SILICON VALLEY, CALIF., (OCTOBER 12, 2026) — A story circulating online is making Trump critics happy. The story goes like this:
In a war President Trump promised he would end on day one of his second term, Ukraine used drones to blow up Russian refineries producing diesel.
Trump got angry because he believed the strikes might further raise fuel prices, harming the Republicans in the upcoming midterms. Trump was quoted in the press as saying: “Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing: He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia.” He made the remark as U.S. diesel prices hit a record high. By October 10 he was telling Zelensky he had “better damn well stop,” and he blamed the strikes for the high diesel prices.
So Ukraine started targeting Yandex data centers, hitting three data centers over four days. (Yandex is the “Russian Google,” offering services that include a search engine, cloud computing, streaming media, shopping, etc.)
READ: The Attachment Economy, Computerworld, Gastronomad newsletter, Gastronomad book
LISTEN: Superintelligent, TWiT, Gastronomad podcast
JOIN: The Gastronomad Experience
FOLLOW: Gastronomad on Surf Social, Machine Society on Surf Social, Bluesky, Reddit, Notes, Mastodon, Threads, X, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin!
LOOK AT: Mike Elgan Photography
Proponents say the Yandex strikes nearly eliminated Russian disinformation bots on social media platforms. X users reported seeing far fewer pro-Russian posts on the platform. A Cloudflare graph showed Yandex bot traffic down 99% from the previous week. And Zelensky himself said at the Warsaw Security Forum that there were “fewer provocations because there were fewer bots” as the result of the strikes. One headline read: “Far-right bot accounts ‘fall silent’ as Ukraine strikes cripple Russian data centres.”
One appealing aspect of this story is that Zelensky is playing three-dimensional chess. After Trump, who was elected with help from Russian disinformation, again revealed his pro-Russia sensibilities, Zelensky blew up Russian disinformation right before the midterms.
Unfortunately, the narrative is false.
What’s really going on
First, there’s no link between Trump’s calls to stop targeting refineries and Ukraine’s subsequent targeting of data centers. They are unrelated. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers is retaliation for Russian strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure and also Ukrainian data centers, which Russia has been targeting for years but his increased in recent weeks.
Second, there is no link between bot traffic and Russian disinformation. The Cloudflare data being held up as bot traffic is mainly search engine crawlers harvesting data.
Russian disinformation influence operations don’t run through Yandex. Instead, they mostly use residential proxies, compromised IoT devices, commercial VPNs and Western cloud hosting.
Bot-driven Russian disinformation campaigns against Western democracies, including the United States, continue, undiminished.
The narrative of Ukraine knee-capping Russian disinformation in retaliation for Trump’s pressure over diesel refineries is a great story.
But it just isn’t true.
What purpose does it serve to shoot down people's enjoyment of this story before the election?
Who to believe?