Ukrainian Strikes On Russian Data Centers Are Felt Across Russia’s Internet

Russia prides itself on its digital advances — an extensive e-commerce sector and ambitious plans for developing artificial intelligence. This month, some of the key data centers at the heart of that system were knocked out by Ukrainian drone attacks, in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, suffering damage that could take a long time to repair, The Associated Press reported on Thursday.

Ukraine this month hit three main data centers belonging to the tech giant Yandex, one for Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, and one for the social-media platform VKontakte, the country’s equivalent of Facebook. Reports citing Reuters and the AP put the strikes between October 8 and October 18: Yandex facilities at Sasovo on October 8, Kaluga on October 9 and Vladimir on October 11; the Sberbank center at Balakovo on October 14; and a VKontakte facility near St. Petersburg on October 18.

While Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte are coy about the damage, people and businesses across Russia have reported widespread interruptions to cloud services. Banking, e-commerce, geolocation and ride-hailing services suffered lasting disruptions, as did Alisa, Yandex’s virtual assistant, and its multimodal AI chatbots. Because Yandex runs services Russians use constantly — search, taxi dispatch, navigation, cloud storage, online shopping — the effects of an outage at its facilities spread quickly. Analysts at the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) reported that Yandex acknowledged serious operational effects, including complete suspension at Sasovo and Vladimir and confirmed damage to power systems at Kaluga, and that Sberbank and VK said their own systems continued operating without major disruption. Yandex restored most key cloud services by shifting workloads to its other Russian facilities, AP reported.

The fallout reached Russia’s judicial system: arbitration courts reportedly canceled or postponed sessions and lost access to their databases. Satellite images showed fires at the struck facilities. Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society, told AP that data-center equipment is fragile, demanding and expensive, and that soot from fire is bad for electronics: “With this kind of hit, it’s hard to expect that at least something was left intact.”

The Sasovo site housed two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, the machines used to train its AI models, according to the reports. Most experts predict repairing the damage could take months, if not years, and some warn that Moscow’s aspiration to become a leader in AI development could be significantly set back. “This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race,” Klimarev said.

Data centers have been hit by both sides in the war: Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers have disrupted internet services and television broadcasts. The exposure is not symmetric. Russia’s policy requires much of its data to remain on domestic systems, concentrating its infrastructure inside one country; Ukraine stores critical information on servers in allied European countries.

Analysts say the repair problem runs deeper than rebuilding walls and power lines. The facilities ran on high-end chips and other specialized equipment that Western sanctions make difficult for Russia to replace, and fire damage spreads beyond the rooms that burned: soot and heat ruin servers well beyond the point of impact. That is why the experts AP spoke to measure the recovery in months or years rather than weeks — and why the loss of the Sasovo supercomputers matters to Russia’s AI program long after the cloud services have been rerouted.

Sources: The Associated Press; Reuters; Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) analysis.