Ukrainian drones are hitting Russia’s biggest data centers. Why are they so vulnerable — and can anything protect them?

Ukrainian drones struck three of Yandex's six largest data centers between October 7 and 11, followed by a strike on Sberbank's flagship Mega Data Center in Saratov region on October 14, a facility Russian officials once promised would be the nation's largest.

None of the hit facilities sat in the Moscow region, where Russia concentrates its Tor and Pantsir air defense systems, leaving everything outside the capital to improvised defenses like small arms fire caught on video. The buildings themselves were built with modern metal structures rather than the reinforced concrete of Soviet-era industrial sites, making them structurally vulnerable to drones carrying modest warheads.

Pro-war channels have accused Yandex of inaction or even sabotage, a framing that conveniently skips over the fact that defending against massed drone strikes at the site level was never realistic. A 2026 law repealed a prior requirement for government authorization to build protective structures, which raises the question of what, if anything, was stopping companies before.

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