KYIV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian drone strike forced Russian tech giant Yandex to shut down a data center in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow, on Sunday, the third attack on the company’s facilities this week, hours after President Donald Trump said Ukraine should “damn well stop” hitting Russian oil refineries, BBC News and Al Jazeera reported.
“Operations at the data centre have been completely suspended,” Yandex said in a service alert on Telegram, warning that “the remaining resource configuration is considered unstable” and advising users to activate disaster-recovery plans. No one was injured, but several of its services were unavailable, the company said. Ukrainian strikes shut down Yandex’s hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, on Thursday — where two of the three supercomputers used to develop its AI model are housed — and partly knocked out its center in the Kaluga region on Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said later on Sunday that “Ukraine will be ready to stop striking Russian oil refineries if Russia stops striking our energy infrastructure,” adding that “any de-escalation steps must be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees,” the BBC reported. Trump said Saturday it was “time for Ukraine to get a new president” after Zelensky condemned a U.S.-Russian deal to release Russian diesel onto world markets.
Kyiv says it is targeting businesses that feed Moscow’s war revenues. “We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Zelensky said after the Sasovo strike, adding: “You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding,” according to Al Jazeera. Russia has struck several Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications sites over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.
Russian attacks continued through the weekend. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said six people were injured overnight in four districts of the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, and Zelensky said search and rescue work in Zaporizhzhia ended Sunday morning with the death toll from Saturday’s glide-bomb strikes at 23, including four children.
Sources: BBC News, Al Jazeera
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