3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit
status.yandex.cloud
status.yandex.cloud
For the entire September, Russia conducted 10+ strikes on all key telecom, and internet provider data centers in Ukraine.
Now it is just a return
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
Turns out digital sovereignty is a bad idea in terms of state security.
Don't put all eggs into one basket they told ya!
I mean, if Russia is striking datacenters in London/Dublin/Frakfurt/Paris/Amsterdam, then we've got really big problems.
And is the US even allied to Europe, or is Europe going it on their own? They might do better to move to datacenters in China at that point.
Barring that kind of a situation, moving European data back to Europe makes the most sense.
Putting datacenters in the Baltic states might not make the most sense, tho.
I get that we have rules of warfare that nations (sorta, mostly, at least when it suits them) agree on, but if the choices are between ceasing to exist and doing something the rules of war prohibit, I'd choose the latter every time. Maybe I wouldn't be able to live with myself afterward, but that's likely a small price to pay when balanced against the rest of my people who'd otherwise be dead or under the oppressive regime of an occupying force.
In this scheme of things "targeting data centers" doesn't trigger my concern-o-meter at all.
(On the other side of this, the Russian government is already reprehensible for starting this war, but any time they break the rules of warfare, that's an additional black mark on their reputation. They don't have to do any of this; they choose to, for Putin's own selfish, war-mongering reasons.)
You might want to dig a little deeper than CNN
Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/
Canada-Ukraine Foundation - Canadian NGO, organizes winter aid for civilians https://www.cufoundation.ca/
Ukrainian World Congress https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy
United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/
Blue/Yellow - Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military https://blue-yellow.lt/en/
Stopify - Latvian initiative, donations collected via Ziedot.lv https://stopify.org.ua/
Weapons to Ukraine - Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en
Help99 - from Estonia's LIFT99 startup hub, convoys refitted trucks and drones to the front https://www.help99.co/donate
Aktion Deutschland Hilft - German humanitarian aid https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/
Thanks to everyone who suggested additions. Please keep adding foundations from your country in the comments.
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
In my eyes one of their highpoints which demonstrates their trustworthiness is the ~20 million dollars payment they received this year by undisclosed European (I think it was European) entity (government or private donors maybe)
Including KOLO dispersing medical equipment that I donated, and I can vouch that they are effective and very efficient.
And this group: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Also, Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en and 69th Sniffing Brigade https://www.help99.co/donate is doing awesome work.
Glory to the Heroes!
Hermit life was the best decision I ever made. Never going back.
Defense against aggressive totalitarianism is much more important than fight against corruption. And there is also the fact that Russian influence is the main reason for corruption in Ukraine..
Edit: thanks for answers, this helps.
And, most importantly, you weren’t sent to the slaughterhouse and are still alive, thanks to your choice.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
(This is incomplete, I think there is a fourth or a fifth wave, probably since about summer 2026.)
So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.
> On the first anniversary of the invasion, rallies took place in the main cities where Russian exiles settled, including Tbilisi, Vilnius, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and London, with turnout in the hundreds. In Yerevan, protesters burned a picture of Putin.
> In November 2024, at least a thousand people marched through central Berlin behind Navalnaya, Yashin and Kara-Murza, with parallel rallies in cities including Prague, Vilnius, Yerevan, Lisbon and San Francisco.
> Another Berlin march followed in 2025, after the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.
And not just EU/US but moreso in other countries, where the migration wave was much bigger, eg Georgia and Armenia; after those protests many Russians were banned from entering Georgia after a visa run, yet others continued protesting anyway. Just google it for christ sake?
Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Anyway, at this point your comments in this thread are pure ragebait and not worth spending time replying to.
What are you talking about? Just look at the amount of humanitarian visas getting by Russians. We like literally talking about hundreds per country on average (not hundreds of thousands, HUNDREDS). So participation in mass protests is like the fastest way to be deported back in Russia and get 8 years in jail.
it really never was. apart from a few one-off examples they have nothing if interest and quality.
very valuable, very high tech.
for nginx/intelij - you can find a few good examples in any country on earth.
does not make the country good in tech.
Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good
Ordinary Russians think the war's bad too. Only difference is you and I can say that without getting 15 years in a (very harsh) prison.
