The Datacenter War

Russia and Ukraine have moved on to a new target set in their long-range strike campaigns: datacenters. It appears that Russia started this a few weeks ago, but now Ukraine has reciprocated with strikes on at least two Yandex facilities.

I suppose western datacenter haters are loving these images, and are actively fantasizing about doing this to our own facilities.

But Russian commentators have pointed out that this may be a bad move for Russia. This is Artjockey, via ChrisO:

Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war—and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.

Immediately after the war began, Amazon allocated 10 petabytes of free cloud storage to Kyiv; data from registries, ministries, universities, and schools was migrated there, ensuring their operations never ceased.

Subsequently, Microsoft and European data centres also provided assistance to Ukraine. The protection of digital infrastructure was spearheaded by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, led by Mykhailo Fedorov — the very same person who, not long ago, briefly held the post of Minister of Defence. Consequently, since 2022, Ukrainian government services have either operated entirely from overseas cloud platforms or maintained redundant infrastructure there, allowing for an immediate switchover following an attack on the primary systems.

Plus, Ukraine relies more on small servers than the enormous ones Russia's Yandex has constructed. And:

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. Due to restrictions imposed by Federal Laws No. 152-FZ and No. 187-FZ, it is virtually impossible to replicate Russian IT infrastructure in places like Belarus or Kazakhstan — though, in any case, the necessary capacity simply isn't there.

So this little datacenter war is likely to hurt Russians much more than Ukrainians, and Russians with any knowledge of the issue already understand this. Which makes one wonder once again about the quality of decision-making in the Kremlin.