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Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine

When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.

当俄罗斯开始攻击乌克兰的数据中心和电信基础设施时，它显然没有为可能的报复做好准备。现在，在乌克兰无人机袭击导致俄罗斯科技巨头 Yandex 旗下的三个最大数据中心在几天内瘫痪后，俄罗斯的数字服务正面临大范围的中断。据化名独立研究员 ChrisO_wiki 翻译的帖子显示，亲克里姆林宫的博主们警告称，俄罗斯的集中式数字经济可能会崩溃，因为该国并未准备好迎接其发起的这场“数据中心战争”。这些俄罗斯评论员还指出，如果两国继续进行此类交锋，乌克兰去中心化的数字服务可能会比俄罗斯的系统更具韧性。

Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks. But Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, also known as “Russia’s Google,” in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a “symmetrical response.”

俄罗斯最初在 9 月下旬发起了一场针对乌克兰数据中心和移动电话网络的无人机袭击行动。这些袭击暂时中断了乌克兰首都基辅多达 10 万户家庭的互联网和手机服务，这是俄罗斯更广泛的远程打击行动的一部分，该行动涉及俄罗斯导弹和喷气式无人机袭击乌克兰的电网基础设施、交通枢纽，甚至是居民住宅楼。但乌克兰很快开始反击，目标是俄罗斯公司 Yandex（也被称为“俄罗斯的谷歌”）旗下的数据中心，乌克兰总统弗拉基米尔·泽连斯基将其描述为一种“对称回应”。

AI data centers and supercomputers

人工智能数据中心与超级计算机

The first Ukrainian drone attack damaged a data center in the Sasovo region southeast of Moscow on October 8, which houses two of the three supercomputers that Yandex has used to train its YandexGPT AI model. It was not immediately clear how much damage may have occurred to the supercomputers, which are based on Nvidia A100 GPU chips. The Chervonenkis supercomputer has a computing performance rated at 29.42 petaflops and ranks at 101 on the Top 500 List of supercomputers, while the Lyapunov supercomputer is rated at 20.03 petaflops and ranks at 161. A second Ukrainian drone strike knocked out another Yandex data center in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow on October 9. This is one of the largest data centers in Russia, with a maximum 63-megawatt capacity. A third Ukrainian drone strike then forced Yandex to suspend operations at its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, on October 11, according to BBC News. This facility houses the third of Yandex’s three supercomputers, Galushkin, which ranked 134 on the Top 500 list and is rated at 20.64 petaflops of computing performance.

10 月 8 日，乌克兰的首次无人机袭击损坏了莫斯科东南部萨索沃地区的一个数据中心，该中心存放着 Yandex 用于训练其 YandexGPT AI 模型的三台超级计算机中的两台。目前尚不清楚这些基于英伟达 A100 GPU 芯片的超级计算机受损程度如何。Chervonenkis 超级计算机的计算性能为 29.42 Petaflops，在超级计算机 Top 500 榜单中排名第 101 位；而 Lyapunov 超级计算机的计算性能为 20.03 Petaflops，排名第 161 位。10 月 9 日，乌克兰的第二次无人机袭击摧毁了位于莫斯科西南部卡卢加地区的另一个 Yandex 数据中心。这是俄罗斯最大的数据中心之一，最大容量为 63 兆瓦。据英国广播公司（BBC）报道，10 月 11 日，乌克兰的第三次无人机袭击迫使 Yandex 暂停了其位于莫斯科东部弗拉基米尔数据中心的运营。该设施存放着 Yandex 三台超级计算机中的第三台——Galushkin，它在 Top 500 榜单中排名第 134 位，计算性能为 20.64 Petaflops。

Russia’s vulnerable digital economy

俄罗斯脆弱的数字经济

More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex’s data centers has reportedly caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex’s search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia. The disruptions are even more widespread, because the data center damage also impacts Yandex’s cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia’s largest companies as customers, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.

