Ukraine Destroyed Massive Ukraine Knocked Out Russia’s Data Centers. The Fallout Almost Resulted in Societal Collapse.

Have you noticed that the volume of images your Mom reposts from her quasi-nostalgic Facebook groups has slowed down recently? Have you found the political blogs and forums you peruse have become calmer and more level-headed? Are you surprised to find that the comments beneath the article about this past weekend’s football game have actually been about...football?

There might be a reason for that. It’s one of the consequences of the counterattacks by Ukrainian forces in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.

“When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12th via video. Zelenskyy was referring to Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes, which followed a September assault by Russian forces on Ukrainian data centers—part of a broader Russian campaign against the country’s information infrastructure that has also targeted everything from hospitals to animal shelters).

The “Yandex” Zelenskyy referenced in his statement is Яндекс, a nearly 30-year-old company in Russia that began life as a search engine, but has since expanded into nearly every facet of Russian digital life, from streaming and shopping to food delivery and ride shares. Yandex currently has a 70.33% market share in the Russian Federation, trouncing Google’s mere 28.1% in the country. Today, in no small part thanks to Russia’s “суверенном интернете” or “Sovereign Internet” law, and the recent sale of Yandex from its Dutch parent company to a consortium of Russian business figures (including energy-sector behemoth Lukoil), the tech giant has become an indispensable part of Russia’s digital economy.

The debilitating early October attacks on three of Yandex’s data centers demonstrated just how important this single company is to Russia’s daily life. It also highlights how ultimately vulnerable a country becomes when it clings to the strongman urge towards protectionism and economic nationalism.

“A lot of people,” Zelenskyy continued in his statement to the Warsaw Security Forum, “a lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.

“If they disappeared when Yandex went offline,” he said, “this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems.”

The suggestion that Russia uses automated bots and “troll farms” as part of a digital disinformation campaign is nothing new. For more than a decade, it’s been discussed as a concerted effort to sow discord that one Clemson University report described as a digital version of the Soviet “Operation Infektion.” What made Zelenskyy’s comments stand out was the idea that these automated, non-corporeal combatants in the information war could actually be taken out with the same lethal force used to snuff out soldiers on the battlefield.

In the aftermath of those comments, outlets like The Independent and Gizmodo were quick to note that while automated traffic from Yandex was undeniably drastically down after the attacks (a 94% decrease, per Gizmodo), “automated traffic is a huge umbrella that includes everything from search crawlers to uptime-monitoring tools.” As such, this 94% decrease in Russian-based automated traffic didn’t inherently mean a 94% decrease in the number of social media usernames with way too many numbers at the end.

Zelenskyy wasn’t necessarily spreading his own misinformation so much as highlighting the consequence of the Yandex strikes most likely to appeal to the European audience listening. For better or worse, those in attendance might feel the blight of Russian bots is more relevant to their interests than the plight of the real people on the ground in Russia or Ukraine.

Yet, as the independent publication The Moscow Times noted, the bots and troll farms represent only a small sliver of the seismic impact these Yandex strikes have had. As Yandex’s cloud computing services are integral to an array of business throughout eastern Europe, the destruction of these data centers has caused Yandex-based apps to become inaccessible not just in Russia, but in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as well. Most frighteningly for those just trying to survive through the day-to-day in Russia’s digital economy, the crucial digital wallet app Yandex Pay shut down, causing such a panic that the CEO of Yandex’s FinTech Division had to put out a statement that said, “All your money is safe.”

Ultimately, ArsTechnica cited a Russian blogger under the handle Artjockey who summarized what this attack truly exposed about the vulnerability of Russia’s digital operations:

“In its pursuit of a ‘sovereign Internet,’ the government has effectively blocked Russian companies from using infrastructure even in friendly nations, while ‘unfriendly’ countries have blocked access via sanctions anyway.”

Russia’s data center attacks on Ukraine dealt far less damage because Ukraine had a more decentralized digital landscape, and opened themselves up to the world, allowing businesses like Microsoft and Amazon to provide cloud services to the beleaguered nation. Meanwhile, when Russia tried to fortify its virtual world from any foreign interference, it ultimately left its own people vulnerable to a catastrophic digital drought.