Ukrainian strikes have set back the development of AI in Russia by years

As a result of a series of nighttime attacks by Ukrainian drones between October 8 and 11, 2026, Yandex’s key data centers in Sasovo (Ryazan Oblast), Kaluga, and Vladimir were damaged. This led to the indefinite shutdown of all three of the IT giant’s supercomputers—“Chervonenkis,” “Lyapunov,” and “Galushkin”—which were working on the development of neural networks and other elements of the company’s AI ecosystem.

The main cause of the vulnerability in Yandex’s equipment was the direct freecooling system (cooling with outside air). Soot and combustion byproducts entered the server racks, causing widespread short circuits and system failures. Cleaning the servers could take up to half a year, and replacing the damaged, hard-to-find NVIDIA A100 accelerators—amid international sanctions—will take years.

The loss of computing power critically halts the development of YandexGPT and Alice AI. Since the “Search Services and AI” division is the company’s most profitable, and AI-powered recommendation technologies accounted for nearly half of its advertising revenue growth, the destruction of this infrastructure deals a direct blow to the entire Russian IT sector. By 2022, “Chervonenkis” ranked 19th on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers; but due to this destruction, Russia risks falling behind Kazakhstan in the regional artificial intelligence race as early as November 2026.

Source: an investigation by T-invariant.

On the night of October 11, drones attacked the Yandex data center in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast. The company confirmed that operations had come to a complete halt, causing widespread disruptions to dozens of digital services across the country.

The Russian technology company Yandex stated that it had completely shut down its data center in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast due to the drone attack. According to the company, its infrastructure was damaged as a result of the attack.