A grassroots student-led coalition threatens to upend Serbia’s political landscape as the EU-candidate country heads to the polls on Sunday

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Serbia’s 6.5 million voters go to the polls on 25 October in a watershed parliamentary election characterised by civil unrest, a new political landscape, allegations of irregularities, an uncertain outcome and the potential of far-reaching consequences.

Here is a brief guide to the key issues.

For years, Serbia’s opposition has struggled to turn public discontent into a credible challenge to Aleksandar Vučić’s political dominance. On Sunday (25 October), a student-led movement that began with demands for accountability after a deadly train station collapse will attempt to do what established opposition forces have repeatedly failed to achieve: translate civic mobilisation into political change.

The upcoming parliamentary elections are about more than the (re)distribution of seats. They represent the endeavour citizens want and need in a democratic society.

For several years now, “the students operate according to the principles of direct democracy,” senior research associate at the University of Belgrade, Vasiljević told EUobserver. They gather in “plenums” and make collective decisions.

The motor behind that movement was anger. The lack of accountability after the collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad railway station on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people was the main trigger.

Since then, protests have been taken place around in the country. Eventually, they grew into a nationwide challenge to the government. The student movement even marched from Belgrade to Brussels and Strasbourg to appeal to the EU institutions.

“It brought some irreversible changes that will have a lasting impact on society,” said Vasiljević.

And these changes could be now transposed into politics. “The country has been held captive for far too long by one ruling party and, in fact, one ruling elite,” Miloje Savić, a volunteering poll observer, told EUobserver.

For many Serbs, as for Savić, the students’ organisation represent “a tectonic shift in how society is organised and how it should function.”

The Student List, now the electoral vehicle for the mobilisation, has given people frustrated with established politics a new focus for their demands. The main idea being that political participation can be rebuilt from the ground up.

“It is not a good time to be living in Serbia. And during my life, I can’t remember a time when it was,” Ivan Bartoš, a 31-year-old organiser of student protests in Bački Petrovac told EUobserver.

Serbia, as many European countries, is suffering from an ageing population. It brings to the social debate a generational difference. On one side, the middle-aged and “corrupted” regime led by Vučić, on the other, a proposal of change without real political experience.

And the question that is heard in the run-up to the elections is “does Serbia need a professional politician who has been trained for years in kleptocracy, or is society willing to take a risk?”

Vučić’s ‘men in black’?

Yet the movement’s rise has exposed a fundamental tension: society may be changing faster than the institutions through which change must be delivered.

“The institutions have been captured and controlled by the regime. There is not enough institutional space to accommodate these political changes,” Vasiljević said.

Previous Serbian elections have been accompanied by allegations of vote-buying, voter intimidation and ballot-box stuffing. After the last ones, held in December 2023, European MP’s called for “independent investigations into the irregularities”.

Knowing what is at stake, the Student List is trained an unprecedented number of poll monitors (15,000), seeking to protect the vote and document potential irregularities.

Attacks on opposition representatives by groups of unidentified men dressed in black have repeatedly raised concerns during the rule of Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

The media are not safe either.

This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership

Each country’s protesters have distinct grievances. Listen to them, not the voices telling us Europe is ungovernable

Last Saturday night, the town hall of Limoges in west-central France was set ablaze. By Sunday, images of the fire destroying a symbol of the French republic, and other scenes of unrest across France, were everywhere, but being used to tell very different stories about what is happening in Europe.

For some, the flames announced a pan-European youth revolt, proof that a single movement was sweeping the continent. Donald Trump, who had already insisted that the French schools protests were not about schools but about migration and Islam, urged Europeans to “close the borders”. The mayor of Limoges saw the fingerprints of an alleged ultra-left insurrection.

Alberto Alemanno is the Jean Monnet professor of EU law at HEC Paris and the founder of The Good Lobby

France readers Q&A: Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst will be live taking questions from our readers about the unrest in France from at 1500 BST / 1600 CEST on Friday 23 October. Send your questions by email now to conversations@theguardian.com or post questions in the comments from 0900 BST here.

Serbia's upcoming parliamentary elections on October 25 have been rocked by so-called "student protests" in the runup to Sunday's voting, and USAID funding is still flowing to an organization supporting opponents of Aleksandar Vučić. 

The post Biden-Era USAID Grant Still Funding Leftist Protests in Serbia Ahead of Elections appeared first on Breitbart.

