It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.

Yandex is just a drop in the ocean bud.

The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.

What an appetite!

Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (this is something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)

But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index it in their search (no index means the site would not appear in search results).

So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their scrapers (i.e. their 'bots' that visit sites to index them). Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.