UKRAINE JUST HIT RUSSIA'S GOOGLE: 3 YANDEX DATA CENTERS STRUCK IN ONE WEEK

Between October 8 and October 11, drones struck three of Yandex's main data centres in Russia. Yandex is often called "Russia's Google": search, maps, taxis, payments and the cloud servers thousands of Russian companies run on.

Sasovo, in Ryazan region, was hit on October 8 and shut down completely. Two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI model are housed there. Kaluga, the company's largest data centre, was hit on October 9 and partly put out of action. Vladimir was hit on October 11, and Yandex said operations there were completely suspended.

Yandex said its cloud platform was running in emergency mode and that it could not yet give a timeline for full restoration. President Zelensky said Ukraine "always responds in mirror-like fashion," after weeks of Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres and telecom facilities, including in central Kyiv.

In this video: what was hit, what Yandex itself confirmed, which services went down, and what this new kind of target means for the war. Every claim is labelled as confirmed, claimed, or unverified.

Orbis Sentinel covers the war from Ukraine's side and shows how we know what we say. If we get something wrong, we correct it in the pinned comment with the date.