Ukraine Is Hitting Putin Where His Data Lives
The Bulwark · C · trust 48/100
Strikes on server hubs are exposing Russian vulnerabilities—but U.S. support is suddenly looking less reliable.
Cathy Young October 15 Upgrade to listen 12 minute s 289 27 51 October Surprise: 30% OFF Bulwark+ for a year. Upgrade now. (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) DONALD TRUMP IS BACK to his favorite sport: throwing Ukraine under the bus. Last week, in his latest flareup of Putinophilia, he made an illegal deal to import Russian diesel fuel and unleashed his petulant rage at Volodymyr Zelensky over Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil facilities—which make Ukraine a convenient scapegoat for the spiking fuel prices caused by Trump’s bumbling war in Iran. Now, there are reported disruptions in Ukraine’s access to Starshield, the military-grade, Pentagon-controlled version of Elon Musk’s Starlink communications network. The United States may also have deliberately failed , on at least two occasions, to give Ukraine early warnings about incoming attacks. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ukraine is being stabbed in the back by its supposed ally. As the tart-tongued exiled Russian pundit Alexander Nevzorov put it on his YouTube channel , “Apparently, having figured out that he’s not strong enough to beat Iran, Trump decided to beat Ukraine.”
What makes this fiasco especially infuriating is that it takes place at a moment when the momentum tilts in favor of Ukraine, which has scored some impressive victories recently.
Most notably, while Ukraine may have suspended its strikes on Russian oil facilities to avoid angering Trump, its drones and missiles have been raining fury on a juicy new target: Russian data centers. The disruptions to every aspect of Russia’s digital infrastructure have been huge. And, while this infrastructure obviously supports Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, making it a legitimate target, the damage is inevitably causing a lot of pain to civilians, undermining the Russian war effort on the home front.
So far, Ukraine has struck three major data centers belonging to Yandex, a company sometimes described as “Russia’s Google” but in reality something closer to Google plus Amazon, Uber, PayPal, and iCloud rolled into one. 1 All three facilities—including the two that house Yandex’s three “supercomputers”—were severely damaged; two came to a complete halt, wreaking havoc on servers.
Videos show Russians complaining about being unable to book a cab ride (many were reduced to trying to hail Yandex cabs in the streets), order a meal at a fast-food chain with a Yandex-powered register, make a medical appointment , or use the Yandex Pay service where all their money is stored. In one clip , a Russian woman who runs an online legal services firm says that not long ago, when Ukrainian strikes were taking out warehouses operated by Russian online retailers, she felt safe because her company had no physical products to warehouse. “Now it’s Yandex’s turn, and I see how wrong I was,” she says with wry resignation. Her company relies on Yandex Disk, Russia’s answer to Google Drive.
(In an interesting subplot to this story, there have been many reports that the disabling of Yandex data centers has resulted in a dramatic dropoff of pro-Russian and far-right propaganda, hate, and bot activity on social media. It would have been a great bonus. But alas, these claims—echoed even by Zelensky—seem too good to be true: investigations by the Guardian , France 24 , and other media organizations show that they are based on unsourced or misinterpreted data.)
Yandex is working to restore access, using its still-functioning servers as well as those of other Russian corporations . But restoring the damaged facilities is likely to take months —especially since the company will be operating under sanctions that make it difficult to buy the necessary equipment abroad—and there is no guarantee that Ukraine won’t hit the centers again.
The delicious irony is that Russia’s digital infrastructure is especially vulnerable to attacks like this because of the Kremlin’s determination to control its subjects’ access to online information.
Russian data-localization laws require companies collecting Russian citizens’ personal data to use databases inside the country. Amendments passed last year tightened those requirements.
What’s more, the tendency of Russian business to “supersize it” means that, just as the country’s online retailers favor giant warehouses, its tech companies favor centralized, gigantic data centers. In the new drone-wars environment, these data centers are dinosaur-sized sitting ducks. And so far, they have remained largely unprotected —even after the warehouse strikes made it clear that the Ukrainians have no compunction about targeting facilities that operate primarily in the civilian economy.
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Join Bulwark+ — Save 30% for next year Given such vulnerabilities, one would have thought the Russians would have been careful not to take the war to data centers. But they did—and bragged about it. In late September, Russia carried out a series of drone attacks on Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in and near Kyiv, justifying these strikes on the grounds that the targets “process and transmit intelligence data for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” The Russian Ministry of Defense then posted a snarky meme crowing about a “digital detox”—“on a mandatory basis.” But the “detox” was limited to temporary service disruptions for about 100,000 people. Even if Russia…
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