---
title: "Three Drone Strikes in Four Days Took Out All of Yandex’s AI Supercomputers"
description: "Ukraine’s drone campaign exposed how much of Russia’s digital economy sits behind two physical sites"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-12T17:52:36Z
modified: 2026-10-13T04:23:50Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/three-drone-strikes-in-four-days-took-out-all-of-yandex-s-ai-affb0c
language: en
tags: ["ukraine", "war", "infrastructure", "cybersecurity", "yandex", "europe", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Three Drone Strikes in Four Days Took Out All of Yandex’s AI Supercomputers

*Ukraine’s drone campaign exposed how much of Russia’s digital economy sits behind two physical sites*

By Luis Goa · October 12, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/three-drone-strikes-in-four-days-took-out-all-of-yandex-s-ai-affb0c

## In brief

- Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers in Sasovo (Oct 8), Kaluga (Oct 9) and Vladimir (Oct 11)
- All three of Yandex’s AI supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, Galushkin — sit at the struck sites
- Kaluga (63 MW, 9 injured) and Vladimir (40-50 MW) were among sites hit; Yandex shares fell ~4% on MOEX
- Enterprise customers Magnit, M.Video and Vkusno i Tochka reported outages via Yandex Cloud
- Zelensky confirmed Ukraine’s role, calling the strikes retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers

Three Ukrainian drone strikes in four days — October 8, 9 and 11 — hit every supercomputer Yandex is known to run and disrupted more than 80 services on a cloud platform that lists roughly 64,000 corporate customers, according to [a Moscow Times explainer](https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/12/ukraines-strikes-on-yandex-data-centers-explained-a93953). Yandex handles 70.35% of Russian search queries, against Google’s 27.79%, per StatCounter data reported by [bne IntelliNews](https://www.intellinews.com/yandex-captures-70-of-russia-s-search-market-outpacing-google-436161/) in August 2026. It also runs the country’s largest ride-hailing, food-delivery, mapping, payments and cloud-computing businesses, plus the compute behind its YandexGPT models. All of that sits on five physical data centers. The strikes showed how much of it actually sits on two.

Yandex operates five large sites: Sasovo in Ryazan region, two in the Moscow region, one at Kaluga’s Grabtsevo industrial park and one near Vladimir. Its three known supercomputers — dedicated clusters of Nvidia A100 GPUs used to train machine-learning models — are concentrated at just two of those five. Sasovo, running since 2014, holds two of them, named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov after Soviet and Russian mathematicians. Vladimir holds the third, Galushkin. Ukraine’s drones found all three sites inside one week, as [Ars Technica reported](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/russia-was-not-ready-for-the-data-center-war-it-started-with-ukraine/).

The specifications of the three machines matter because Russia cannot easily replace them. Chervonenkis debuted in November 2021 with a measured Linpack performance (Rmax) of 21.53 petaflops against a theoretical peak (Rpeak) of 29.42 petaflops — Rmax is what a machine sustains on a standard benchmark, Rpeak what its chips could do with zero overhead. That measured figure was good for 19th place on the [TOP500 list](https://www.top500.org/system/180029/) of the world’s fastest supercomputers in 2021. By the June 2026 edition of the same list it had slipped to 101st, not because the hardware got slower but because competitors’ hardware got faster: Western sanctions have blocked new Nvidia A100-class chips from reaching Russia since 2022, so Chervonenkis cannot be upgraded the way an unsanctioned operator’s cluster could. Lyapunov, the second Sasovo machine, runs at 20.03 petaflops. Galushkin, at Vladimir, runs at 20.64 petaflops and ranked 134th on the same list.

![Two cracked cream-colored cups hold dark microchips against a bright blue background, with a small cream-colored airplane silhouette in the upper right.](https://rews.cc/img/904e73761a193ee383d5ab6a5e884709ecde6fbd.webp)

The knock-on effects reached well beyond Yandex’s own apps. Kaluga’s regional governor, Vladislav Shapsha, said nine people were injured in that strike, five of them hospitalized. Yandex shares fell about 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the second attack. On October 10, between the Kaluga and Vladimir strikes, Yandex updated its user agreement to add drone and missile strikes to its force-majeure clause — the language that lets a company walk away from service-level commitments when an outage isn’t its fault.

On the consumer side, Russians lost access at various points to digital payments, online banking, email, e-commerce, ride-hailing, food delivery and the Yandex Maps navigation service much of the country’s logistics runs on. On the enterprise side, the grocery chain Magnit, the fast-food chain Vkusno i Tochka (the rebranded Russian McDonald’s), the appliance retailer M.Video, the real-estate listings site Cian and the dating app Twinby all reported disruptions, according to the Moscow Times explainer, which cited outage-tracking data compiled by the business daily Kommersant.

> Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia’s advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—including, and even primarily, due to hyper-centralization—both at the market level, where Yandex had become a powerful monopolist, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where the entire power of the information giant was concentrated in a few... large nodes—those aforementioned data centers.

