Ukraine’s Yandex data-center strikes and Russian attacks: what to know

The two accounts give different counts as information about the damage emerged. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said people might be trapped beneath rubble in Sloviansk.

In Bucha district, part of Kyiv region, Russian attacks set storage facilities at an industrial enterprise on fire. A later account reported no one injured in the Bucha-area strike.

The attacks also reached emergency services elsewhere. Regional officials told Euronews that a Russian drone hit an ambulance in Sumy region, injuring a paramedic and a driver. Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s grid operator, said emergency power cuts were in effect in several regions after Russian shelling.

How did the Yandex strikes affect services and residents?

The attacks on Yandex facilities unfolded over several days. The company said a drone attack seriously damaged its Sasovo data center, in the Ryazan region, between Wednesday, Oct. 7, and Thursday, Oct. 8, and that it shut down the site. On Friday, Oct. 9, Yandex said an attack on its Kaluga data center had put part of the infrastructure out of service, the company said.

Overnight into Sunday, a drone damaged the Yandex data center in Vladimir and the company suspended operations there. Yandex reported no casualties at the facility and said it could not yet estimate how long repairs would take.

The Vladimir attack also affected nearby residents. Two substations serving 5,000 people were switched off. Governor Aleksandr Avdeyev later said 80% of the power supply had been restored and that heating and water had returned to normal. Residents of nearby homes were evacuated, and Avdeyev said residential areas had not been destroyed.

Users reported trouble ordering taxis, logging in and navigating Yandex services in Russian cities and in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia. Yandex operates a major search engine, food-ordering and ride-hailing services. The company says its data centers also support business operations, so the outages affect infrastructure used for ordinary consumer and commercial activity, not just online discussion.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defenses shot down 479 Ukrainian drones overnight into Sunday across 17 regions and annexed Crimea. That figure is the ministry’s account of the interceptions.

What do the traffic figures say about online bots?

An analysis of Cloudflare Radar data found that automated traffic from Yandex’s network was about 94% lower on Sunday than its average in the second half of September, Euronews reported. The measure includes legitimate automated activity, such as search crawlers. It describes a change in network traffic, not a count of political accounts or their operators.

At the Warsaw Security Forum, Zelenskyy said social platforms had become less hostile and attributed the change to fewer bots. His explanation is a claim about online discussion; the traffic comparison measures automated activity from Yandex’s network without identifying its purpose.

Zelenskyy described Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers. Separately, Russia has said it targets military-related sites, CBS News reported in coverage of Russian strikes on Kyiv. Yandex says its facilities support consumer services and business operations. The civilian impacts are clear: outages can affect daily services, while damage to nearby infrastructure can interrupt power, heating and water.

What is the status of the proposed energy ceasefire?

The dispute over infrastructure attacks also continues in the energy sector. U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire, but did not detail its terms, The Associated Press reported.

On Monday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had not received Russian approval and reported further Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said contacts were ongoing, The Associated Press reported.