RUSSIA’S DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE ENTERS THE DEEP-STRIKE WAR
After years of attacks on Ukraine’s telecommunications and data infrastructure, the war is beginning to reach Russia’s digital backbone.
The strike on Yandex’s Sasovo data center caused a fire and forced operations at the facility to be suspended. The complex contains tens of thousands of servers and has hosted major computing systems used for cloud services and artificial-intelligence development.
Yandex said its principal consumer services continued operating, but disruptions were reported across a range of Russian websites and online platforms. The attack demonstrated that Russia’s digital infrastructure—just like its refineries, ports and logistics centers—is no longer beyond the reach of the war.
A new DroneBomber map highlights other major facilities across Russia, including the enormous Udomlya data-center complex near the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant and Moscow’s MMTS-9 telecommunications hub. These locations have not been confirmed as struck; the map illustrates how much of Russia’s economy and government now depends on a relatively limited network of major digital facilities.
Udomlya supports cloud computing, equipment hosting, telecommunications, backups and corporate or state data processing. MMTS-9 houses crucial internet-exchange and telecommunications equipment connecting hundreds of networks.
A prolonged failure at one of these facilities would not necessarily switch off the entire Russian internet. However, it could produce widespread disruption: websites becoming unavailable, online ticketing and deliveries failing, payment systems slowing, government portals closing, cloud-based businesses losing access to their data and some mobile or internet services becoming unstable.
For ordinary Russians, this would not look like the electricity disappearing everywhere at once. It would feel like parts of daily digital life suddenly refusing to work—payments, transportation, shopping, communications and essential online services failing unpredictably.
Russia has spent years treating Ukraine’s infrastructure as a battlefield. The strike on Sasovo signals that the battlefield is now expanding beyond fuel and transportation into the digital systems that keep Russia’s modern economy functioning.