Russian military bloggers who back the Kremlin are warning that the country’s centralized digital economy could collapse because Moscow was not prepared for the data center war it launched against Ukraine, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. Their argument is blunt: Ukraine’s more scattered digital services may prove tougher than Russia’s if the two sides keep trading blows.
The bloggers’ warnings land after an autumn of escalation in which both capitals have aimed drones at the machinery that keeps the other side’s internet, banking and communications running.
Moscow opened this front in late September with a drone campaign against Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks. The attacks temporarily cut internet and cell service for as many as 100,000 households in Kyiv, part of a broader campaign of long range strikes in which Russian missiles and jet powered drones have hit power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs and residential apartment blocks.
Ukraine soon hit back, targeting data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, widely described as the country’s answer to Google. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has framed the strikes as a “symmetrical response.”
Three strikes, three Yandex sites
The first Ukrainian drone attack, on October 8, damaged a data center in the Sasovo region southeast of Moscow. That facility houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex has used to train its YandexGPT artificial intelligence model.
How much harm the supercomputers sustained was not immediately clear. Both are built on Nvidia A100 GPU chips. The Chervonenkis machine is rated at 29.42 petaflops and holds the 101st spot on the Top 500 List of supercomputers, while Lyapunov is rated at 20.03 petaflops and ranks 161st.
A second strike, on October 9, knocked out another Yandex data center, this one in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow. It is among the largest data centers in Russia, with a maximum capacity of 63 megawatts.
A third attack, on October 11, forced Yandex to suspend operations at its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, according to BBC News. The site holds Galushkin, the third of the company’s supercomputers, which ranked 134th on the Top 500 list with a rating of 20.64 petaflops.
For ordinary Russians, the deeper disruption has been to the services they use every day. The damage has reportedly caused interruptions or outages across popular payment apps and digital banking services, email, e commerce platforms, video streaming, ride hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map tools. Yandex’s search engine alone accounts for roughly 70 percent of the market in Russia.
The fallout spreads further still. Because the hit sites also underpin Yandex’s cloud computing service, some of the country’s largest companies have been affected, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. Those customers include big grocery and fast food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.
A milblogger writing under the name Ratio Militaris argued in a post translated by ChrisO_wiki that Yandex’s hypercentralized digital ecosystem had become a wartime liability:
“Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia’s advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—including, and even primarily, due to hyper-centralization—both at the market level, where Yandex had become a powerful monopolist, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where the entire power of the information giant was concentrated in a few (the exact number is no secret, but perhaps inappropriate to specify) large nodes—those aforementioned data centers.”
Building redundant infrastructure outside Russia would be hard for companies like Yandex, according to another milblogger, Artjockey, whose writing was also translated by ChrisO_wiki. Part of the obstacle is the Sovereign Internet Law, which the Russian parliament passed and President Vladimir Putin signed in 2019.
“In its pursuit of a ‘sovereign Internet,’ the government has effectively blocked Russian companies from using infrastructure even in friendly nations, while ‘unfriendly’ countries have blocked access via sanctions anyway… it is virtually impossible to replicate Russian IT infrastructure in places like Belarus or Kazakhstan—though, in any case, the necessary capacity simply isn’t there. China might have the capacity, but that would require legislative changes to allow key services and registries to be moved there.”
Ukraine, by contrast, runs a far more decentralized digital ecosystem built on smaller data centers, and it has taken steps to harden it. Some equipment and networks have been moved underground or shifted outside the country.
Western technology giants have helped. Microsoft and Amazon have supplied free cloud services that allowed Ukraine to migrate crucial government services to other parts of Europe, keeping many essential digital services alive despite Russia’s sustained missile and drone attacks. Amazon Web Services alone hosts more than 15 petabytes of data belonging to over 60 Ukrainian government organizations, along with data from DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.
Recovery on the Russian side could be slow. An unnamed IT expert interviewed by the Russian newspaper Kommersant said Yandex may need up to six months to replace damaged data center equipment. That sort of timeline would echo what Amazon experienced after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year.
For now, the loudest alarm is coming from inside Russia’s own pro war information sphere, where commentators once treated Yandex’s reach as proof of digital strength are recasting it as a single point of failure. The debate over how quickly that backbone can be hardened, and whether Ukraine’s flatter, better backed up model is genuinely more durable, remains open.
