In recent days, a Ukrainian drone strike hit Russia’s largest data centre, owned by bank and technology company Sberbank. The strike came after Ukraine hit three data centres belonging to the tech giant Yandex, which is often referred to as “Russia’s Google”.
After those attacks, Yandex’s traffic dropped 94%. Its users experienced heavy disruption to features such as email, search, navigation, music, ride hailing, marketplace, and financial services.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes had made it “easier to breathe on many social media platforms”, by reducing Russian disinformation and bot activity.
Later reports have cast doubt on Zelensky’s claim. Either way, the incident highlights the role of physical communication infrastructure in the online world. It also raises questions over what “digital sovereignty” really means, and hints at a way to fight disinformation.
Data in the line of fire
Data centres are an unconventional military target. However, that may be changing as their importance grows. Attacking data centres may disrupt an enemy’s military operations, as well as the ordinary civilian services that rely on these facilities. In Russia, these disruptions may slow down the economy in the long term, undermining its ability to continue war.
Ukraine’s strikes came after Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres and internet service providers. They also follow a precedent set by Iran earlier this year when it hit data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in response to American attacks.
The Middle East data centres were run by Amazon Web Services, the world’s biggest cloud computing company with facilities around the globe.
Typically, data centres use redundancy and backups to make sure losing a single facility does not have permanent negative consequences. Even so, the Iranian strikes resulted in long-term degradation of services and irrecoverable loss of some data.
Russian data centres may have less in the way of international redundancy options. This is due to a particular vision of “digital sovereignty”, which Moscow has actively championed over the past decade.
The idea that nations should have autonomy and control over their own digital data and infrastructures is a sound one. However, Russia’s pursuit of “sovereignty” has enabled 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 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.
Disinformation and influence
Disinformation is often considered as the strategic spreading of deliberate falsehoods. Governments have often tried to fight it by removing or debunking these falsehoods on the platforms where they circulate.
However, influence operations work in many different ways. Not all of them propagate falsehoods. Most of them aim to undermine public trust and delegitimise democratic processes and institutions.
In Australia’s 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, for example, campaigners generated plausible competing narratives to exacerbate political polarisation. 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 goal of these interventions has often been to sow dissent, distrust and dismay. Supporting candidates with pro-Russian stances can also be a goal.
Civil society and activist communities have developed creative approaches to tackling this problem. These have included debunking, prebunking (pre-emptively countering false claims), reporting misleading content to platforms, or strategically using humour and memes.
Digital sovereignty can create points of weakness
The data centre attacks in Russia are a reminder that Russian internet services – including influence operations – depend on physical infrastructure. Whether or not the strikes have led to a significant reduction in disinformation bot activity this time around, targeting the physical sources of disinformation may still be an effective way to contain it.
There are over 100 data centres operating on Russian territory. Few of them have backups and resilience plans in place.
Concentrating all digital operations in a relatively small number of physical sites creates a vulnerability. Once this infrastructure is hit, rebuilding can be slow and challenging, especially as Russia is reliant on China to supply advanced semiconductors.
Lessons for democracies
What does this mean for efforts to counter Russian disinformation and influence operations more broadly?
One set of solutions might involve imposing physical or regulatory limits (such as sanctions) on Russian-based platforms and services such as Telegram. Other solutions would require international cooperation to undermine Russia’s capability to inflict harm in the digital environments. This may include supporting Ukraine’s efforts on the battlefront through bilateral security agreements.
In any case, the recent events have shown that Russia’s digital influence extensively relies on physical infrastructures: data centres, scarce semiconductor materials and a domestic platform ecosystem that has been splintered from the world wide web.
As the Kremlin continues to isolate itself in the name of sovereignty, it is also becoming more vulnerable to attacks and disruptions.
Democracies can draw lessons from these events. Digital sovereignty is not achieved through isolation and vertical control over digital infrastructures. Instead, it is constantly negotiated through geographically distributed backups, frameworks for risk and governance, and strategic alliances that keep critical systems running and make them resilient to attacks.
