In 10 days, Russia attacked Kyivstar eight times: what are the consequences?

Over the past 10 days, Russia has launched eight strikes against the infrastructure of Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile operator.

Despite significant technical damage, the attacks had zero impact on the company’s customers thanks to backup equipment and proactive risk management.

“Over the past 10 days, Kyivstar’s infrastructure has been hit eight times. One data center is completely offline; for the other, we’re actively mitigating risks, switching over systems, and so on. Two missiles struck our central warehouse,” Komarov said.

According to the company’s president, one of the data centers was completely taken out of service, while specialists are implementing measures to mitigate risks and performing the necessary switchover procedures at the other.

Separately, two missiles struck Kyivstar’s central warehouse. Komarov noted that the company had partially prepared for a possible strike on this facility. In particular, the standard inventory of equipment had been halved in advance—to $15 million.

At the same time, no Kyivstar employees were injured as a result of the attacks.

Oleksandr Komarov emphasized that even after a series of strikes, the company is focused not on survival, but on further development and recovery.

“We have already restored one data center and are working on restoring the second. But I understand that this will be a process of two steps forward, one step back. Or perhaps two steps back, one step forward. But everything we’ve done over the years has been to maximize the buffer between a crisis and the destruction of our infrastructure,” Komarov stated.

Thus, despite eight attacks on its infrastructure in 10 days, Kyivstar continues to provide services to customers without any reported impact from the attacks, while simultaneously restoring damaged facilities and strengthening infrastructure redundancy.

Kyivstar President Alexander Komarov spoke about this during the Forbes CEO Summit in Kyiv.

Ukraine is preparing for potential major internet disruptions amid Russian strikes on data centers and telecommunications infrastructure. Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi stated that the government is working to maintain access to the internet and digital services.

Russia is attempting to disable Ukraine’s digital infrastructure, particularly data centers, but a complete loss of internet access in Ukraine is currently unlikely. This is the view of Serhiy Denysenko, director of the Cyberlab Computer Forensics Laboratory. According to him, Ukraine has a large number of data centers, internet service providers, and mobile networks, and some of the data and equipment are located outside the country altogether.