Inside Ukraine drone strikes crippling Russia’s digital economy
In a strategic shift, Ukraine has launched targeted strikes against critical Russian tech and data centre infrastructure, including key facilities owned by tech giant Yandex and banking giant Sberbank.
What is driving this strategy, and how are physical attacks on server hardware disrupting digital banking, daily life, and AI development inside Russia?
In this interview, Joseph Jarnecki, Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), breaks down:
The real-world consequences for ordinary Russians relying on Yandex and Sberbank digital services.
How attacks on Sberbank’s mega data centre aim to disrupt Russia’s long-term AI and supercomputing ambitions.
Why data centres are extraordinarily difficult to harden against drone and missile strikes.
The ‘dangerous normalisation’ of targeting civilian cloud infrastructure and what NATO and Western nations must do to protect their own networks.
Video Chapters
00:00 – Intro
00:20 – Why Ukraine targeted Yandex data centres
00:59 – Impact on Russian banking & digital services
02:04 – Hitting Sberbank: targeting Russia’s AI & supercomputers
03:11 – Why Sberbank’s server architecture was more resilient
03:45 – How vulnerable are modern data centres?
04:39 – The Hardening problem: repairing damaged hardware
04:59 – Does disrupting tech hurt Putin’s regime?
05:58 – International law & the targeting of civilian infrastructure
06:58 – Hybrid threats: is western data infrastructure at risk?
07:57 – Economics of air Defence against cheap drones
09:17 – Underground servers vs. network redundancy: protecting NATO’s data
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