Seems like a mistake to stagger these hits, doing both in the same hour could have taken out backups before they had a chance to replicate elsewhere.
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
Isn't it difficult to get access to Chinese clouds without having legal entities registered in China?
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Russia isn't a Western Democracy.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.