Kyiv’s long-range drone operators have gone high-tech: in the past few days, Ukrainian drones attacked three massive data centres belonging to Yandex, Russia’s internet services giant. For a while, it became almost impossible to order a taxi, listen to music, open an email or transfer money in Russia. Yandex’s ubiquitous electronic payments app went dark and even one of the country’s biggest online dating services briefly went sideways.
Outside Russia, an eager and hyperbolic online world initially assumed that another Russian internet service had also gone down. Charts showing a precipitous drop in Russian bot activity provoked instant celebrations over the assumed death of Russia’s corrosive online disinformation campaigns. In the wake of the attacks, German observers of online activity claimed that propaganda supporting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party plummeted; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday that, ‘it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.’ Western public figures subjected to online harassment they attribute to Russia heaved a sigh of relief.
The festivities were premature. Cloudflare Radar, a real-time internet traffic monitor, indeed showed that bot traffic from Yandex’s network cratered following the attacks. But the collapse in bot activity reflected a slowdown in web crawling, the automated indexing of web pages that makes online searching more accurate. We have come to see bots as malicious actors; in truth, a bot is a piece of software designed to carry out any number of autonomous tasks. Yandex claims its servers do not host disinformation campaigns. Russia’s digital subterfuge is diffuse, international, covert and resilient.
The Ukrainian attacks are important for other reasons. First, Kyiv has once again demonstrated that its long-range drones can evade air defences and reach deep into Russia. The Yandex data centres were in regions adjacent to Moscow, hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
The Russian military has taken notice but can’t deliver adequate countermeasures. Instead, a Russian presidential decree now requires private sector enterprises critical to national security to provide their own anti-drone defence capability. Companies that fail to comply risk being placed under temporary administration; critics say this threat makes the security requirement look more like a veiled nationalisation play. Just how companies are meant to defend themselves against drone attacks is another question. Measures can include covering buildings in anti-drone netting or buying weapons to shoot at drones as they approach. Earlier this year, before the presidential edict, the Russian parliament passed a law allowing bank employees to shoot drones out of the sky.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the strikes continue a category-bending expansion of Ukrainian targeting. Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries make strategic military sense; energy exports help fuel Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The drone campaigns against warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace, represented a twist in targeting. Ukraine claimed that Wildberries was selling equipment to the Russian army. The more likely reason for targeting the consumer-facing depots was to bring the war home to the average Russian. At the outset of the full-scale invasion, now almost five years ago, Putin promised that the war would not change how ordinary Russians live. But most ordinary Russians are regular Wildberries customers, for everything from pet food to flat-screen televisions. Many ordinary Russians run small businesses on Wildberries’ platform.
The attack on data centres – Ukraine has also hit a Sberbank data centre – is another step in this direction. Russia had already attacked Ukrainian data centres, so Ukraine’s response could be seen simply as like-for-like revenge. But the assaults advance and expand the definition of critical national infrastructure. Yandex, a 1997 Russian start-up that became a multi-billion-dollar behemoth, is so big that thousands of companies run their online presence on their facilities, much as companies use Amazon Web Services. Websites brought down by the Ukrainian attacks included portals for a national supermarket chain and Pulkovo Airport in St Petersburg. Russian consumers panicked as their online Yandex Pay accounts disappeared. The disruption also reached Yandex apps in countries like Serbia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Dutch-registered Yandex sold its Russian operations to Kremlin-friendly owners in 2024 for $5.2 billion, a sum reflecting the punitive 50 per cent discount imposed on the value of companies from ‘unfriendly’ countries as defined by the Kremlin. Ironically, one of the other companies that use Yandex web services is Vkusno i Tochka (Tasty and That’s It), as McDonald’s former Russian restaurants are now awkwardly known, following the chain’s exit from the country.
Yandex is slowly restoring services, though international sanctions on Russia will make it difficult to import some of the high-tech equipment required for repairs. In the meantime, the Russian government is reportedly helping shift Yandex traffic to other data centres.
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