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When Yandex’s data centers were hit, the disruption revealed how much of Russia’s everyday digital life depends on a few centralized systems. Ukrainian drone strikes exposed a vulnerability inside the Kremlin’s drive for digital sovereignty: keeping data and critical services within Russia may make them easier to control, but it can also leave them exposed to a single point of failure.
Elvira Bary examines how outages can ripple into taxis, payments, businesses and cloud services—and why sanctions can make damaged infrastructure harder to repair. This current-affairs technology analysis explores Yandex, Russia’s internet infrastructure, digital centralization and the risks of state control. It offers context for listeners interested in the Russia-Ukraine war, cybersecurity, tech policy and what happens when a country’s digital services go offline.
Elvira Bary examines how outages can ripple into taxis, payments, businesses and cloud services—and why sanctions can make damaged infrastructure harder to repair. This current-affairs technology analysis explores Yandex, Russia’s internet infrastructure, digital centralization and the risks of state control. It offers context for listeners interested in the Russia-Ukraine war, cybersecurity, tech policy and what happens when a country’s digital services go offline.
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00:00There is a Russian saying, people are the new oil.
00:04For years, the Kremlin has been building a digital system that makes Russians easier
00:09to tax, monitor, summon for military service and control.
00:14At the same time, Putin pushed important data and services inside Russia in the name of
00:20digital sovereignty.
00:22The idea was to make the country more secure and less vulnerable to foreign pressure.
00:30But now, that policy is creating a new problem.
00:34Much of Russia's digital life depended on a relatively small number of companies and
00:39data centers.
00:41And Ukraine has started attacking them.
00:44So, what happens when a system designed to increase state control begins going offline?
00:51I am Elvira Berry, a Russian-American writer who grew up in the Soviet Union.
00:56Today, I will explain how the attacks on Yandex exposed an unexpected weakness in Putin's
01:03digital sovereignty project and what that could mean for Russia if the attacks continue.
01:10Here is our roadmap.
01:12When servers go down, what happened when Ukraine attacked Russia's data centers?
01:21Why Putin's digital sovereignty policy has become a problem?
01:26One failure, thousands hit.
01:29How these attacks affect ordinary people and businesses?
01:34Why repairs drag?
01:36Why replacing damaged equipment is so difficult?
01:40Control without protection.
01:41What continued attacks could mean for Russia's future?
01:46And now, I have some exciting news.
01:50My new political thriller, The Snow Queen's Spring, is coming out on November 9th.
01:56The novel takes readers behind the closed doors of Russia's ruling elite into a world of
02:02secret fortunes, sanctions-busting schemes, and powerful men who have turned the state into
02:09their private business.
02:11It explores how Russia's mafia-style system actually works, who profits from the war, and
02:18what happens when those who help keep the regime running find themselves trapped by it.
02:24The Snow Queen's Spring releases November 9th and is already available for pre-order on Amazon.
02:30The link is in the description.
02:33And now, here's a short book trailer to give you a taste of the story.
02:38Marika Snjegova is the Snow Queen of the Kremlin's shadow economy.
02:44She runs secret supply chains that keep Russia's sanctioned aviation industry airborne.
02:53But Marika has a dangerous secret.
02:55When Russia invaded Ukraine, her daughter, Alisa, abandoned Harvard, went to Kiev to volunteer
03:02and limited contact with her mother to occasional text messages.
03:08Then, Alisa disappears altogether.
03:16Marika has no way of finding out what happened to her daughter.
03:20Under constant surveillance, she knows that if the authorities discover Alisa's support
03:26for Ukraine, she could pay with her life.
03:30Desperate, she turns to Leo Brunewald, an American engineer designing drones for Ukraine.
03:38They were lovers in Soviet Moscow until the KGB tore them apart.
03:44Now, they find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict far more brutal than the Cold War of their youth.
03:54The Snow Queen's Spring
03:56A geopolitical thriller by Elvira Berry
04:10Ukraine has been increasingly targeting the infrastructure that keeps Russian businesses running.
04:16The latest targets are data centers,
04:19which provide the computing power behind many of the services Russians use every day.
04:24The attacks followed Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers in Kiev in September.
04:30The Russian Defense Ministry even published a picture of a drone with the words
04:35Mandatory Digital Detox.
04:38Ukrainian officials warned that Russia would expect similar attacks in return.
04:44In October, those attacks began.
04:46In the night of October 7th and 8th,
04:49Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data center in Saseva, the Russia's Rezany region.
