Kyiv’s long-range drone operators have gone high-tech: in the past few days, Ukrainian drones attacked three massive data centres belonging to Yandex, Russia’s internet services giant. For a while, it became almost impossible to order a taxi, listen to music, open an email or transfer money in Russia. Yandex’s ubiquitous electronic payments app went dark and even one of the country’s biggest online dating services briefly went sideways. 

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Outside Russia, an eager and hyperbolic online world initially assumed that another Russian internet service had also gone down. Charts showing a precipitous drop in Russian bot activity provoked instant celebrations over the assumed death of Russia’s corrosive online disinformation campaigns. In the wake of the attacks, German observers of online activity claimed that propaganda supporting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party plummeted; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday that, ‘it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.’ Western public figures subjected to online harassment they attribute to Russia heaved a sigh of relief. 

The festivities were premature.........

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