Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine

Russia’s campaign of strikes on Ukrainian data centers and telecoms prompted a Ukrainian retaliation in early October 2026 that disabled three major Yandex facilities, producing widespread outages across Russian digital life. Drone attacks on data centers in Sasovo (Oct 8), Kaluga (Oct 9) and Vladimir (Oct 11) hit facilities that house Yandex’s three supercomputers - Chervonenkis (about 29.4 petaflops), Lyapunov (about 20.0 petaflops) and Galushkin (about 20.6 petaflops) - which rely on Nvidia A100 GPUs and support YandexGPT training. The Kaluga site alone has up to 63 MW capacity. Damage forced suspensions or interruptions of search, cloud, payment and banking apps, e‑mail, e‑commerce, streaming, ride‑hailing, delivery and mapping services; Yandex holds roughly 70% of Russia’s search market. Ukrainian leaders framed the strikes as a symmetrical response.

Russian commentators and milbloggers now argue that hypercentralization of critical internet infrastructure created a wartime vulnerability. Domestic laws aimed at a “sovereign internet” and sanctions limit the ability to migrate key systems abroad or use third‑country backups, while capacity in friendly neighbors is insufficient. By contrast, Ukraine’s more distributed infrastructure, underground backups and rapid migration to Western cloud providers - Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (hosting multiple government datasets and over 15 PB of Ukrainian data) - helped preserve services. Analysts warn Yandex may need months to replace damaged equipment, exposing how unprepared Russia’s centralized digital economy is for reciprocal data‑center warfare.