04:55The company reported serious damage and shut down the facility.
04:59Another center was hit in Kaluga the following morning.
05:03And on October 11th, a third attack forced Yandex to shut down its data center in Vladimir.
05:10Now, why is this so important?
05:13Most people know Yandex as Russia's equivalent of Google.
05:16They use it to search the internet, find directions, order food, call taxis,
05:22or store photographs and documents.
05:24But Yandex also provides services that ordinary users rarely think about.
05:29Officially, Yandex is a private company, but for many years,
05:33it has closely collaborated with Russian authorities,
05:37censoring information and providing user data to security services.
05:41That makes it an important part of Russia's system of digital control.
05:47At the same time, Yandex rents out computing power and storage space to thousands of businesses.
05:53Their websites, customer records, orders, and other information
05:57all depend on computers inside its data centers.
06:00And when those computers stop working, many businesses can be affected at once.
06:06Take Aleksandr Savitsky, who runs a Russian dating app called Pulse.
06:11He had spent three years building the business when the attacks began.
06:17Savitsky told Reuters that his customers could no longer access the app,
06:22and his team could not retrieve its backup database from Yandex Cloud.
06:28Nobody had confirmed that the information was permanently lost,
06:33but Savitsky's business had already stopped working,
06:37and he couldn't say when it would return.
06:40Other disruptions affected services connected with Russian railways,
06:45the telecommunications company Megafone, and several Russian media outlets.
06:52Yandex's own services also suffered interruptions.
06:57Locked inside Russia
07:01How did Yandex end up becoming a single failure point for much of Russia's Internet?
07:07For years, the Kremlin has promoted what it calls digital sovereignty.
07:13The idea sounded reasonable.
07:15Russia should protect important information from foreign interference
07:19and make sure its services keep working, even if Western technology becomes unavailable.
07:25The same policy also helped the authorities monitor citizens, block websites,
07:31and demand information from Internet companies.
07:35In 2019, Russia adopted its sovereign Internet law.
07:40It gave the government greater control over Internet connections
07:44and required operators to install equipment that could filter or block traffic.
07:49The authorities presented these measures as protection against foreign threats.
07:55Russia also has laws requiring companies to keep certain personal information about Russian citizens
08:02on servers inside the country.
08:05These rules have become stricter over time.
08:08Since July 2025, companies have faced tighter limits on storing and processing such information abroad.
08:16And during a war, that can become a serious problem.
08:21Consider what Ukraine did after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
08:27Ukrainian officials understood that government buildings and data centers could be destroyed by Russian missiles.
08:34If important information existed only inside Ukraine, losing one facility could disrupt essential public services.
08:43So Ukraine began moving critical databases and backup copies to foreign cloud providers.
08:49These companies could store Ukrainian information on computers located beyond the reach of Russian attacks.
08:55By December 2022, Amazon Web Services had helped transfer approximately 100 Ukrainian government registers
09:04and important databases to its cloud infrastructure.
09:08Ukraine also changed its regulations to allow certain government databases and backups to be stored abroad during martial law.
09:16This gave Ukraine an important advantage.
09:20Even when Russian missiles damaged equipment inside the country, many services could continue working through systems located elsewhere.
09:29Of course, this did not protect Ukraine from every disruption.
09:34Russian attacks have repeatedly damaged communications and other infrastructure.
09:39But keeping backup systems abroad gave Ukrainian authorities and businesses more options.
09:45Now, compare that with Russia.
09:48Putin's government has encouraged Russian companies to keep important information and computing systems inside Russia.
09:56Meanwhile, large technology companies built major facilities near their main customers, especially in Western Russia.
10:05The biggest provider, Yandex, came to support a huge variety of everyday services.
10:12It had the advantages of scale and low cost that no smaller company could hope to bid.
10:18This arrangement looked convenient.
10:20The state could easily enforce its rules over a large company it directly controlled.
10:27Businesses could use ready-made infrastructure instead of building their own systems.
10:32But when so many services depend on a single provider, damage to its facilities can spread through much of the
10:41country.
10:42One failure, thousands hit.
10:46The consequences of Yandex attacks became visible almost immediately.
10:52People could not order taxis, make payments or use services they normally took for granted.
10:58And many of them had no idea that their problems were connected to a damaged building somewhere far away.
11:06On October 11th, an AFP journalist spoke with a 69-year-old taxi driver named Yevgeny Niamosko.
