Ukraine’s drone strikes spur hasty Russian plans for underground data centers

Putin’s decree also allows a special Russian government commission to authorize use of foreign data centers in consultation with Russia’s Federal Security Service. That marks a notable policy change because Putin and the Russian parliament previously enacted Russia’s “Sovereign Internet Law,” which has blocked Russian companies from using cloud computing infrastructure outside Russia’s borders.

Russia’s push for a sovereign and increasingly closed Internet has resulted in a highly centralized system under a few Russian tech companies like Yandex. That hyper-centralized system has now proven vulnerable during wartime, as Ukrainian drone strikes on key Russian data centers created widespread disruptions for popular payment and digital banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, and ride-hailing and food delivery apps, among others.

Yandex has also been forced to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the AI data centers where they were originally housed, Meduza reported.

By comparison, Ukraine’s decentralized digital services have proven much more resilient despite years of Russian drone and missile attacks, especially as the government has taken more steps to disperse crucial energy and telecommunications nodes and bury more supporting infrastructure underground.

A big boost came from US tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, which helped Ukraine migrate government resources and other crucial digital services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainian government has also used SpaceX’s Starlink satellite terminals—paid for by the United States and European countries such as Poland and Germany—as a backup communications system.