Russian strikes kill at least 10, injure 45 across Ukraine over past day

A Ukrainian drone attack ignited a fire at a Yandex data center in Sasovo, a town in the Ryazan region, causing the facility to cease operations completely. Although no one was injured, the data center's shutdown has led to Yandex issuing warnings that some of its services, including Yandex Cloud, Yandex Disk, and Yandex Documents, may be unavailable.

This disruption is already causing outages for websites of Cian, Russian Railways, and regional administrations. Shares of Yandex, a leading IT company in Russia, dropped over 3% following the strike, as reported by the Moscow Exchange.

The attack targeted one of Sasta, a pipe-threading machine manufacturer's plants, which had rented premises from Yandex since 2014. Sasta's products are exported and used by machine-building plants across Russia, and it serves defense enterprises. The data center, part of Sasta's former site, houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, "Lyapunov" and "Chervonenkis," which are crucial for training neural networks.

Chervonenkis, Yandex's most powerful supercomputer, once ranked 19th globally but has struggled with infrastructure updates due to sanctions. The third supercomputer, "Galushkin," is situated in Vladimir.

It remains unclear if the plant or the data center was the intended target of the Ukrainian strike. Ukraine has not commented on the incident, which follows a series of similar attacks on Russian infrastructure since September 23, damaging or destroying data centers of at least eight companies. Russian forces have also targeted bridges, gas stations, railroads, shopping centers, and warehouses.

The attacks are seen as part of Russia's strategy to pressure Ukraine and weaken its economy. Russian forces have been relentlessly striking Kyiv almost continuously in recent weeks.