**How one outage became eighty** Yandex's three struck sites feed one platform

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Sasovo DC (Ryazan) *(Chervonenkis, Lyapunov)* | Yandex Cloud platform |  |
| Kaluga DC *(63 MW)* | Yandex Cloud platform |  |
| Vladimir DC *(Galushkin)* | Yandex Cloud platform |  |
| Sasovo DC (Ryazan) *(Chervonenkis, Lyapunov)* | AI training clusters *(YandexGPT)* | 2 of 3 supercomputers |
| Vladimir DC *(Galushkin)* | AI training clusters *(YandexGPT)* | 3rd supercomputer |
| Yandex Cloud platform | Consumer apps *(payments, maps, rides, delivery)* | 80+ services down |
| Yandex Cloud platform | Enterprise customers *(~64,000 accounts)* | Magnit, M.Video, Cian… |

![How one outage became eighty. Yandex's three struck sites feed one platform](https://rews.cc/img/2d443d4c8667e98737d93931ce3e6e539a3a358b.webp)

Based on [Yandex statements; Moscow Times](https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/12/ukraines-strikes-on-yandex-data-centers-explained-a93953)

Not all of Russia’s heavy compute sits this exposed. Sberbank’s two systems, Christofari and Christofari Neo, sit in Skolkovo near Moscow, under the capital’s own air-defense coverage — the only large Russian supercomputing sites in a protected zone, according to reporting cited by [United24 Media](https://united24media.com/defense-tech/three-yandex-data-centers-hit-in-four-days-now-all-of-its-supercomputers-may-be-down-23332). Yandex’s data centers were built for cost and bandwidth near Moscow’s commercial corridors, not for a war that puts them within drone range of launch sites inside Ukraine.

Any Russian company serious about disaster recovery would normally mirror critical infrastructure outside the country. Russia’s legal architecture makes that harder than it sounds. The 2019 [‘sovereign internet’ law](https://www.occrp.org/en/news/putin-signs-controversial-internet-sovereignty-bill-into-law), signed by President Vladimir Putin, requires internet providers to install deep packet-inspection equipment that lets the state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, reroute or sever Russian traffic from the rest of the internet at its own discretion during a declared “crisis.” The law was written to let the Kremlin isolate Runet from outside interference, not to help Russian firms disperse their infrastructure past the border. The Russian military blogger writing as Artjockey, in a translation circulated by the OSINT translator ChrisO\_wiki, argued that this same framework will make it hard for Yandex to stand up real backup capacity abroad.

![A cream padlock surrounds two dark server towers and a yellow unplugged power cord, with a separate electrical socket on a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/a5cbef0eb2dbb733cfc383bb4a370e8587e8dcd9.webp)

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, confirmed Kyiv’s role without detailing it. “We always respond in kind,” he told reporters on October 8, after the Sasovo strike, according to [the Kyiv Independent](https://kyivindependent.com/we-always-respond-in-kind-zelensky-addresses-ukrainian-attacks-on-russian-data-center/), framing the campaign as retaliation for Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers and internet providers that Ukrainian officials say cut service to roughly 100,000 households in late September — [an outage covered earlier](https://rews.cc/a/kyiv-s-data-centres-under-fire-russia-s-jet-drones-find-the--8cd890). “I cannot share all the details,” he added.

At the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Zelensky went further, linking the Yandex strikes to a drop in pro-Russian social-media bot activity: “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said, adding that bot accounts had thinned out because, in his account, “it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.” That is a correlation claim between a data-center outage and bot-account behavior on platforms Yandex does not own, one a wartime president has an obvious incentive to draw a straight line through; [Euronews, examining the claim](https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/12/did-ukrainian-strikes-on-yandex-data-centres-cause-russian-bot-activity-to-plummet), found no platform-level bot-count data to back it.

What isn’t known yet is more interesting than what is. Yandex has not confirmed whether any of the three strikes destroyed the GPUs themselves, as opposed to the power, cooling or networking around them. A widely shared claim that the Sasovo strike destroyed 2,700 Nvidia chips remains [unverified](https://www.explainx.ai/blog/yandex-sasovo-data-center-drone-strike-2700-gpus-claimed-verified-october-2026), with neither Yandex nor a wire service confirming the figure. Sanctions have cut off new A100-class Nvidia silicon since 2022, so any chips that did burn cannot simply be reordered. Whether Chervonenkis, Lyapunov and Galushkin come back online at all, and at what cost, is the number to watch.

## See also

- [Meduza's explainer on Russia's internet vulnerability](https://meduza.io/en/cards/ukraine-strikes-a-data-center-operated-by-russian-tech-giant-yandex-how-vulnerable-is-russia-s-internet-to-further-drone-attacks) — meduza.io · How exposed Russia's internet backbone is to further drone strikes
- [2021 coverage of Yandex's three supercomputers entering TOP500](https://www.ewdn.com/2021/11/16/yandex-supercomputers-top-entries-from-russia-and-eastern-europe-among-worlds-most-powerful-computing-systems/) — ewdn.com · Background on Chervonenkis, Lyapunov and Galushkin at launch
- [Human Rights Watch on Russia's internet-control law](https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/18/russia-growing-internet-isolation-control-censorship) — hrw.org · Assessment of the 2019 sovereign-internet law's enforcement