Ukrainian drone attacks struck two major Russian data centers over two days, disrupting digital operations and artificial intelligence development at tech giant Yandex, company officials and Ukrainian leadership said Friday.
The strikes hit a site in the Ryazan region overnight into Thursday and targeted the company’s largest data complex in the Kaluga region early Friday morning. Yandex, widely known as Russia’s dominant search engine and digital platform provider, operates five data centers across the country. The company acknowledged that maintaining normal operations had become difficult following the damage.
Critical infrastructure damaged across two regions
The first strike knocked out a data hub in Sasovo, located southeast of Moscow in the Ryazan region. Operations at the Sasovo site were completely halted after sustained damage, according to a company announcement reported by the BBC. That facility houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex relies on to develop its artificial intelligence models, though the company did not specify whether the computing machines survived the impact.
On Friday, drones attacked a massive facility located southwest of Moscow in Kaluga. Yandex told the Interfax news agency that multiple modules at the site were disabled, taking critical digital infrastructure out of service. State media agency TASS reported that the Kaluga complex, which opened in late 2023 across roughly 130,000 square meters, was built to hold more than 3,800 server racks and anchor the company’s cloud network.
Yandex said none of its workers were harmed, but Kaluga Gov. Vladislav Shapsha reported that nine people were injured in drone strikes affecting regional infrastructure, according to The Moscow Times. Yandex told TASS that certain artificial intelligence chatbot features went offline and warned that its smart home devices could face interruptions.
“Our teams are working day and night to keep services running and help those affected by the incident,” Yandex said in a statement. “Right now this is our most important task, but unfortunately it is not an easy one.”
Kyiv cites retaliatory strategy
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes, describing them as direct retaliation for recent Russian missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian data and telecommunications infrastructure.
“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Zelenskyy said, as reported by Al Jazeera. “They have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding.”
Last month, a Russian drone strike on a commercial center in Kyiv killed four people and damaged server facilities, leaving around 100,000 households without internet service, according to the BBC. Moscow defended its actions by claiming the Ukrainian facilities aided military intelligence, while Ukrainian authorities accused Russia of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure ahead of winter.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry stated that damaging Russian digital facilities could force Moscow to reassign resources to technical repairs. Beyond the data centers, Ukrainian officials said recent long-range drone missions struck Russian missile production plants in the Tver and Nizhny Novgorod regions, as well as an oil refinery operated by Lukoil.
What remains unknown
The full extent of the physical wreckage at the Sasovo and Kaluga complexes remains unclear, and Yandex stated that it is “very difficult to predict” when the disabled modules will return to normal operation. It also remains unknown whether Russian commercial networks will shift server workloads to alternative domestic sites or if the loss of supercomputer access will permanently set back the company’s artificial intelligence development programs.