11:17He was sitting in his Yandex-branded car, unable to work because the application he used to receive orders had
11:24stopped functioning.
11:25Yevgeny said that in five years, he had never experienced anything like it.
11:31He didn't know what to do.
11:33The problems even reached other countries.
11:37Yandex taxi and delivery services also experienced interruptions in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia.
11:44But perhaps the most troubling example came from banking.
11:48Yandex operates a financial service called Yandex Pay.
11:52After the strike on the Vladimir Data Center, many customers could no longer check their account balances, pay for purchases,
12:00or transfer money.
12:01On October 11th, Dmitry Piragov, the head of Yandex's financial technology division, published a personal apology.
12:09He acknowledged that customers could not access their money and said the company could not yet promise when everything would
12:18work normally again.
12:19Now, there is an important distinction here.
12:23Yandex said its records of customers' accounts were safe.
12:27No money had disappeared, but people still could not use it.
12:32By October 13th, Yandex Pay had begun restoring payments and transfers for some customers.
12:40The company also announced special arrangements for people affected by the outage.
12:47Problems appeared in other industries as well.
12:50Russian users reported disruptions involving the CIAN real estate platform, restaurants, retailers, and other online services.
13:01All of them depended on the same large technology provider.
13:06Why repairs drag?
13:10Why is Yandex now struggling to put its facilities back into full operation?
13:15Large technology companies prepare for equipment failures.
13:19They normally keep spare capacity and copies of important information elsewhere.
13:25Yandex was no exception.
13:27The company regularly practiced shutting down one of its data centers and moving its work to other facilities.
13:33Russia's digital development minister, Maksud Shadaev, acknowledged that these preparations had helped.
13:41Without them, he said, many more services would have stopped working after the attacks.
13:46But preparing for one failure is different from dealing with several damaged facilities within a few days.
13:55Imagine that one data center stops working and another takes over.
13:59That is what the backup system is supposed to do.
14:03But if the second facility is also damaged, the company must find somewhere else to move the work, and there
14:10may not be enough spare capacity left.
14:13On October 11th, Yandex Cloud warned customers that it was working in emergency mode.
14:20The company said its remaining resources were unstable and advised businesses to use their own recovery plans.
14:28Yandex also arranged for other Russian technology providers to help its customers move their systems.
14:34But those companies already had customers of their own.
14:37They could not easily take on thousands of new clients at once.
14:41Then there is another problem, replacing the damaged equipment.
14:46A data center needs much more than computers.
14:50It also needs a reliable electricity supply, cooling systems, and communications equipment.
14:56Buying replacements can take months, and Western sanctions make some purchases far more complicated.
15:03On October 11th, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that some equipment needed to restore damaged data centers could take up
15:12to six months to arrive.
15:14Industry representatives warned that buying large quantities would be difficult, and that prices could rise as companies competed for the
15:24available supplies.
15:25Meanwhile, Russian data center operators face another expense.
15:31They now have to think about protecting their buildings against drones.
15:35Some companies have started buying additional protective equipment.
15:39Others may need to change where they build new facilities or spend more money on backup systems.
15:47If attacks continue while companies are still repairing early damage, they may have to keep moving their services between facilities
15:55that are already under pressure.
15:58And the longer this goes on, the harder and more expensive it becomes to keep Russia's digital economy running normally.
16:06Control without protection
16:10The recent attacks have raised an uncomfortable question.
16:15Who is supposed to keep Russia's digital infrastructure safe?
16:18On August 24th, Putin signed a decree allowing the state to take temporarily control of certain important facilities if their
16:28owners fail to protect them properly or restore their operations after an attack.
16:33The rules cover several kinds of critical infrastructure, including energy, transportation, and communications facilities.
16:42Officials said the purpose was to improve protection against drones rather than to nationalize businesses.
16:49But consider what this means for a company.
16:53The government can demand expensive security measures.
16:56And if the authorities decide that the company has failed to meet those requirements,
17:01Qualifying facilities may be placed under temporarily state management.
17:07Then Yandex data centers got attacked.
17:09On October 8th, Alexey Zhuravlev, a senior member of the State Dome's Defense Committee,
17:16declared that data center owners were responsible for protecting their facilities.
17:21He complained that Yandex had not done enough to defend its buildings against drones.
17:26This produced angry reactions even among supporters of Putin's war.
17:32Several Russian pro-war commentators asked why businesses should organize their own defenses
17:38when the government was already collecting taxes and spending enormous amounts of money on the military.