Maybe Russians outside Russia.
Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
Literally no one thinks that. Look at the last election in Russia.
There were like 10 pro-Putin pro-war parties and one pro-Putin maybe-we-a-lil-bit-try-to-stop-the-war joke party. And that last party was banned from participating because of copyright infringement (they used fonts from Microsoft).
That’s not surrender because Russia started this invasion without provocation. It wasn’t under attack and Ukraine hadn’t joined NATO.
Russia had no reason to invade except as a show of force.
If Putin suddenly declared he’d met his objectives and withdrew who’s to say otherwise?
1. there needs to be a buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine; it needs to come from both countries. There are plenty of oblasts in Ukraine that are annihilated hellscapes where demographically it's possible that Ukraine may be happy(ish) to shed those populations since they're broadly prorussia(ish). Similarly there are regions of Russia that should be set aside as "buffer zone". Ukraine would be free to chose which regions are set aside for this buffer zone; the remaining depth of the zone will be "contributed" by Russia.
2. This buffer needs to be rebuilt by the west since they're the ones who "caused all the damage" -- a neutral 3rd party should oversee that rebuilding; obviously western countries won't want to just pour money into Oligarch owned companies -- instead the buffer region should be managed by some set of neutral countries such as Ireland, Indonesia, and India. This strip of land would describe the whole Russian / Ukrainian border and be at its narrowest 20 miles wide.
3. This region will eventually (in 40-60 years) have a plebiscite to allow it to rejoin russia or join Belarus, or remain independent.
4. So long as this land and Belarus remains free of Russian or Ukranian armies or military personnel Ukraine may not join nato. Ukraine will be free to petition to join nato, but so long as Belarus and the border zone are free of Russian or Ukranian forces nato will not allow Ukraine to join nato (IE no formal article 5 protections of Ukraine from nato)
5. Belarus will have sanctions lifted if they have normal elections.
6. This new zone will be under "russkiy mir" in that this zone will be governed by the written legal system as modeled by the russian legal system; though instead of the ultimate power (the "roof") being russian, it will instead be indigenous.
7. taxes would be collected and disbursed to Russia and Ukraine and Belarus in some proportion of the land "contributed" by each party to this buffer zone.
So -- in this way, the Russians can be told "they won" even though in practice this gives Russia no control over Ukraine proper. They can be told "NATO has been made to pay!" and "All of this is under Russian Law" but at the same time it helps squeeze Russian control out of Minsk as well. The goal is to allow Russians to be Russia without being under the thumb of Moscow.
Anyhow, sorry for the fan fiction...
Maybe you can trick our naive western friends, but not me.
Being an indifferent somnambula is not the same as being against war.
Who do you think is killing Ukrainians?
It's not Putin himself, and it's not some kind of professional army.
Those are ordinary Russians who decided to join the occupational army, and who are launching drones and rockets at Ukraine every day.
Yabloko is the sole officially registered party to openly oppose the Russian war in Ukraine, openly calling "for peace and freedom". The party planned to partake in the 2026 Russian legislative election under their anti-war slogan.[29][30] However, in August 2026, the party was barred from running by the Supreme Court of Russia due to a lawsuit by Rodina.
Since then I think they simplified the system and just forge the results outright.
tl;dr Other parties are Putin-like, and if/when a genuine alternative emerges, Putin deals with them ruthlessly. Example: Navalny was the charismatic leader of a small but popular rival party with anti-corruption policies. He was initially delegitimised (not allowed to partake in the 2018 elections due to [likely fake] charges of embezzlement), then poisoned (nearly died), then imprisoned, and then killed while in prison.
Consider the terrifying message that sends to would-be political rivals...
Estimate range is big because lots of civilians died in cities that ended up occupied.
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/10/06/i-m-used-to-walking-...
"innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good".
Estimations for how many civilians Russians killed in Chechnya range from 45,000 to 80,000.
From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to December 2025, 14,999 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 40,601 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU).
The point is to inflict economic losses on Yandex and the companies using those datacenters, which hits the elite around Putin. That is the fault line to try to establish and then exploit/widen.
