Ukrainian drones attacked this week two data centers of Yandex —the largest technology provider in Russia— in an escalation that Kiev describes as a deliberate strategy to dismantle Russian artificial intelligence infrastructure and raise the economic cost of the war.
The attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, confirmed by the company itself, rendered two out of its three supercomputers inoperative and triggered cascading failures across much of the Russian digital economy, according to a report by The Kyiv Independent.
The first strike hit the data center in Sásovo, in the Ryazan region, rendering it completely inoperable. The following day, a second facility in Kaluga suffered severe damage, with several modules rendered inoperative; the regional governor reported nine injuries and 26 downed drones.
Both facilities housed the supercomputers "Chervonenkis" and "Lyapunov," where the artificial intelligence model YandexGPT was trained with around 2,700 Nvidia A100 accelerators.
When the servers collapsed, the first systems to report failures were those of Wildberries, Ozon, T-Bank, Russian Railways, and the real estate portal Cian, all of which relied on Yandex's cloud to operate.
The attacks are not an isolated incident, but rather the latest link in a long-term Ukrainian campaign against the Russian economy that began in mid-July with a systematic offensive against the warehouses of Wildberries, the e-commerce giant known as the "Russian Amazon."
According to The Guardian and Reuters, around one-fifth of the company's storage capacity was damaged or destroyed, with estimated losses of up to 1.18 billion dollars.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense justifies the attacks on Yandex by arguing that its services are not exclusively civilian. According to the analysis by expert Konstantin Tarasov, published by OBOZ.UA, “Yandex Cloud services and its mapping systems process high-precision geospatial data, and the company's artificial intelligence algorithms analyze satellite images, correct military logistics routes, and assist in target recognition.”
Additionally, the data center in Sásovo shared an industrial complex with the "Sasta" factory, which produces components for the Iskander tactical ballistic missile system.
The propaganda dimension of Yandex also weighs in the Ukrainian decision. An audit funded by the European Union, known as Weaponised Algorithms and conducted by researcher Ihor Samokhodskyi, documented that the assistant Alice supported Kremlin narratives in 86% of its responses in Russian.
The report concluded that "the finding is not merely a limitation of training, but a deliberate suppression of real-time information": Alice claimed that the Bucha massacre was "a staged event".
The attacks on Yandex are also a direct response to the Russian campaign at the end of September, when Moscow bombed at least eight data centers in Kyiv, leaving 100,000 homes without internet and resulting in four deaths in the attack on the provider Datagroup.
The political context adds tension to the situation. On Saturday, President Donald Trump publicly criticized Volodymyr Zelensky, stating that "it's time" for Ukraine to have a different president and accused him of "creating problems for the world" by continuing attacks on Russian refineries.
U.S. negotiators reportedly warned Kiev that Washington could suspend intelligence sharing if Ukraine did not halt that energy strategy.
Zelenski rejected the diesel agreement backed by Trump with Moscow, calling it "absolutely terrible" and warned that it would allow Russia to fund the continuation of the war. Far from slowing down the offensive, Kyiv expanded it into the technology sector, adding data centers to a list that already included refineries, logistics warehouses, and e-commerce platforms.
The accumulated impact of this strategy is reflected in the Russian accounts: the federal budget had an accumulated deficit of about 67 billion dollars in the first half of 2026, and a source close to the Kremlin warned Reuters that a "wave of bankruptcies" was approaching in the commercial sector that no one had the resources to contain.
Related videos:
Filed under: