No. The reported drop in automated requests from Yandex’s AS13238 network does not show that Russian propaganda accounts stopped operating: the figures track network requests, not social-media accounts. Cloudflare Radar’s AS13238 page identifies the network traffic view; historical readings were reported separately by UNITED24 Media and t3n.
Reports described Ukrainian strikes on Yandex sites in Sasovo on October 8, Kaluga on October 9, and the Vladimir region on October 11, 2026. Yandex reportedly suspended operations at the Vladimir data center after the third strike. NeoTeo previously covered a separate report about Yandex supercomputers.
On October 12, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had noticed fewer Russian bots on social media after the strikes. That was his observation; the network measurements concern a different thing.
What the network metric measures
AS13238 is the network identifier shown in Cloudflare Radar’s view of bot traffic. Automated requests can come from search-engine crawlers, monitoring systems, and other software—not just social-media accounts or political campaigns. Mashable explains the distinction between network requests and influence-operation accounts.
UNITED24 Media reported that 99.6% of requests to HTML content from AS13238 during a seven-day period were classified as automated. That share describes the type of request, not its political purpose.
Why the reported percentages use different baselines
At 02:00 UTC on October 11, UNITED24 Media reported a Cloudflare reading of 0.3% of the chart’s maximum, compared with 88.2% at the same hour a week earlier. Those are normalized chart readings, not counts of posts or accounts.
A separate series reported by t3n put traffic at about 0.4% of the previous week’s level, then around 20% later on October 11. That comparison uses the previous week as its baseline, so it is distinct from the Cloudflare chart-maximum figures.
What would connect a disruption to an influence operation?
A stronger test would track accounts attributed to a specific campaign across matched periods, compare their activity with suitable accounts outside that campaign, and establish whether the operation relied on Yandex services such as hosting, routing, or coordination tools. Nacho Montes de Oca proposed this kind of account-level and infrastructure test. It would examine campaign activity directly rather than treating a change in network requests as a proxy for it.
