Ukraine Seeks To Bomb Russia Back to the Analog Age

First, Ukrainians bombed Russia’s oil refineries, causing hours-long gas lines. Then, they burned warehouses of ‘Russia’s Amazon,’ hitting e-commerce with an ax. Now, they are bombing the data centers of Yandex, ‘Russia’s Google.’Today, tens of millions of Russians are encountering problems using ATMs, sending emails, making payments, hailing taxis, navigating city streets, ordering pizza, getting a date, or accessing computer files on the cloud.Ukraine has “every capability to drive Russia back into the analog era,” posts Russian-German sociologist Nikolay Mitrokhin. Largely concentrated about Moscow, 95 percent of Russia’s data centers are within range of Ukrainian drones.Bombing Russia back to Gen Z’s equivalent of the Stone Age is the goal of Ukraine’s war strategists. They want to bring the war home to Russia’s 40-million member middle class, potentially a politically crucial force. Russia, with its state-controlled, monopoly-style economy, now finds that market concentration is an Achilles heel. Largely invisible outside the former Soviet Union, Yandex Search is the largest search engine in Russia, enjoying an estimated 72 percent market share. Yandex Go is the nation’s largest food delivery and taxi hailing service.Aware of the vulnerability of this Internet architecture, Ukraine’s drone strategists over the last week hit and severely damaged Yandex’s three main data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir.“Yandex has lost “half or more of its capacity” and “cannot continue operating with the same functionality,” former head of Yandex in Ukraine Serhiy Petrenko, told Radio Free Europe’s Current Time program. He said that “around 80 percent of Russia’s data centers are located in Moscow and the surrounding Moscow region.” In Russia, a country where war damage is usually glossed over or censored outright, this news can’t be suppressed.Yandex faced an unprecedented attack,” Russia Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayevtold the Duma on Monday. “The Defense Ministry is working on the issue of protecting these facilities.”Looking ahead, Yandex told its millions of users: “Our teams are working day and night to do everything possible to keep services running and to help those affected by the incident … it is very difficult to say when the equipment at the data centers will be back up and running.”Yandex Cloud, Yandex Pay, and Yandex 360, a software suite, are waiving fees for the rest of this month. Yandex Cloud has more than 64,000 corporate clients, including Russian Railways, major banks and national supermarket chains. Two days of trading this week wiped almost $1 billion off the company’s valuation on the Moscow Exchange, about 5.4 percent of the pre-bombing value.“Following the recent drone attacks on our data centers, our engineers had to completely rebuild the infrastructure,” Yandex Pay fintech director Dima Pirogov said Monday in a message asking customers to be patient. “Our service was particularly hard hit, and recovery is taking longer.”In response, Ukrainian drone and missile maker Fire Point took a verbal jab at the frozen Russian IT company: “Dima, have you tried turning it off and on again?” Fire Point claims that on Friday its one-way drones largely destroyed Yandex’ largest data center, in Kaluga.Analysts interviewed by Moscow’s leading business news site, Kommersant, estimated that it will take six months for Yandex to rebuild what was lost last week. Much of the equipment is Western and subject to export bans due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After a Dutch holding company was forced to sell the Russian business of Yandex in 2024, control passed to a group of Putin insiders, exile publication Novaya Gazeta Europe reported last month.In modern warfare, data centers increasingly are easy targets. Last March, Iran carried out a wave of strikes on U.S.-owned data centers in the Persian Gulf. Two Amazon facilities were hit, one in Bahrain, the other in the United Arab Emirates. In August, the Brookings Institution warned that data centers represent “strategic national capability,” and that they are “costly to conceal and often physically vulnerable.”Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he ordered the strikes on Russia data centers as “our‘ tit-for-tat response” to Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian data centers last month. He told reporters: “We always respond in kind. Regarding data centers, as you all know, they have been and still are striking our data centers.”Russia’s Defense Ministry had grandly labelled its campaign as “Digital Detox.” The Ministry said it was striking data centers because they “process and transmit intelligence data for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”However, these bombings had a minimal impact on the average Ukrainian, or on Ukraine’s war effort. With hundreds of competing internet providers in the Ukrainian market, traffic switches easily from one provider to another.“Will the Internet disappear in Ukraine? Of course not” Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksandr Fediienko posted online. “The infrastructure will be restructured, and alternative sites will be established.” In addition to further decentralization, officials say, some sites are to be moved underground.In contrast, in the former Soviet empire many roads still lead to Moscow. Users of Yandex Go, the taxi hailing app, are reporting widespread outages in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

Ukraine Seeks To Bomb Russia Back to the Analog Age

Ukraine Seeks To Bomb Russia Back to the Analog Age

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