A Ukrainian drone strike has damaged a Yandex data centre at Vladimir, east of Moscow, forcing the Russian technology company to suspend operations there completely. It is the third time in four days that facilities belonging to the firm, often described as Russia’s equivalent of Google, have been hit. Yandex said nobody was injured in the latest attack, but some of its services were left unavailable while staff worked to restore connectivity.

A week of mounting damage

The earlier attacks struck two other sites in quick succession. A facility at Sasovo in the Ryazan region, south-east of Moscow, was hit on Thursday, followed by one at Kaluga, south-west of the capital, on Friday. Operations at both sites were suspended as a result. The company said it was already having difficulty maintaining services after two of its five data centres were targeted, and warned that it was very difficult to predict when the affected sites would return to full operation.

The disruption matters because of the place Yandex occupies in everyday Russian life. Beyond search, it runs services including a food-ordering platform and a taxi app used by tens of millions of people. Yandex says its data centres are essential to keeping those services running normally.

Kyiv frames strikes as economic warfare

Ukrainian officials present such strikes as economic warfare, arguing that the targets support the revenue streams that finance Moscow’s war effort and that damage of this kind can force Russia to divert money and effort into repairs. The outages left users in dozens of Russian cities, and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, unable to order taxis or access banking services, according to the Russian independent outlet Astra.

Both countries have intensified attacks on each other’s infrastructure in recent months, as the war that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine moves through its fifth year. The strikes came a day after US President Donald Trump suggested Ukraine should get a new president, saying Volodymyr Zelenskyy had not done enough to end the war.