Student activists seem set to defeat Aleksandar Vučić at the ballot box this Sunday. The EU should never have written off Serbian democracy

History may not be about to repeat itself in Serbia, but it is beginning to rhyme. Just over a quarter of a century ago, Serbian citizens turned out to vote in large numbers to inflict a historic defeat on the then strongman in Belgrade, Slobodan Milošević, who was seeking re-election as president. He lost despite his extensive control over the media, the judiciary and the security forces. When he was reluctant to leave office, Serbs poured on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, finally forcing him to go.

On Sunday, a new generation could have the decisive voice in an equally fateful election, this time for the national parliament. Today’s strongman, Aleksandar Vučić, recently resigned as president to fight the election with the aim of swapping the locus of power from the presidency to the prime minister’s office.

RT | October 20, 2026

Acting Serbian President Ana Brnabic has accused the European Parliament of breaking its own ethics rules and sending a team of political operators to Serbia “with already formed conclusions” about how they want this weekend’s election to end.

Former Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is running in parliamentary elections this Sunday, after vacating the presidency last month. Vucic’s coalition, led by his SNS party, is competing against the Student List – an electoral faction put together by the organizers of anti-government protests raging in Serbia since 2024.

European Parliament elections observers are due to arrive in Belgrade on Thursday. However, in a letter to Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Tuesday, Brnabic accused the team of political bias, pointing out that some of its members have openly expressed “extremely negative judgments about the authorities in Serbia [and] expectations for their removal.”

Lead EU observer Andreas Schieder monitored parliamentary elections in Serbia in 2023, and signed off on the official result, before accusing Vucic’s party of fraud and vote-buying. Brnabic explained this in her letter to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, which was seen by Serbian media outlets.

The appointment of Schieder, an Austrian Social Democrat, violates the UN’s Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, she continued. This document, to which all EU delegations are beholden, states that observers must be “free from any political, economic or other conflicts of interest.”

In June, Schieder publicly backed the student protest movement and accused Vucic of leading Serbia into an “authoritarian downward spiral.”

Speaking to Austria’s APA news agency on Tuesday, Schieder described Brnabic’s letter as “unprecedented attack on the European Parliament’s election-observation mission.”

The observation team also includes liberal MEP Helmut Branstetter, who has described Vucic as “not the person to lead Serbia to the European Union,” and promised to “do everything” to cut Serbia off from EU funds and accession talks over his refusal to ban the funeral of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic in September.

Two Croatian MEPs are members of the mission. Gordan Bosanac has met with protesters at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, while Suncana Glavak has signed a letter to EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos calling for talks with Serbia to be suspended.

“All of the above indicates that the European Parliament sent an observation mission to Serbia that already has predetermined political positions, and that the goal of such an assessment of the elections and electoral conditions is to directly help one of the participants in the elections,” Brnabic wrote in her letter. “It is clear that their goal is not to impartially observe the elections, but to participate politically in them.”

Recurring protests have dogged Vucic since 2024, when the deaths of 16 people in a railway station disaster in Novi Sad sparked nationwide discontent. More than two decades earlier, the US successfully fomented mass protests that forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic out of power, and Vucic has accused the EU and Western NGOs of attempting to run the same playbook against his government.

Last month, Vucic described MEPs who traveled to Novi Sad to support the protests as “scum that cannot rule even in their own countries,” who have “come to demolish Serbia from the outside.”

Unorthodox campaign is challenging the ruling party’s 14-year reign with a bold democratic experiment

On a cool autumn evening, a team of Serbian student volunteers went canvassing in the housing estates of Krnjača, a Belgrade suburb. They were equipped with lanyards emblazoned with the word “victory”, a stock list of questions and a mobile app that mapped visited homes and the level of support in each.

The volunteers were part of a mass student movement, Student List, that has rocked Serbia with two years of constant protests. On Sunday, the group will represent the most serious challenge Aleksandar Vučić has faced in his 12 increasingly authoritarian years in power, by putting forward their own candidates in parliamentary elections.

Unorthodox campaign is challenging the ruling party’s 14-year reign with a bold democratic experiment

On a cool autumn evening, a team of Serbian student volunteers went canvassing in the housing estates of Krnjača, a Belgrade suburb. They were equipped with lanyards emblazoned with the word “victory”, a stock list of questions and a mobile app that mapped visited homes and the level of support in each.

