In late September, Russia initiated a campaign of drone strikes targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile networks, causing temporary service disruptions for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv. Ukraine responded with a series of drone attacks on Yandex data centers located in the Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir regions between October 8 and October 11.
The strikes affected three major Yandex supercomputers: Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin. These systems, based on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, provide computing power ranging from 20.03 to 29.42 petaflops. The Vladimir facility, which houses the Galushkin supercomputer, was forced to suspend operations following the October 11 attack.
The damage to Yandex infrastructure has disrupted various digital services in Russia, including banking, e-commerce, email, and navigation apps. Yandex, which holds approximately 70 percent of the Russian search engine market, also provides cloud services to major retail and fast-food chains that are now facing operational outages.
Analysts suggest that Russia's hyper-centralized digital ecosystem has become a strategic vulnerability. The 2019 Sovereign Internet Law complicates efforts to establish backup infrastructure in other countries, as it restricts the use of foreign data centers. Experts estimate it could take up to six months to replace the damaged equipment.
In contrast, Ukraine has utilized a decentralized digital architecture and relocated some infrastructure underground or abroad. Western companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, have supported this effort. Amazon Web Services currently hosts over 15 petabytes of data for more than 60 Ukrainian government organizations.
