Ryazan

Ryazan region entered a new category of target on 8 October. Ukrainian drones knocked out the Yandex data centre at Sasovo, which housed two of the three supercomputers the company uses to train artificial intelligence models. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a mirror response.

The strike came days after Kyiv claimed on 4 October that its drones had disabled 51% of Russian oil refining, a figure the Associated Press could not verify. Until Sasovo, Ryazan's exposure in the war had been its Rosneft refinery. A data centre is a different kind of target: it tests whether civilian technology firms with links to the state are now fair game in Ukraine's long-range campaign.

The Ryazan refinery felt the strike campaign through the spring. After Ust-Luga stopped taking fuel oil and petrol and the Kirishi refinery shut, Russia banned petrol exports from 1 April to 31 July, and refineries at Yaroslavl, Moscow and Ryazan faced knock-on shutdowns.

On 20 May Reuters reported that Ukrainian strikes had halted or reduced operations at nearly every major refinery in central Russia, Ryazan among them, alongside Kirishi, Moscow, Yaroslavl, Syzran and Kstovo. Ryazan was one of six named plants, the cluster that supplies Moscow and the central regions.