The volunteers were part of a mass student movement, Student List, that has rocked Serbia with two years of constant protests. On Sunday, the group will represent the most serious challenge Aleksandar Vučić has faced in his 12 increasingly authoritarian years in power, by putting forward their own candidates in parliamentary elections.

Serbia está a punto de convertirse en el primer país de Europa del siglo XXI en celebrar elecciones como consecuencia de una rebelión estudiantil y con la candidatura que no firma ningún partido político, sino La lista estudiantil, compuesta por 250 nombres sin filiación partidista. El próximo 25 de octubre, los jóvenes serbios que llevan casi dos años de protestas contra el régimen de Aleksandar Vučić, su Partido Progresista Serbio (SNS) y la corrupción desmesurada que le atribuyen, saldrán a competir con políticos profesionales y sus agrupaciones. La mayoría de la oposición actual se ha retirado del plebiscito para dejar protagonismo a quienes han conseguido tambalear la autocracia del poder actual. “Luchamos sin consignas políticas por un Estado con instituciones fundamentales sólidas y por una sociedad ordenada y democrática, donde no haya lugar para la corrupción que condujo a la tragedia de Novi Sad” anuncian los universitarios, que tras casi dos años de lucha han conseguido que el Gobierno convoque elecciones anticipadas.

Seguir leyendo

Serbia’s authoritarian president personally intervened to remove the protection of a historic landmark – then came protests and prosecutions. Tom Burgis on the murky tale of Trump Tower Belgrade

In the heart of Belgrade, near the banks of the Danube, stands the General Staff building. Built in the 1960s, it embodies the difficult history of Serbia. It was designed to resemble a canyon of the Sutjeska River, where one of the most significant battles of the second world war was fought.

Then suddenly, in November 2024, it was announced that the building was no longer protected from development. Instead, a tower with Donald Trump’s name on it would go up in its place.

Apparent attempt to hack Rade Bajić’s iPhone comes amid efforts to undermine landmark criminal case

A Serbian prosecutor who investigated the authorities’ allegedly illegal scheme to help the Trumps build a tower in Belgrade has been targeted with advanced spyware, expert analysis indicates.

The finding suggests a disturbing new element in the authoritarian Serbian regime’s campaign to undermine what is believed to be the first criminal case related to global moneymaking drive of the US president’s family, which critics describe as a “pay to play” scheme trading the Trump administration’s favour for business opportunities.

Apparent attempt to hack Rade Bajić’s iPhone comes amid efforts to undermine landmark criminal case

A Serbian prosecutor who investigated the authorities’ allegedly illegal scheme to help the Trumps build a tower in Belgrade has been targeted with advanced spyware, expert analysis indicates.

The finding suggests a disturbing new element in the authoritarian Serbian regime’s campaign to undermine what is believed to be the first criminal case related to global moneymaking drive of the US president’s family, which critics describe as a “pay to play” scheme trading the Trump administration’s favour for business opportunities.

A Sofia court has cleared European arrest warrants for two 19-year-old Germans charged with setting fire to Starlink antennas south of the Bulgarian capital, a court spokeswoman told dpa. Prosecutors named the pair in court, but both had already left Bulgaria. The case adds Bulgaria to a run of attacks on Starlink sites in Europe, which Poland and Lithuania have linked to Russia.

While Russia presses its assault along the front and strikes Ukraine’s cities, Starlink keeps Ukraine’s drone units and front-line troops connected, and Poland pays about $50 million a year for its terminals. The network’s ground links in Europe are now a target in their own right, and ISW has linked the Polish fire to a wider Russian pattern of sabotage. Each attack on a ground station hits a network whose speed caps already disrupted Ukraine’s drone missions this month.

Two names, a few hours in Bulgaria

Prosecutors identified the suspects as Zeka Islam and Tirpan Beytullah, Bulgaria’s state news agency BTA reported, noting the names may be misspelled. Their whereabouts are unknown, according to German authorities cited by the agency. They were charged in absentia on 14 October and face three to 12 years in prison if convicted.

According to the indictment, the two crossed from Serbia at the Kalotina checkpoint at 17:37 on 9 October and told border officers they were tourists. At about 22:25, wearing gloves and masks, they allegedly set fire to antennas at the Plana teleport, a satellite ground station near the village of Plana. They drove back into Serbia through the same checkpoint at 23:55.

Three antennas burned completely, two were partly damaged, and three more were affected, prosecutors say. The pair traveled in a Volkswagen with German plates, and a national warrant followed two days after the charges, ZDF reported.

