Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles have begun striking Russian digital infrastructure, targeting facilities that host cloud services and financial applications. The campaign follows months of Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, which intensified after Russia started hitting Ukrainian data centers in late September. Kyiv’s retaliatory strikes have disrupted servers belonging to major Russian firms and government ministries, prompting Moscow to consider protective measures.
The attacks have knocked out or degraded data centers operated by Yandex, the state bank Sberbank, the social network VKontakte, and the Ministry of Finance. Disruptions have affected payment processing, e-commerce, video streaming, ride-hailing and food-delivery platforms. Ukrainian strikes have therefore demonstrated the strategic importance of hosting critical services in hardened locations.
State-owned telecom provider Rostelcom has raised the prospect of relocating some Russian data centers underground, a move discussed with the nickel and palladium miner Norilsk, Vedomosti reported. Data Center Dynamics also highlighted a proposal from a regional governor to embed facilities within open-pit coal mines while covering them with green public parks as camouflage. Both ideas aim to shield servers from aerial attacks.
On November 2, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree obligating Russian data-center operators to set aside ten percent of their available space and capacity for potential government use, Meduza noted. The same order creates a special commission that may permit the use of foreign data centers after consultation with the Federal Security Service. This marks a shift from the earlier “Sovereign Internet” law that barred Russian companies from relying on overseas cloud services.
The push for a sovereign, closed-off internet has concentrated Russian online traffic in a handful of domestic firms such as Yandex. The concentration has proved fragile in wartime, as Ukrainian drone strikes on key facilities have caused widespread outages across payment apps, streaming services and logistics platforms. Officials now view the centralised architecture as a liability.
Meduza reported that Yandex was forced to move all three of its main supercomputers after Ukrainian drones hit the AI data centers where they were originally housed. The relocation underscores the urgency of protecting high-performance computing resources from further aerial attacks.
By contrast, Ukraine’s more dispersed digital architecture has shown greater resilience, aided by Western assistance. After the February 2022 invasion, Amazon and Microsoft helped shift Ukrainian government workloads to European cloud regions, while the United States and European nations funded SpaceX Starlink terminals as a backup communications layer. These measures have allowed Ukrainian services to remain operational despite ongoing missile and drone strikes.