Ukraine struck and partly disabled a Yandex data center in Russia’s Kaluga region on Friday, the second attack on the Russian technology company’s data centers in two days, Reuters reported. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy confirmed the strike, calling it “our tit-for-tat response.”
“As a result of a drone attack, part of Yandex data center infrastructure in Kaluga was affected. Several data center modules are completely out of service,” Yandex’s press service said, according to the Associated Press. The company warned that some services could be disrupted, said it was assessing the full extent of the damage and said nobody had been injured.
Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said Kyiv used its FP-1 one-way attack drones against what it called Yandex’s biggest data center, according to Reuters.
The Kaluga strike came a day after a Ukrainian attack on Thursday shut down Yandex’s data hub in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region southeast of Moscow. Yandex said in 2021 that Sasovo hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large AI model. The company has declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected. Yandex operates five data centers, and two have now been hit.
Yandex, sometimes called Russia’s Google, is heavily involved in Russia’s AI development. Millions of Russians use its services daily for navigation, music, food orders and other tasks, and many businesses depend on its cloud computing. Yandex said it had struck a deal with other cloud providers so clients can quickly move their data and services. Its shares fell more than 4% on the Moscow exchange.
Maryana Lazaricheva, head of equity research at T-Investments, said Yandex could shift some of the load to its other data centers. “However, if the chain of attacks continues, this possibility vanishes, which could lead to even more severe consequences,” she said.
Both sides have widened drone campaigns against infrastructure this year, and data centers are the newest target. Russia has struck Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv. “We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Zelenskiy said on Thursday. Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground.
Sources
- Reuters, via The Straits Times: Ukraine hits second major tech site, expanding range of targets inside Russia (October 9, 2026)
- Reuters, via CNA: Ukraine expands drone strikes on data centres owned by Russia’s Yandex (October 9, 2026)
- AP, via The Seattle Times: Russian strikes kill 2 in Ukraine as Kyiv struggles to counter escalating Russian attacks (October 9, 2026)