Ukrainian drones struck five data centers belonging to Russia’s largest technology companies in October, causing widespread outages in cloud services, payment systems and navigation applications across the country.
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Ukrainian armed forces struck three Yandex facilities: on October 7 in Sasovo, Ryazan region, on October 9 in Kaluga and on October 11 in Vladimir.
On October 14, a Sber data center in Balakovo, Saratov region, was attacked, and on October 18, a VKontakte data center, in the Leningrad region, near St. Petersburg, was attacked.
Yandex, Sber and VKontakte together run much of Russia’s consumer internet infrastructure, from taxi apps and card payment processing to cloud storage and messaging.
None of the companies disclosed the extent of the damage. Russians reported continued difficulties paying for goods, ordering taxis, using navigation services and accessing cloud storage.
Experts say restoring infrastructure could take months or even years, and that the strikes have set back the development of artificial intelligence in Russia, Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society, told the AP.
Russia continues to target Ukraine’s IT sector
These attacks come as Russia itself has systematically targeted Ukrainian data centers this fall.
On October 19, a Russian strike completely destroyed one of the largest facilities of Ukrainian operator Datagroup in kyiv, which was declared beyond repair.
The next day, a Russian attack damaged the Kyiv GigaCenter. Russia struck several other Ukrainian data centers in September and October.
A previous Russian strike on a kyiv data center in July disrupted access to the internet, mobile communications and television across the city.
Moscow has been targeting Ukrainian computer systems since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion: cruise missiles hit a government server on February 24, 2022, and a Russian missile hit the National Data Backup Center in central kyiv on March 1.
Ukraine has since transferred most of its data to servers in European countries, limiting the impact of subsequent attacks.
Russian data centers are more vulnerable than Ukrainian ones, analysts say. Under legislation aimed at creating a “sovereign internet,” Russia requires companies to store all data on servers located inside the country. This focus makes facilities easier to target.
“Russia’s problem is that it has to provide air defense over a large territory and it doesn’t have enough resources for that,” said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group.
“Since all the infrastructure and data are in Russia, it is relatively easier to deactivate them.” It was not explained why air defense systems did not, or failed, protect Russian data centers.
Sensitive to fire
Analysts describe the facilities as easy targets: vast halls filled with servers, electrical equipment and cooling systems where even a small explosive charge can cause serious damage.
Satellite images of affected Yandex facilities show fires that may have destroyed electronic chips and other fragile components.
“After such a strike, it is difficult to hope that anything has survived: data center equipment is fragile, demanding and expensive. Soot from fires is extremely harmful to electronics,” Klimarev told AP.
The damage to Yandex is particularly important for Russian AI ambitions. The company’s three supercomputers, used to develop AI models, rank among the top 500 in the world. The most powerful, located at the Sasovo facility, was once ranked 19th in the world, but has since fallen below the top 100.
“Ukrainian drone strikes will likely further delay the development of Russian artificial intelligence,” said Connor Martin of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before the strikes, Russia was already several years behind the United States and China.
Restoring the hardware will be complicated by Western sanctions and the global chip shortage. Yandex’s supercomputers run on Nvidia A100 processors, which Russia cannot legally import.
Klimarev said the strikes could have unintended consequences for Russian internet policy.
“Paradoxically, attacks on data centers saved the Russian Internet from isolation, as companies will now be forced to move their IT resources, most likely to Europe,” he said.
“It is highly likely that many Russian companies are now studying the European market in search of opportunities to rent computing capacity,” Klimarev said. He added that Russian authorities could ease efforts to tighten internet controls to limit economic damage.
Infrastructure for malicious purposes
Moscow has for years actively used its IT sector to spy on its users and carry out malicious hybrid operations elsewhere.
Under Russia’s SORM legislation, all domestic internet companies, including Yandex, VKontakte and Sber, are legally required to install FSB backdoors allowing security services to access user data and communications.
These data centers are integrated into the Russian surveillance apparatus and not purely commercial infrastructure.
VKontakte has been widely used for state-sponsored propaganda and recruitment. Ukraine banned it in 2017 partly for these reasons.
The Kremlin has evidently used AI tools in its disinformation operations, including rewriting real news articles with pro-Kremlin leanings and fabricated claims, and publishing them on dozens of sites designed to imitate legitimate international media outlets, including Euronews.
It also used AI-generated video and audio to fabricate statements attributed to Western officials. AI-cloned voices impersonating European politicians have also been circulating, although some were detected before spreading widely.
More recently, it has flooded the Internet with repetitive pro-Kremlin content to distort what AI chatbots pick up and, possibly, how they are trained. NewsGuard stress testing found that chatbots repeated false statements in about a third of responses when prompted in an adversarial manner.
Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment, however, said that the poisoning of training data is slow, heavily filtered and increasingly countered by behavioral rules built into the newest models.
EU sanctions prohibit the provision of IT services, software and cloud capabilities to Russian companies.
Companies seeking to circumvent restrictions have resorted to intermediaries, anonymous hosting providers or foreign corporate structures. Brussels has strengthened the application of these rules.
Gn world
