The claim that strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots finds no support in the networks tracked by Ukrainian disinformation-monitoring company LetsData, co-founder Ksenia Iliuk told Euromaidan Press on 13 October. She cautioned that the strikes may still have affected networks outside the company’s view.

At the Warsaw Security Forum, Lithuania’s prime minister suggested allies should ask Ukraine to strike more Russian data centers because that might help protect European elections from foreign interference. Bot networks are one tool of that interference, so whether the strikes mute them carries weight well beyond Ukraine.

No drop in the networks LetsData tracks

Drones hit Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Vladimir between 8 and 11 October. Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 drones struck Yandex’s Kaluga site in between. On 12 October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that once Ukraine’s response reached Yandex, social media had fewer bots.

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LetsData checked X and Facebook, where bot networks usually stand out clearly, Iliuk said. Its analysts looked at networks attributed to Russia’s influence ecosystem. Among them are groups of X accounts spreading domains from what she called a new wave of Doppelgänger, a Russian campaign that clones real news sites.

Those networks look unaffected, Iliuk said. None of them has stopped posting or broken its usual rhythm, she added. Some are slightly less active, but LetsData’s analysts say that is typical for them. The networks run on a weekly cycle, and the check fell in the part of the week when they post less.

A network that jumped from Germany to Ukraine

LetsData worked with two samples. One covers accounts that systematically target Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia. The other covers bot networks the company has followed for some time that keep changing their target audience, so they have no fixed country.

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About two weeks ago, one network from that second sample wrote about elections in Germany and spread fake Die Welt sites, she said. It now posts about mobilization in Ukraine and shares a fake site of Ukrinform, Ukraine’s state news agency.

What the check can’t see

The company can compare only within networks whose usual behavior it knows, Iliuk said. Checking the whole internet is impossible because the scale is colossal, she said. A Cloudflare chart that circulated as evidence counted automated web requests from Yandex’s network, including its search crawlers, not social media posts, Cybernews reported.

So the networks LetsData follows show no impact, Iliuk said. That does not mean the strikes had no effect at all, she noted. They may have shown up in networks the company isn’t tracking now. LetsData will keep watching and report other signals if they appear.

Russian strikes have killed or wounded more Ukrainian civilians in the first eight months of 2026 than in all of last year, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council, Censor.net reported. The official warned that the toll keeps climbing as missiles and drones increasingly reach cities far from the front line. She also cautioned that mounting attacks on Ukraine's battered energy grid could push millions into a dark, cold winter.

In the war's fifth year, Russia's long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities have shifted the danger from the front to the streets where people live, and the rising civilian toll now tracks how far those weapons reach.

Casualties outpace all of 2025

Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, gave the toll as the Council met on Ukraine, Ukrinform reported.

"In just the first eight months, more civilians were killed or injured in Ukraine than in all of 2025," she said.

The heavy toll already recorded in September shows the trend continuing, she added, as strikes hit populated areas away from the front.

The UN human rights office has confirmed at least 17,257 civilians killed since February 2022, including 835 children. Another 53,693 people have been wounded, among them 3,247 children, and DiCarlo said the real numbers are likely far higher. Kyiv and other cities have faced near-daily attacks in recent weeks, she said, with strikes hitting railways, shopping centers, gas stations, warehouses, and food and logistics firms.

A warning over the coming winter

DiCarlo said the mounting strikes on Ukraine's already-damaged energy infrastructure are especially worrying with another war winter near.

"The cumulative impact of these strikes could plunge millions of people into darkness and cold in the coming months," she said.

She urged an immediate moratorium on strikes on populated areas and urgent action to protect the power grid. Targeting civilians and civilian sites is prohibited under international law, she noted.

The warning follows the deadliest stretch of the war for civilians, when UN monitors counted 437 people killed in July, the worst monthly toll since May 2022. Russia has also renewed strikes on gas production and power plants ahead of the heating season.