对俄罗斯社会而言，更重要的是，据报道，Yandex 数据中心的损坏导致俄罗斯流行的支付应用程序、数字银行服务、电子邮件、电子商务平台、视频流媒体服务、网约车和外卖应用程序以及导航和地图服务出现中断或故障。Yandex 的搜索引擎在俄罗斯的市场份额也占到了约 70%。据独立报纸《莫斯科时报》报道，这种中断的影响范围更为广泛，因为数据中心的损坏还影响了 Yandex 的云计算服务，该服务的客户包括俄罗斯一些最大的公司。这些公司包括大型连锁超市、快餐连锁店以及一家家用电器零售商。

The Russian milblogger writing under the name Ratio Militaris warned that Yandex’s hypercentralized digital ecosystem had become a wartime weakness for Russia, in a post translated by ChrisO_wiki: 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 (the exact number is no secret, but perhaps inappropriate to specify) large nodes—those aforementioned data centers.

以 Ratio Militaris 为名撰文的俄罗斯军事博主在 ChrisO_wiki 翻译的一篇帖子中警告称，Yandex 的超集中式数字生态系统已成为俄罗斯在战时的弱点：“Yandex 及其创建的数字生态系统长期以来一直是俄罗斯相对于西方国家的优势之一，但现在已被证明是一个薄弱环节——包括且主要是由于其超集中化——无论是在市场层面（Yandex 已成为强大的垄断者），还是在具体基础设施解决方案层面（该信息巨头的全部力量都集中在少数几个（确切数字并非秘密，但或许不便说明）大型节点上，即上述那些数据中心）。”

Russian companies like Yandex will also have a hard time establishing infrastructure backup systems outside of Russia to provide additional wartime resiliency. That is partly because of the “Sovereign Internet Law” passed by the Russian parliament and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in 2019, according to Russian milblogger Artjockey, whose writing was translated by ChrisO_wiki. In its pursuit of a “sovereign Internet,” the government has effectively blocked Russian companies from using infrastructure even in friendly nations, while “unfriendly” countries have blocked access via sanctions anyway… it is virtually impossible to replicate Russian IT infrastructure in places like Belarus or Kazakhstan—though, in any case, the necessary capacity simply isn’t there. China might have the capacity, but that would require legislative changes to allow key services and registries to be moved there.

据俄罗斯军事博主 Artjockey（其文章由 ChrisO_wiki 翻译）称，像 Yandex 这样的俄罗斯公司也很难在俄罗斯境外建立基础设施备份系统以提供额外的战时韧性。这部分是因为俄罗斯议会通过并由弗拉基米尔·普京总统于 2019 年签署成为法律的《主权互联网法》。在追求“主权互联网”的过程中，政府实际上已经阻止了俄罗斯公司使用即使是在友好国家的基础设施，而“不友好”国家也已经通过制裁封锁了访问权限……在白俄罗斯或哈萨克斯坦等地复制俄罗斯的 IT 基础设施几乎是不可能的——而且无论如何，那里根本没有必要的容量。中国或许有这种能力，但这需要进行立法改革，以允许关键服务和注册系统迁移到那里。

By comparison, Ukraine has a much more decentralized digital ecosystem consisting of smaller data centers. It has also taken steps to build out backup infrastructure, including moving some equipment and networks underground or outside the country. Western tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon have also provided free cloud services to help Ukraine migrate crucial government services to other parts of Europe, enabling many essential Ukrainian digital services to keep going despite Russia’s sustained missile and drone attacks. Amazon Web Services alone is hosting more than 15 petabytes of data from over 60 Ukrainian government organizations, along with data from Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK. Meanwhile, Russians may be waiting up to six months until Yandex can replace damaged data center equipment, according to an unnamed IT.

相比之下，乌克兰拥有一个更加去中心化的数字生态系统，由规模较小的数据中心组成。它还采取了措施建立备份基础设施，包括将一些设备和网络转移到地下或国外。微软和亚马逊等西方科技巨头也提供了免费的云服务，帮助乌克兰将关键的政府服务迁移到欧洲其他地区，使许多重要的乌克兰数字服务能够在俄罗斯持续的导弹和无人机袭击下继续运行。仅亚马逊网络服务（AWS）就托管了来自 60 多个乌克兰政府机构的超过 15 PB 的数据，以及来自乌克兰最大的私营能源公司 DTEK 的数据。与此同时，据一位未具名的 IT 人士称，俄罗斯人可能需要等待长达六个月的时间，Yandex 才能更换受损的数据中心设备。