Drones knocked out a data centre belonging to Yandex, the Russian internet company, at Sasovo in Ryazan region on 8 October. The site houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models1. A day later Yandex said several modules at its largest data centre, in Kaluga, were completely disabled; it reported no injuries. Zelenskyy called the strikes "our symmetrical response", and Al Jazeera reported Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres over the past month, one of which caused temporary internet outages for about 100,000 households.
Yandex also runs Russia's main search engine, maps and taxi services, so Kyiv's reciprocity lands on sites that millions of Russian civilians use every day. Ukraine had already widened its list beyond oil in July, when drones hit two logistics hubs of the online retailer Wildberries.
The oil campaign kept running alongside. Ukraine's Defence Ministry said late on 4 October that its strikes had disabled 51% of Russian oil refining capacity, which Defence Minister Yevhen Khmara called "a significant blow"2. The Associated Press could not verify the figure. The Ukrainian General Staff said drones hit the Lukoil refinery in Volgograd and an oil-pumping complex in Samara region overnight on 1-2 October3. On 9 October Zelenskyy confirmed hits on the Omsk refinery the previous day and on the Ukhta refinery, 1,900 km from the border4; Ukraine had claimed a 2,500 km strike on Omsk in July.
Vladimir Putin was asked on 1 October at the Valdai Discussion Club, the Kremlin-backed annual foreign-policy forum, whether Ukraine had achieved its aim of damaging Russia's economy. He answered: "Partially."
