targeting of data services in Russia as “a step too far”. The Wall Street Journal now reports that Musk, potentially after talking directly with Trump (reports differ on this), ordered Starshield (a military version of Starlink) to strangle the data Ukraine needs to defend itself against Russian drones. Musk insists it was Trump’s call; Trump says it wasn’t him.
Any time they flew faster than 100 miles an hour, the video feed cut out—the result of new limits put in place last week for Ukrainian drones using Starshield, a military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite-internet service. Musk himself imposed the limits, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
When it looked like Russian bots were disappearing from the internet, that plunging red line in fact more accurately traced Kyiv’s chances of intercepting Russian drone swarms before they speared into a bunch of apartment buildings and childcare centres. If the US were still a functioning society, the whole septic mess would probably be called treason.