Ukrainian drones struck Russia's largest data center this week, the fourth such attack in seven days. The strikes hit facilities operated by Yandex and Sberbank, damaging supercomputers used for AI models and knocking two Yandex data centers offline. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attacks as a "symmetrical response" to Russian aggression.
The civilian impact has been significant. Yandex services—email, payments, taxis, and bus apps—have been disrupted across Russia, with some users reporting lost data. Russian logistics and document management systems have also been affected. The attacks follow a pattern seen elsewhere: Iran struck AWS data centers in Dubai in March, and Russia has targeted Ukrainian data centers for months.
Klaudia Klonowska, a researcher on emerging technology and international law, told 404 Media that legal frameworks are still developing. Data centers used purely for military purposes may be lawful targets, but most are dual-use, housing both civilian and military data. She noted that retaliation alone does not make a target lawful, and that civilians often suffer the most from prolonged outages.
Klonowska also raised a broader question: why have militaries been allowed to rely on civilian commercial data centers? France has announced an underground military-only data center near Paris, which may point to a future where military data is separated from civilian infrastructure. Until then, the legal and ethical status of data centers in war remains unresolved.