In recent days, a Ukrainian drone strike hit Russia’s largest data center, owned by the bank and technology company Sberbank. The strike comes after Ukraine struck three data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, often nicknamed “Russia’s Google.”
After these attacks, Yandex traffic dropped by 94%. Its users experienced significant disruptions in features such as email, search, navigation, music, ride-sharing services, marketplace and financial services.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes had provided “breathing easier on many social media platforms”, reducing Russian disinformation and bot activity.
Subsequent reports cast doubt on Zelensky’s claims. Regardless, the incident highlights the role of physical communications infrastructure in the online world. It also raises questions about what “digital sovereignty” actually means and hints at a way to combat misinformation.
Data in focus
Data centers are an unconventional military target. However, this could change as their importance increases. Attacking data centers can disrupt enemy military operations, as well as ordinary civilian services that depend on these facilities. In Russia, these disruptions could slow the economy in the long term, undermining its ability to prosecute the war.
The Ukrainian strikes follow Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers and internet service providers. They also follow a precedent set by Iran earlier this year when it struck data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in response to US attacks.
The Middle East data centers were run by Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud computing company with facilities around the world.
Typically, data centers use redundancy and backups to ensure that the loss of a single facility does not result in permanent negative consequences. Despite this, the Iranian strikes led to long-term degradation of services and irrecoverable loss of some data.
Russian data centers may have fewer international redundancy options. This is due to a particular vision of “digital sovereignty”, which Moscow has actively promoted over the past decade.
The idea that nations should have autonomy and control over their own data and digital infrastructure is a good idea. However, Russia’s quest for “sovereignty” has allowed it to censor online information and isolate Russian users from global internet services.
Russia passed laws requiring certain data to be stored locally in 2015. These laws were followed by international sanctions after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As a result, Russia’s options for maintaining backup infrastructure abroad have been significantly limited.
Misinformation and influence
Disinformation is often seen as the strategic dissemination of deliberate lies. Governments have often tried to combat it by removing or debunking these lies on the platforms where they circulate.
However, influence operations work in different ways. Not everyone spreads lies. Most of them aim to undermine public trust and delegitimize democratic processes and institutions.
In Australia’s 2023 referendum on an Indigenous voice in Parliament, for example, activists generated plausible competing narratives to exacerbate political polarization. In New Zealand, influence operations have involved avalanches of misogynistic abuse to derail public support for policy initiatives.
Russia is known for its orchestrated interventions in democratic politics around the world. The aim of these interventions has often been to sow discord, distrust and consternation. Supporting candidates with pro-Russian positions can also be a goal.
Civil society and activist communities have developed creative approaches to solving this problem. These include debunking, pre-debunking (pre-emptively countering false claims), reporting misleading content to platforms, or strategic use of humor and memes.
Digital sovereignty can create points of weakness
Attacks on data centers in Russia are a reminder that Russian internet services – including influence operations – depend on physical infrastructure. Whether or not the strikes led to a significant reduction in disinformation bot activity this time around, targeting physical sources of disinformation can still be an effective way to contain it.
There are more than 100 data centers operating on Russian territory. Few have backups and resilience plans.
Concentrating all digital operations on a relatively small number of physical locations creates vulnerability. Once this infrastructure is hit, rebuilding can be slow and difficult, especially since Russia depends on China for the supply of advanced semiconductors.
Lessons for democracies
What does this mean for efforts to counter Russian disinformation and influence operations more broadly?
One set of solutions could include imposing physical or regulatory limits (such as sanctions) on Russian-based platforms and services such as Telegram. Other solutions would require international cooperation to weaken Russia’s ability to harm digital environments. This could involve supporting Ukraine’s efforts on the frontline through bilateral security agreements.
Regardless, recent events have shown that Russia’s digital influence relies to a large extent on physical infrastructure: data centers, rare semiconductor materials, and an ecosystem of national platforms separate from the web.
As the Kremlin continues to isolate itself in the name of its sovereignty, it also becomes more vulnerable to attack and disruption.
Democracies can learn lessons from these events. Digital sovereignty does not involve isolation and vertical control of digital infrastructures. Instead, it is constantly negotiated through geographically distributed safeguards, risk and governance frameworks, and strategic alliances that keep critical systems running and resilient to attack.
Gn world