You could face a 15-year prison sentence for calling for peace on social media, or you could be forcibly conscripted.
Furthermore, rallies are equally persecuted. All rallies are outlawed due to the COVID restrictions, and these restrictions have never been lifted.
So far, all the West has done is target ordinary, poor Russians instead of oligarchs and the Tsar himself.
Their quality of life has plummeted, but would you risk your life to speak out against this?
Westerners are only brave in the comments. Come to Russia and show us how it's done. A country where everyone with power or guns serves the Tsar almost directly. Including the courts, the police and the army.
You don't f*cking understand what has happened to the country. It's become a dictatorship.
Oh, we westerners know...
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
You could, of course, repurpose a data-center to run a bunch of emulators and have some h/w to plug in a bunch of SIM cards, but... why? It probably won't be very cost-efficient, and you need some bespoke h/w and virtualization solution to do it...
The bot traffic the news about bombing data-centers refers to is the crawler type. They collect information and index it for later searches, they don't interact with social media.
NB. valid and high value targets are not the same. Valid means it furthers some military goals while minimizing civilian impact. High-value means that it has a potential to alter opponent's strategy.
I'm on the fence about whether data-centers are valid targets. But, even if they aren't, it's not a terrible thing to do to bomb them, as it will not have any severe adverse effects on the civilian population. Of course, in the context of a war where there are much worse things to bomb. But the parent was making a comment about data-centers being high-value targets, and I don't see a way to justify that. It probably doesn't even factor into the calculations of the military strategists.
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
https://www.decommsystems.com/resources/what-goes-into-an-il...
Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.
Ukraine has a very targeted response but notably tries to minimise civilian casualties
- "Just make them wage some wars, they'll bury it themselves".
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-hits-russia...
Musk and Google.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Hint: It is impossible to cause a Kessler Syndrome at Starlink orbital heights.
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
Unless you're talking about an adversary who has ~no launch capability then the person trying to put the data center out of reach is always going to be massively disadvantaged in terms of the physics.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?
Surely it isn't cheap, but given the price of the hardware, does it add substantially to the total cost of a datacenter?
If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.
As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)
As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.
He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.
Different problem.
Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.
However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.
We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.
You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.
He may have been a wrong'un before that, but he was definitely already doing a confidence trick by that point.
>Internet Connectivity for AS200350 (YandexCloud)
https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/asn/200350?from=1791331...
Time favours Ukraine. Absent a really shocking reversal in all western aid, they're surviving and advancing. Russia, meanwhile, is incurring deep structural damage to its economy that shows up already as huge labour shortages, high inflation, and high interest rates, along with war-driven destruction of infrastructure. It's steadily marching to a point where economic collapse, internal unrest, or both, demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine.
Putin either doesn't know or doesn't care that they're not winning, and any replacement for Putin will be Putin*2, so it'll take something societally catastrophic to force the issue, which becomes more likely every day. As long as Ukraine just hangs on, they win by not losing.
I don't know that it can end from anything short of that.
I think that we’re heading to the future that nobody expected and predicted. Imagine 9/11 scale attack with locally assembled drones that came in regular shipping container. I expect something like to happen in next 5-10 years somewhere in the world.
I think that we’re heading to much more decentralized and fortified _everything_.
https://www.pingdom.com/blog/the-worlds-most-super-designed-...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
We should never celebrate hitting civilian infrastructure. Russia right now is bombing bridges in Kyiv, it's awful.
All wars end with diplomacy or when one side is dead or completely out of resources
Example quote from Azure documentation:
> Azure Government is used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) entities to deploy a broad range of workloads and solutions.
Calling such a DC a civilian target is essentialy incorrect now, and has been for years.
its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military
US-Directed Strikes on Russian AI & Energy Centers As False US Diplomacy Floated - The New Atlas
shouldn't these be underground? would it even matter if they were, ukraine would just make mole drones..
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
A mystery really...
Can we use it to judge which accounts were bots?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/russ...
I'll be curious to see how it affects the mood around HN.
EDIT: How curious - the article above removed all mention of disinformation - but you can still see it in the URL....
You got a source for that?
The general decency of condemning any/all types destruction won't apply here.