Ukraine has struck and partly disabled a major data centre operated by Russian technology giant Yandex, marking the second such attack in successive days and a widening of Kyiv's campaign against targets inside Russia.
What happened
Yandex said its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, was struck by Ukrainian drones and partly put out of action on Friday. The company, which is heavily involved in Russia's artificial intelligence development and is sometimes described as Russia's Google, said on Thursday it could not yet determine whether the damaged equipment could be restored.
The strike follows another hit on a major Russian tech site a day earlier. Together, the two attacks signal a shift in Ukraine's targeting strategy, expanding the range of objectives inside Russia beyond energy and military infrastructure to the digital infrastructure that underpins the Russian state and economy.
A tit-for-tat over data infrastructure
President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine was responding in kind to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres. "We always respond in mirror-like fashion," he told reporters. "You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding."
Zelensky added that he could not share all the details of Ukraine's operations. Russia has been pounding Ukrainian data hubs as part of a broader aerial campaign that has killed dozens of civilians this week, including strikes on buses in Kramatorsk and an apartment block in Pryluky.
The attack on the Kaluga facility is significant because data centres are critical to both civilian internet services and military command-and-control networks. A prolonged outage at one of Yandex's facilities could disrupt cloud services, search and AI workloads across Russia.
Escalating beyond the front line
The strikes come as the war approaches the five-year mark with diplomacy stalled. Zelensky said Ukrainian negotiators were heading to the United States for talks on Friday and Saturday, even as both sides continue to hit infrastructure far behind the front lines. The latest exchange suggests that even as negotiations are discussed, the technological front of the war is heating up.
Sources:
Reuters World News Summary
Reuters: Zelenskiy says Ukraine expects Europeans to join talks with US
What happened
Yandex said its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, was struck by Ukrainian drones and partly put out of action on Friday. The company, which is heavily involved in Russia's artificial intelligence development and is sometimes described as Russia's Google, said on Thursday it could not yet determine whether the damaged equipment could be restored.
The strike follows another hit on a major Russian tech site a day earlier. Together, the two attacks signal a shift in Ukraine's targeting strategy, expanding the range of objectives inside Russia beyond energy and military infrastructure to the digital infrastructure that underpins the Russian state and economy.
A tit-for-tat over data infrastructure
President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine was responding in kind to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres. "We always respond in mirror-like fashion," he told reporters. "You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding."
Zelensky added that he could not share all the details of Ukraine's operations. Russia has been pounding Ukrainian data hubs as part of a broader aerial campaign that has killed dozens of civilians this week, including strikes on buses in Kramatorsk and an apartment block in Pryluky.
The attack on the Kaluga facility is significant because data centres are critical to both civilian internet services and military command-and-control networks. A prolonged outage at one of Yandex's facilities could disrupt cloud services, search and AI workloads across Russia.
Escalating beyond the front line
The strikes come as the war approaches the five-year mark with diplomacy stalled. Zelensky said Ukrainian negotiators were heading to the United States for talks on Friday and Saturday, even as both sides continue to hit infrastructure far behind the front lines. The latest exchange suggests that even as negotiations are discussed, the technological front of the war is heating up.
Sources:
Reuters World News Summary
Reuters: Zelenskiy says Ukraine expects Europeans to join talks with US
