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Why Ukrainian strikes on data centers are a real problem for Russia — and beyond
Ukraine’s strikes on data centers inside Russia aimed to disrupt military planning and communication services. There were also reports of another kind of disruption: to customers waiting for their dinner from food-delivery apps.
Kyiv’s drone strikes on three Yandex data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir saw delays and interruptions for thousands of businesses and households that rely on Yandex’s cloud infrastructure, including e-commerce, digital payment platforms and apps of food delivery and car services. Ukrainian drones on Wednesday targeted a major Sberbank data center in Russia’s Saratov region, though a senior company executive said it hadn’t affected operations.
After the strikes on Russian data centers, Kyiv noted that Moscow has already repeatedly targeted its digital infrastructure. “Ukrainians wanted to show Russians that two can play this game,” a senior official familiar with the operation told POLITICO, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The attacks and counter-attacks point to a new frontline in war: the infrastructure powering the digital economy.
The attacks on the buildings that supply compute power are akin to striking a power plant supplying the electricity, heating and fuel that both militaries and civilians depend on. It may weaken an enemy’s war effort but can also bring everyday life to a standstill.
Experts say the cost of rebuilding in Russia will be particularly high as the centers require scarce materials that must be imported. “Obtaining a large amount of equipment to replace what was destroyed is not going to be easy,” said Oleg Shakirov, a cyber policy and international security researcher, noting that most hardware needs to be imported and that is complicated by high global demand and sanctions on Russia.
“To be honest, no one really knows what’s the actual damage. Since two data centers are still offline, we can assume that it’s significant,” said Shakirov.
Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, warned that normalizing strikes to data centers could have a new set of dangerous consequences.
“These strikes likely breach International Humanitarian Law and it’s a big risk when global populations increasingly rely on digital services,” he told POLITICO.
When servers become targets
Data centers have entered the crosshairs of other recent armed conflicts. During the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran earlier this year, drone strikes hit three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Since data centers can serve civilian and military purposes simultaneously, the legal status of targeting them is far from straightforward.
Kubo Mačák, an expert on international humanitarian law, said a data center must meet two conditions to qualify as a military objective under the Geneva Conventions: it must make an effective contribution to military operations and destroying it must offer a “definite military advantage.”
“If you know that they are storing military intelligence or that they’re using the data center to power military artificial intelligence tools,” Mačák said, there could be grounds to consider it a military objective.
Following the most recent strikes of the Yandex data centers, users on social media platform X reported a sudden drop in automated bot activity, including from accounts associated with pro-Russian, pro-Trump and Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) narratives.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seized on the reports to boast that the strikes had made social media less toxic, even as independent researchers and national research institutes found no evidence they specifically disrupted any Russian disinformation campaigns.
Mačák said that even if a data center is being used to “let’s say, run some trolls or these bot farms to interfere with elections abroad … that would not be sufficient.” In other words, hosting propaganda bots does not, by itself, make a data center a lawful military target.
The dual-use quandary has often focused on the targeting of energy infrastructure, which has been frequent in the Russia-Ukraine war. On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries, blaming the attacks for rising fuel prices. He has since called for both sides to halt attacks on energy infrastructure, although the existence of any ceasefire agreement remains disputed.
As data centers become increasingly central to national economies, they will become more consequential targets. A senior NATO official granted anonymity to discuss the matter told POLITICO that data centers are already considered potential targets and that the alliance is factoring their vulnerability into its planning.
NATO allies recognize that their data centers could come under attack in a conflict, the official said: “We would get it in a fight.”
Veronika Melkozerova in Kyiv contributed to this report.
