Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers disrupt daily life and raise legal questions
Ukrainian drone strikes on three Yandex data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir have knocked out cloud services relied on by thousands of businesses and households, delaying e-commerce, digital payments and food-delivery apps across Russia. On Wednesday Ukrainian drones also targeted a major Sberbank data center in the Saratov region, though a senior executive said operations were unaffected. The strikes are part of Kyiv's effort to disrupt Russian military planning and communications, and are meant as a message: Moscow has repeatedly bombed Ukrainian digital infrastructure, and, as one senior official put it anonymously, "two can play this game."
Beyond the immediate disruption, the attacks point to a new frontline in modern war — the compute infrastructure that powers both economies and armies, much as power plants do. Rebuilding in Russia will be expensive and slow, researcher Oleg Shakirov said, because the required hardware must largely be imported amid high global demand and Western sanctions. With two data centers still offline, the true scale of the damage remains unclear.
The strikes also raise contested questions under international humanitarian law. Joseph Jarnacki of the Royal United Services Institute said they likely breach it and warned of dangerous consequences as populations increasingly depend on digital services. Under the Geneva Conventions, legal expert Kubo Mačák explained, a data center qualifies as a military objective only if it makes an effective contribution to military operations and destroying it offers a definite military advantage — a standard hosting propaganda bot farms would not meet. Zelenskyy claimed the strikes reduced pro-Russian and far-right bot activity on X, but independent researchers found no evidence of any disrupted disinformation campaign. Data centers have already been hit in other conflicts, including AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain during this year's U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, and a senior NATO official said the alliance now treats its own data centers as potential targets: "We would get it in a fight."
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