On 2 November 2026 Vladimir Putin signed a decree about computers. It is written in the dry language of capacities, commissions and approvals. Read slowly, it is something else: a state admitting that the system it built to control its own internet has become a target its enemy can find.
The decree orders Russian owners of private data centres to set aside 10% of their capacity to keep the country’s IT infrastructure running, The Moscow Times reported, and operators must hand that reserve over within 24 hours when asked, according to UNITED24 Media. It also does something stranger. As Jeremy Hsu wrote in Ars Technica, it allows a special government commission, in consultation with the Federal Security Service, to authorise the use of data centres outside Russia.
That clause runs against years of Kremlin policy. Putin and the Russian parliament had enacted the “Sovereign Internet Law”, which barred Russian companies from relying on cloud infrastructure beyond the country’s borders. Bloomberg’s headline put the reversal plainly: Russia now allows the use of foreign data centers in the wake of attacks.
A few rooms, easy to find
The drive for a sovereign, ever more closed internet produced a system concentrated in the hands of a few Russian technology companies, Yandex among them. A government that wants to see everything tends to gather everything in one place. That is a reflection, not a finding. What the war has shown is that a place where everything is gathered is also easy to hit.
Ukrainian drones struck key Russian data centres, and the effects reached everyday life. Payment and digital banking apps faltered. So did e-commerce platforms, video streaming, ride-hailing and food delivery services. In mid-October rews counted four Russian data centres hit in a single week.
Yandex, according to Meduza, has had to move all three of its main supercomputers after Ukrainian drones targeted the AI data centres that housed them. A supercomputer is not a field kitchen. It does not move easily, and it does not move willingly.
Into the ground
So the servers are going underground. Rostelecom, the state-controlled telecom giant, plans to build underground data centres to protect against drones, Meduza reported on the day the decree was signed. Ars Technica calls the plans hasty, and the timing supports the word: two announcements on one day, both answers to the same attacks.
Here is a pattern older than the internet, offered as reflection. Powers that set out to command the open sky often end up digging. The bunker is what a state builds after the fact.
The other side of the front
Across the front line the story has gone differently. Ukraine’s digital services, which are decentralised, have held up far better through years of Russian drone and missile attacks. The government has gone further, spreading out its energy and telecommunications nodes and burying more of the supporting infrastructure. Russia has not stopped trying. Earlier this autumn its jet drones were hunting Kyiv’s data centres as winter approached.
Much of Ukraine’s resilience came from outside. Shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Amazon and Microsoft helped Kyiv move government resources and other essential digital services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe. For backup communications the Ukrainian government has used SpaceX’s Starlink terminals, paid for by the United States and by European countries such as Poland and Germany.
Set side by side, the two choices form an irony the documents do not spell out. Kyiv survived in part by sending its data abroad, to foreign servers in other countries. Moscow wrote a law forbidding exactly that, in the name of sovereignty. Now, under fire, it permits it. But only through a government commission, and only after the FSB has been consulted.
The commission will sit. The security service will give its view. The supercomputers have already moved.