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The court-appointed lawyers argued that investigators had pinned down the vehicle, not the men in it. The court rejected those objections, finding reasonable grounds to suspect the pair. The lawyers said they would appeal. The ruling can be challenged within three days.

An opposition MP made the fire public three days later

The fire became public only on 12 October, when opposition MP Ivaylo Mirchev of Democratic Bulgaria posted about it on Facebook. He said 11 antennas had been set on fire, more than prosecutors later counted.

In parliament two days later, Prime Minister Rumen Radev asked the head of the State Agency for National Security (DANS) not to reveal details, saying disclosure could harm the investigation. DANS head Plamen Tonchev told lawmakers he believes the fire was sabotage and that more such attacks cannot be ruled out, dpa reported.

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After the ruling, Mirchev wrote that Radev personally owes the public an explanation of what has been achieved, BTA reported.

Bulgaria’s case joins attacks Poland and Lithuania tie to Russia

Bulgaria has not said who might be behind the fire. Authorities in Poland and Lithuania have linked similar recent arsons on Starlink equipment to Russia.

In September, fire hit a Starlink ground station south of Warsaw, and Germany later detained two suspects. On 18 October, Lithuania’s prime minister said intruders had tried to burn a company’s Starlink antennas used by Ukraine, calling it part of Russia’s hybrid war. Moscow claims such accusations are baseless, Reuters reported.

“Non crediamo nella vittoria: ne siamo completamente certi”. A dirlo sono Mihajlo, Ivana e Tea. Uno studente, una giornalista e una regista. Tre serbi di generazioni diverse, con storie e percorsi differenti, ma uniti dalla stessa convinzione: il 25 ottobre la lista del movimento studentesco vincerà.

La Serbia tornerà alle urne per le elezioni parlamentari anticipate. Il voto è stato convocato il 9 settembre, quando Aleksandar Vučić era ancora presidente. Il 27 settembre si è dimesso dalla presidenza e ora guida la lista del Partito progressista serbo, l’SNS. Da una parte il partito al potere dal 2012. Dall’altra la lista nata dal movimento studentesco. Dopo quasi due anni di proteste, gli studenti sono arrivati sulle schede elettorali. Il 15 settembre la “Studentska lista, studenti pobeđuju” è stata ufficialmente proclamata dalla Commissione elettorale serba. Sono 250 candidati.

Perché sono convinti della vittoria? La prima a rispondere è Ivana Perić: “Perché siamo sostenuti da moltissime persone”. È una giornalista indipendente e attivista. Ha raccontato il dopoguerra in Kosovo e si è battuta per la libertà di stampa in Serbia. Per anni ha diretto City Smart Radio, una radio indipendente di Belgrado, poi chiusa dopo pressioni che, racconta, l’hanno spinta a rinunciare. “Quando ho capito che nel nuovo bando per l’assegnazione delle frequenze l’emittente sarebbe stata rilevata da qualcuno vicino al Partito progressista serbo, ho deciso di chiudere definitivamente. È stata dura”.

Oggi è una delle candidate della lista studentesca. La libertà di stampa è anche uno dei punti del loro programma. “È l’articolo 4”, precisa. Ma la battaglia, per lei, non riguarda soltanto i media. Riguarda una società ancora profondamente divisa. “Inizialmente c’erano forti contrasti, anche nelle famiglie, per via della propaganda televisiva del partito. Chi protestava veniva descritto come violento, terrorista e come se fosse una minoranza. Ma bastava affacciarsi dalla finestra e vedere un fiume di giovani che sorridevano e si baciavano”. La candidata racconta che per molto tempo una parte della società è rimasta confusa, soprattutto gli anziani che non si informavano online, dove invece circolavano i video delle proteste. Poi, dice, hanno iniziato a fidarsi dei giovani. “Li ho visti dormire al freddo, all’aperto, con temperature sotto lo zero, perché i funzionari comunali non permettevano loro di mettere i sacchi a pelo nelle palestre. Ma hanno resistito”.

Quando ricorda le prime manifestazioni a Novi Sad, Ivana si commuove. È lì che tutto è iniziato, dopo il crollo della pensilina della stazione ferroviaria, il primo novembre 2024. Morirono 16 persone. “Non abbiamo ancora giustizia. Siamo molto arrabbiati“.