17:45Others complained that officials were demanding protective measures that should have been arranged years earlier.
17:52For years, Russian authorities have insisted that important information must remain inside Russia.
18:05But when that infrastructure comes under attack, private companies are told that protecting it is largely their own responsibility.
18:15At the same time, Russia now relies on digital systems for many essential government functions.
18:21Tax administration, electronic documents, and military registers all depend on computers and communications networks.
18:29There is no evidence that the recent attacks on Yandex have disabled these particular government systems,
18:35but further attacks on infrastructure used by public services could create much more serious problems.
18:42And the Kremlin is unprepared to invest in a new, more resilient and decentralized system
18:48to keep services running when one location fails.
18:52And this brings us to a much bigger problem, one that goes far beyond data centers.
18:59Authoritarian regimes have a peculiar understanding of national interests.
19:04Their overriding priority is to remain in power indefinitely.
19:08Political power gives the ruling elite access to the country's wealth, resources, and privileges.
19:15Losing power means risking all of that, and sometimes their personal freedom as well.
19:22This helps explain their obsession with sovereignty and national security.
19:27They are terrified that someone, whether a foreign government or a domestic rival,
19:32might take away their control over the country's resources.
19:36Security becomes almost a religion.
19:39Everything can be sacrificed on its altar.
19:43Economic development, technological progress, private property, and the well-being of ordinary citizens.
19:51And yet, the system they build to protect themselves creates new vulnerabilities.
19:57By concentrating power, money, information, and infrastructure in a few hands,
20:02they make the entire country dependent on a remarkably small number of institutions.
20:08Ukraine is gradually discovering these weaknesses.
20:11Some are obvious, like oil refineries and military factories.
20:15Others are hidden deep inside Russia's administrative and technological systems.
20:20Some targets may remain beyond Ukraine's reach for now.
20:24But military technology keeps evolving,
20:27and the vulnerabilities of Putin's centralized state are becoming increasingly apparent.
20:33There is a character in Russian fairy tales called Koshay the Immortal.
20:37Koshay is an evil sorcerer who cannot be killed by ordinary means.
20:43His death is hidden inside the needle.
20:46The needle is inside an egg, the egg inside the duck, the duck inside the hair,
20:51and the hair inside the chest hanging from a tall oak tree on golden chains.
20:56As long as the needle remains intact, Koshay is invincible.
21:01But whoever finds the oak tree, opens the chest, and breaks the needle can finally defeat the tyrant.
21:08I sometimes wonder whether Putin's own needle might be hidden inside the digital infrastructure
21:14his government has spent so many years building.
21:16The original purpose of this system was to bring every citizen,
21:21every business, and every ruble under closer state control.
21:24But Russia has become so dependent on these technologies that their prolonged failure
21:30could eventually threaten the very institutions that keep the regime in power.
21:35Imagine what happens if the government can no longer reliably collect taxes,
21:40process payments, or distribute money.
21:42What happens when police officers cannot receive their salaries?
21:47When soldiers and officers cannot be paid?
21:50When the people making fortunes from the war can no longer access their money?
21:55The more functions a centralized state concentrate in interconnected systems,
22:01the more serious the consequences become when those systems fail.
22:07And that is the irony of Putin's digital sovereignty.
22:10A system designed to make his government more secure
22:14may eventually reveal just how vulnerable it really is.
22:17Perhaps Cachet's needle is already out there.
22:21The question is whether anyone will find it.
22:25Now I'd like to hear about your own experience.
22:28Have you ever had one digital outage suddenly disrupt several parts of your life or work at once?
22:35What did it make you realize about how dependent you had become on that system?
22:40Tell me about it in the comments.
22:42If this video gave you a new way of thinking about the weaknesses of highly centralized systems,
22:48please like it, subscribe, and share it with someone who might find these discussions interesting.
22:55And if you want to help make this kind of independent analysis possible,
22:59you can support the research behind these videos from my think tank, paypal, or superfinks.
23:05That support helps fund source checking, historical research, translation,
23:10and the time it takes to go beyond the daily headlines.
23:13If you are listening on Spotify, please follow the show so you don't miss the next episode.
23:20And a quick reminder.
23:22My new novel, The Snow Queen's Spring, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
23:27It takes you inside the strange, dangerous world of Russia's ruling elite
23:32through the human stories behind the system.
23:37I'll see you in the next one.
23:57The Snow Queen's Spring