Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers caused disruptions in Russia — Politico Europe
In Russia, the aggressor state, Ukrainian strikes on three Yandex data centers caused delays and disruptions to services used by thousands of companies and households. As Politico reports, the facilities are located in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir.
According to the publication, the strikes were intended to disrupt military planning and communication services. At the same time, users of Yandex's cloud infrastructure felt the consequences: disruptions affected e-commerce, digital payment platforms, food delivery apps and ride-hailing services.
Disruptions and difficult recovery
Ukrainian drones also attacked a major Sberbank data center in the Saratov region. A senior company representative said that this attack did not affect its operations.
Oleg Shakirov, a researcher of cyber policy and international security, noted that the real scale of the damage remains unknown. According to him, two data centers remained offline, which may indicate significant damage. He also pointed out that recovery could be costly and difficult, as data center equipment mostly has to be imported, while supplies are complicated by sanctions against Russia and high global demand.
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International law issues
Joseph Jarnacki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said that such strikes likely violate international humanitarian law and set a dangerous precedent due to societies' growing dependence on digital services.
Kubo Mačák, an expert in international humanitarian law, explained that a data center can be considered a military target only under two conditions: it must effectively contribute to military operations, and its destruction must provide a definite military advantage. In particular, this may concern the storage of military intelligence or ensuring the operation of military artificial intelligence tools. At the same time, hosting bot networks or propaganda accounts alone does not make a data center a lawful military target.
After the attacks, users of platform X reported a reduction in the activity of automated bots associated with pro-Russian, pro-Trump and narratives linked to the German party Alternative for Germany. However, independent researchers and national scientific institutions found no evidence that the strikes directly disrupted Russian disinformation campaigns.