La censura la conosce bene anche Tea Puharić, regista. Nel marzo 2025, racconta, le sono stati tolti tutti i progetti. “Mi è stato esplicitamente detto che ciò era dovuto al mio sostegno al movimento studentesco. Da allora, il mio diritto al lavoro mi è stato di fatto negato”. Tea racconta di essere stata inserita in quella che definisce una “lista nera“: “Sono stata discriminata nella richiesta di finanziamenti e cofinanziamenti per opere artistiche. Poi, nell’agosto del 2025, i sostenitori delle autorità hanno sfondato le porte d’ingresso del mio palazzo, le hanno imbrattate di vernice rossa e hanno sparso intorno all’ingresso fotografie che mi ritraevano, accompagnate da messaggi offensivi. Questa è la quotidianità in cui viviamo”, racconta la donna che continua a sostenere il movimento studentesco.

Nella lista ci sono persone provenienti da mondi diversi: studenti, professori, agricoltori, biologi, artisti e sportivi. “Siamo molto orgogliosi delle personalità che abbiamo scelto”, dice Mihajlo Srdanović. È uno degli studenti che fin dall’inizio ha marciato per le strade della Serbia. La sua battaglia, dice, è cambiata nel tempo. “Non pensavamo che i blocchi sarebbero continuati per così tanto tempo. Ci sono stati momenti in cui ho pensato di mollare“, confessa parlando delle violenze e delle umiliazioni subite. “Ma non potevo farlo. Prima per la giustizia delle vittime, ora per la vittoria, per la democrazia e per la libertà“. Per Mihajlo la candidatura degli studenti non significa soltanto partecipare a un’elezione. Significa cambiare il rapporto tra cittadini e istituzioni. “Vogliamo un modello in cui gli studenti siano partecipanti attivi alla vita politica e in cui lo Stato funzioni secondo principi democratici, che ci chiamino a rispondere delle nostre responsabilità ma, allo stesso tempo, ci garantiscano protezione giuridica in quanto cittadini dello Stato”.

Per Ivana queste elezioni rappresentano la possibilità di aprire una nuova fase. “Per tutti noi è un’occasione per iniziare a risanare la società e le istituzioni“. Poi sorride. “Non vediamo l’ora che arrivi il 25 ottobre”.

L'articolo Dalla piazza alla corsa elettorale, gli studenti in Serbia sognano di sconfiggere Vucic il 25 ottobre: “Porteremo democrazia e libertà” proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Squalifica esemplare decisa dall’Itia per Stefan Milicevic, responsabile di gravi violazioni delle norme anticorruzione del tennis. Il serbo è stato radiato per 24 anni e sarà costretto a versare a titolo di multa la somma di 70mila dollari. Milicevic a partire dallo scorso 9 ottobre, data di entrata in vigore della sanzione, è da considerarsi completamente escluso da qualsiasi evento legato all’Itia stessa e gli è proibito, da qui fino al 2050, presenziare a eventi organizzati o autorizzati da World Tennis, Wta, Atp, dai tornei dello Slam o da qualsiasi federazione nazionale.

Milicevic, 29 anni, che nell’agosto 2014 aveva raggiunto il suo best ranking in singolare al numero 1338 del mondo, è stato accusato di aver manipolato sei incontri, cinque dei quali disputati in prima persona, e di aver tentato di combinare altri sei match tra il 2022 e il 2024. Nel comunicato si legge: “Al giocatore è stato inoltre contestato di aver reclutato, o tentato di reclutare, diversi professionisti per inserirli in una rete corruttiva attiva nello stesso periodo, contribuendo così alla manipolazione di altri incontri”.

Il 24 settembre 2026, al termine dell’inchiesta, a Milicevic è stata notificata una contestazione per grave violazione del regolamento (Notice of Major Offense). Il giocatore non ha presentato alcuna risposta e, in conformità con le norme e le linee guida sanzionatorie dell’Itia, la sanzione prevista in questi casi è di 24 anni di squalifica e una multa di 70mila dollari. La squalifica è entrata in vigore il 9 ottobre 2026 e terminerà l’8 ottobre 2050.

L'articolo Maxi-squalifica per Stefan Milicevic: è stato bandito dalle partite di tennis di tutto il mondo proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Exclusive: Aleksandar Vučić personally intervened to push plans for controversial $500m Trump Tower in Belgrade, which sparked protests and a criminal case

Serbia’s authoritarian ruler personally intervened to advance an allegedly illegal scheme to hand over a protected site in Belgrade for a Trump tower, the Guardian can reveal.

