Information Warfare — 2026-10-11

Ukraine Strikes Yandex Data Centers in Kaluga and Ryazan for Second Straight Day Disrupting Russian Digital Services

BLUFUkraine's consecutive strikes on Yandex facilities hosting AI supercomputers and critical service infrastructure signal an escalatory targeting shift, and another Russian data center is likely to be struck by the end of October.

Yandex said in a statement that a drone attack overnight into October 9 left several modules at its Kaluga data center "completely disabled," with no employee casualties and some services facing disruption 123. Kaluga Governor Vladislav Shapsha reported nine people injured and infrastructure damaged but did not mention Yandex, per The Moscow Times and Meduza 23. The previous night, drones struck the Sasovo data center in Ryazan region, causing a fire and full shutdown, according to Meduza 2. The Moscow Times reported that the site houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model 3. Meduza reported outages at Avito, Ivi, Megafon, Russian Railways and T-Bank 2. Zelensky said Thursday that "we always respond symmetrically" to Russian strikes on Kyiv server facilities 3.

Analysis
Another Russian data center or commercial cloud facility is likely to be publicly reported as struck by Ukrainian drones between October 11 and October 31, 2026. Kyiv calls the strikes symmetric retaliation, and Moscow has shown no sign of halting its own campaign against Ukrainian data centers. The Kaluga hit, following Sasovo, shifts the picture from a one-off demonstration to a sustained campaign against commercial compute, with outages already reaching banking, rail and telecom. Confidence is high, because consecutive nightly strikes, Ukraine's stated intent and consistent outage reporting align, though the damage assessment rests on Yandex alone. The strikes may instead be brief signaling tied to the Kyiv losses, with targeting returning to refineries. A further strike would force operators and regulators to disperse workloads and fund air defense for digital sites.

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