Over the past week, Ukraine attacked some of Yandex's biggest data centers, disrupting the operations of various Russian national applications and metropolitan digital services. Russia, which has itself targeted Ukrainian data centers in recent weeks.

Worse yet for Russia, its online disinformation activities appear disrupted by these attacks. Although not as catastrophic as some initial reports claimed, a new report from Cloudflare claims that the bot traffic merely migrated to other hosts.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the war has moved through several phases. From the pushback of Russian forces in 2022, to the rapid deployment of FPV drones in 2023, to the mid-range drone strike campaigns both sides have focused on since 2025. Over that time, the targets have changed. Ukrainian supporters published "bingo cards," with various refineries and warehouses listed, often superimposing fire graphics to showcase when they'd been damaged or destroyed.

There are tens of major targets across different industries and networks; there are only a handful of Yandex data centers. Although there is a more expansive list of data centers from other providers that support the Yandex cloud network, most are small, only offering a few megawatts of compute capacity.

Considering that targeting just three of Yandex's facilities brought several key digital services such as shopping and taxi apps to their knees in major Russian cities, it may not take much for Ukraine to severely hamper the modern digital elements of Russia's economy and society at large.

While Ukraine isn't immune to similar attempts at disruption, its already-hardened networks and expansive list of allies make it far more resilient.

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