Aleksandar Vučić summoned officials to a meeting at his presidential offices about the project, which has culminated in a landmark indictment of senior figures from his regime on charges of abuse of public office.

Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 12 October. Network data do show Yandex’s automated traffic collapsing after the strikes. Disinformation researchers say that traffic is search crawling, not trolls. A Ukrainian social media monitor told Euromaidan Press its own data show no clear drop in bot activity either.

Russian influence operations are a live threat to European votes. In August, the Matryoshka network fabricated news clips aimed at Sweden’s general election. German and French authorities flagged the same network targeting Germany’s local votes and French presidential hopeful Gabriel Attal. A way to switch such networks off would hand allies a new tool, which is why the claim needs testing.

The president’s claim

Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum by video link, Zelenskyy said that once Ukraine began answering Russia’s operation against Ukrainian data centers and its strikes reached Yandex, many social media platforms suddenly became a little easier to breathe on.

Many people noticed less hatred, discord, and provocation because there were fewer bots, he said. It was quite clear where those bots came from, he noted. Their disappearance once Yandex went down proves again that Europe is not the source of the problems, he added.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said at the same forum that allies should ask Zelenskyy to strike more data centers in Russia, answering a question on how to protect their elections from interference.

Three data centers in four days

Drones first hit Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, on 8 October. Yandex said it shut the site down completely. The next day, a strike on its Kaluga site completely disabled several modules, the company said. Yandex calls Kaluga its largest data center, Russian science outlet T-Invariant noted.

Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 long-range drones carried out that strike.

After the first strike, on Sasovo, a source at Yandex summed up the mood for The Bell: “Things are rotten. We keep working.”

Overnight on 11 October, drones hit the third site, in Vladimir. Yandex said it fully halted that data center too. Vladimir Oblast Governor Aleksandr Avdeev acknowledged an attack on “infrastructure” near the city. It started a fire and cut power to two substations serving 5,000 residents, he claimed.

What the traffic data show

Automated web requests from Yandex’s network fell to 0.4% of their two-week peak after the third strike, Cloudflare Radar data showed, Cybernews reported. That chart counts automated requests to websites, mostly from Yandex’s own search crawlers. It does not count social media posts.

The chart “has nothing to do with social media,” the Russian opposition analysis group Antibot4navalny wrote.

Russia’s overall bot traffic last week looked much like any other week. Yandex’s own figure began recovering on Sunday. Covert troll farms usually hide behind residential proxies, hacked devices, virtual private networks (VPNs), and Western cloud providers, the outlet added.

What Ukrainian social media shows so far

Yevhen Luzan tracks Ukrainian social media sentiment as an analyst at the Ukrainian nonprofit CAT-UA. Its daily reviews sample about 500 random posts. On 11 October, that sample showed an unusually small share of posts criticizing Ukraine’s authorities, he told Euromaidan Press. Accounts showing signs of bot activity made up only a few tenths of a percent of that criticism. That is within the margin of error.

The same day, though, US President Donald Trump’s deal for Russian diesel supplies dominated Ukrainian feeds. Luzan said a rally-around-the-flag effect could explain the shift, as outrage at Washington crowded out domestic stories.

“To state it definitively and draw a cause-and-effect link from this correlation would be too bold,” he said.

Across the wider pool of about 10,000 daily mentions, CAT-UA sees no significant drop in posting activity in recent days. The curve shows only the usual rises and dips around the start and end of the week, Luzan said.

“For now, even a hypothetical drop in bot farm activity dissolves entirely in the natural fluctuations of the information space,” he said.

How a crawler chart became a bot story

The claim that Russian social media bots fell by half is unproven and built on a misread chart, disinformation analyst Joohn Choe concluded in a fact-check. It traces back to an 8 October post by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler. That post said Russian bot traffic had dropped to 49%. On 11 October, radio reporter Jamie Dupree spread it on X. Tom’s Hardware then ran it under a headline calling the crawler traffic “Russian disinformation bot traffic,” wording it has since changed.

Ukrainian military analyst Tatarigami claimed that Texas separatist accounts with identical “Veteran, Christian, Father, MAGA” bios had gone quiet. He said Quebec separatists and Polish anti-EU accounts went quiet alongside them.

Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski claimed that AfD’s online support fell 56%, posting a chart without naming its source. Another X user said “Polish” bots had vanished.