The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war has mixed the digital and the kinetic in unprecedented and often terrifying ways, including widespread use of suicide drones, software orchestration of the front lines, and the weaponization of commercial ad data. So it’s hardly surprising that Ukraine has struck data centers run by Russia-based tech giant Yandex (sort of a Facebook/Google/Uber hybrid) three times in the last few days. The most recent strike, on Oct. 11, reportedly completely disabled a facility in the Vladimir region east of Moscow.

The result was widespread outages of Russian internet services, both within and outside the country. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the result was also to near-instantly silence armies of pro-Russian troll bots on social media.

“When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy told attendees at the Warsaw Security Forum by video link, according to Euronews.

“A lot of people, a lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from… If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems.”

Euronews noted that Cloudflare data did appear to show a huge decrease (94%) in automated traffic originating from Yandex on Sunday compared to the average throughout the second half of September.

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