Ukrainian Attack Disrupts Russian Datacenters

Yandex data centres are central to Russia’s sovereign internet infrastructure. Like most modern digital infrastructure, they host data and applications used for a range of civilian and military purposes. One targeted facility in Sasovo reportedly hosted two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, which were used to train the YandexGPT large language model.[2]

The attacks followed an increase in Russian jet-powered drone strikes against Ukrainian data centers, which disrupted mobile and internet services for thousands of people. Russia may face greater difficulty restoring affected services because its internet infrastructure is more restricted. While Ukraine can rely on international partners for cloud services, Russia has fewer comparable options. [3] Unverified sources claim that Yandex may be unable to replace the destroyed infrastructure before 2028. [4]

Assessment

Social media posts have circulated graphs claiming that the attacks caused a significant decrease in Russian bot traffic. This interpretation is misleading. The graphs show activity from Yandex web-crawling bots, which continually scan the internet to update Yandex’s search index, they don’t measure actual social media bot activity.

It is still likely that some Russian organizations that conduct large-scale social media disinformation campaigns use Yandex-hosted tools to automate bot activity. Anecdotal evidence suggests a decline in such activity, but it is still too early to assess the impact on Russian disinformation capabilities. The attacks follow Iranian strikes against AWS data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates earlier in the war involving the US, Israel, and Iran. Data centers are increasingly viewed as important military targets during war and armed conflicts.

Ukraine will likely continue targeting Russian data centers to disrupt Russia’s economy and its use of AI in support of military objectives. Truesec cannot verify the claim that Yandex will be unable to replace the destroyed equipment before 2028. Given the sanctions imposed on Russia, the claim is plausible. China may offer to host Russian services, but doing so would effectively give China control over Russian data, an outcome Russia will likely seek to avoid.

References

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/russia-yandex-ukraine-drone-strike-data-center.html
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ukraine-reportedly-hits-russian-data-centers-causing-internet-outages/ar-AA2dW8fi
[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/russian-drones-strike-ukraines-data-centers-by-exploiting-air-defense-gaps/