Russia’s New Strategy in Kyiv: Why Attacks Are Targeting Data Centres, Not Just the Energy Grid

The most revealing targets of the past week have not all been obvious military facilities.

On September 23, strikes hit the data centres of DataGroup, UTELS and Pavutyna, causing local power cuts and internet disruption. The DC|Cosmonova facility at the Protasiv business centre was hit again on September 26 after an earlier strike, forcing a complete shutdown and migration of networks. Several television broadcasts and internet service providers in Kyiv were affected. An Ukrtelecom facility was damaged on September 28.

These are not simply buildings containing servers. Kyiv's digital economy depends on physical nodes through which internet providers, broadcasters, businesses and other services connect. The network is decentralised, which gives it resilience, but physical destruction of important nodes can still create temporary bottlenecks.

That distinction is increasingly important in wartime.

A damaged data centre does not necessarily mean that the capital loses its internet. It can mean that companies must reroute traffic, restore systems, move equipment and absorb additional costs. A broadcaster may lose transmission capacity. A business may find a cloud-based service temporarily unavailable. A disruption that looks minor on a military map can therefore become an operational problem for thousands of users.

Russia's Ministry of Defence has sought to give the attacks a different interpretation, claiming that the Kyiv data centres were being used by the Ukrainian armed forces to process intelligence. Moscow even presented the strikes under the slogan “Digital Detox”. The claim attempts to place civilian-looking infrastructure inside a military targeting narrative.

But the practical consequence is that the boundary between the security of military systems and the continuity of civilian life becomes increasingly difficult to separate.

A city under distributed pressure

The same pattern is visible outside the digital sphere.

The Darnytsia pharmaceutical plant was struck on September 23. Warehouses, a business centre, a retail store, petrol stations and the Shaiba market near Kyiv's central railway station were also damaged. On September 27, an attack drone hit the Stolychnyi market in Sofiyivska Borshchahivka, causing civilian casualties. Debris fell near a playground, a kindergarten and shops.

Rail infrastructure around Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi was damaged on September 23 and 28. In central Kyiv, strikes on September 27-28 damaged an administrative building, a medical centre and the main building of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, where a major fire broke out.

Across five districts of Kyiv Oblast, local authorities recorded hits on at least 21 civilian objects over September 27-28, including agricultural facilities, administrative buildings, commercial warehouses and residential structures.

The human cost has accompanied the infrastructure damage. Kyiv's municipal authorities recorded two deaths and 43 injuries on September 23 alone. The strike on the National Academy of Sciences building killed one person and injured three others, while casualties were also reported at the Stolychnyi market.

The geographical spread is significant because it creates a different kind of defensive problem. A single major attack can be met with a concentrated response. A stream of smaller or geographically dispersed threats forces authorities to manage risk continuously.

That is precisely where Kyiv has been adapting.

Defence becomes a matter of urban management

The capital's response increasingly resembles a system for managing permanent uncertainty.

By late September, Kyiv's authorities had introduced differentiated air-raid warnings covering about 70 per cent of the city, allowing alerts to be tailored to the nature of the threat, whether drones or ballistic missiles. Curfew restrictions remain in place from 1am to 5am, while bridges and open sections of the metro can face restrictions during periods of high threat. Commercial establishments are required to comply with shelter rules during air alarms.

The purpose is not simply to protect people from individual strikes. It is to prevent every attack from producing a citywide shutdown.

That is a crucial form of resilience. Urban systems designed for peacetime assume that disruption is exceptional. Kyiv increasingly has to assume the opposite: disruption is recurrent, geographically uneven and capable of arriving with little warning.

Telecommunications operators face a similar problem. Repeated strikes on physical data infrastructure are pushing both private and public organisations towards greater redundancy, multiple sites and distributed cloud architecture. The logic is straightforward: if one physical node can be destroyed, critical services cannot depend on that node alone.

The adaptation comes with a price. Businesses must spend more on backup capacity and restoration, while operators have to maintain systems that may never be fully safe from physical attack.

The air war is becoming more complicated

The aerial threat itself is also changing.

Russian forces are deploying new-generation jet-powered attack drones alongside stockpiled ballistic missiles and more conventional Shahed-type drones. The jet-powered systems are capable of faster movement and real-time adjustments in flight, making them more difficult for conventional mobile fire groups to neutralise.

For Kyiv's air defences, the problem is therefore not simply the number of incoming weapons. It is the growing variety of threats that must be identified, prioritised and engaged with a finite set of defensive resources.

That creates an economic as well as military equation. Ukrainian forces rely on layered air defence, including mobile fire groups, medium-range systems and Patriot batteries, with Patriot systems remaining central to countering short-range and manoeuvring ballistic missiles. Using expensive interceptors against cheaper drones presents an obvious resource-management dilemma.

The briefing does not establish the remaining size of Russia's missile and drone stocks, and the question of how long Moscow can sustain the current tempo therefore remains open. What is clear is that the combination of different systems allows Russia to impose pressure without relying on a single type of weapon.

The attack does not end in the sky

The aerial campaign is only one part of the pressure described by Ukrainian intelligence and senior officials cited by The Economist.

Their assessment identifies three connected elements: mass missile and drone attacks; covert sabotage, assassination attempts and recruitment of operatives; and information operations aimed at exploiting war fatigue, power outages, corruption scandals and public frustration.

The sabotage component is particularly suited to a city already under physical pressure. Ukrainian counterintelligence reportedly neutralises seven to eight such operations each week, with many recruits contacted remotely through Telegram. The targets can be low-level: arson, surveillance or other acts that require relatively little capability but can consume significant police and security resources.

This is a different proposition from trying to destroy Kyiv outright. The purpose of repeated small disruptions is partly to force the state to spend attention everywhere.

The information component operates on the same principle. Power failures, damaged businesses or disrupted communications can become raw material for narratives about state incompetence or an inability to protect civilians. The Center for Countering Disinformation has rejected expectations of mass unrest, while its head, Andriy Kovalenko, has said Russian officials may exaggerate claims about “paralysing Kyiv” to support arguments for higher military spending.

There is, so far, a structural obstacle to the destabilisation strategy: Kyiv is adapting faster than a static target would.

The city is learning to operate with localised warnings, alternative communications, dispersed digital infrastructure and security services focused not only on the immediate consequences of attacks but on the networks behind them. That does not eliminate vulnerability. It changes the nature of it.

Russia can damage a data centre, market or railway facility in minutes. The more consequential question is whether the wider system can continue operating after the damage.

For Kyiv, resilience increasingly means ensuring that the destruction of one node does not become the failure of the network around it. For Moscow, the challenge is to make those adaptations more expensive and less reliable than they can sustain.