Russian businesses had been preparing for attacks on data centers long before Ukraine began striking them, the BBC Russian Service reported.
Yandex, for example, regularly held drills to shut down systems and reroute traffic. Russian companies are also buying mobile data centers in large numbers. According to the BBC, one supplier is linked to the son of a senior general in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
Demand for mobile data centers has increased since late summer, the BBC reported. Buyers include IT companies and mobile operators, as well as medium-sized and large businesses “that need more computing power than a standard PC.”
Suppliers in Russia include Rostelecom subsidiary RTK-TsOD and Yadro, which is part of X Holding. Boris Korolev, the son of FSB First Deputy Director Sergey Korolev, is a deputy CEO of the holding company.
In 2026, Yadro launched Borey, a containerized data center. According to government procurement records analyzed by the BBC, a unit costs 18 million to 25 million rubles without servers; with computing equipment, the price can reach hundreds of millions of rubles. The units have been on sale for several months.
“The headlines are good for sales — too good, in fact,” an industry source told the BBC.
According to the BBC’s sources, people in the industry had been saying since late summer that attacks on Russian data centers were inevitable. Two-thirds of the country’s data centers are concentrated in the Moscow region and St. Petersburg. On October 6, just a couple of days before the first attack on Yandex, Deputy Digital Development Minister Yevgeny Filatov urged companies to move computing capacity “somewhere beyond the Urals, where, fortunately, the strikes haven’t reached yet.”
From October 8 to 11, Ukraine attacked three of Yandex’s six data centers: in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, Kaluga, and Vladimir. The strikes disrupted both Yandex’s own services and those of other companies.
The data centers that came under attack housed all three of Yandex’s supercomputers: “Chervonenkis,” “Lyapunov,” and “Galushkin.” As of the evening of October 11, the extent of any damage to them was unknown. According to Kommersant, replacing damaged equipment could take about six months.
The younger Korolev became a deputy CEO of X Holding in 2023, when he was 27. That same year, Garda, a company in which he held a 20% stake, acquired a stake in the holding company following the death of its founder and owner, Anton Cherepennikov.
Whether the younger Korolev retained his stake is unknown, as the company’s financial reports are not public. Journalist Andrey Zakharov believes the ultimate beneficiary of Boris Korolev’s assets is his father, who had previously registered property worth hundreds of millions of rubles in his son’s name.
In addition to data centers, X Holding supplies equipment for internet traffic filtering systems known as TSPU. Spending on blocking and filtering traffic continues to rise: The new draft budget would allocate 60 billion rubles for these purposes over the next three years — twice the amount previously planned. It is unknown how much of this money will go to X Holding.
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