Pavel Belyavskiy drives for Yandex Taxi in Moscow, and on Sunday his app stopped working. “I’d press the ‘call’ button to contact them, but nothing happens,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do, so I’m just forced to cancel.”
The cause was a Ukrainian drone attack on a Yandex data center in Vladimir, a city east of Moscow. The Yandex Cloud Telegram channel said the facility’s infrastructure was damaged and that operations had been “completely halted.” Nobody was hurt.
It was the third strike on Yandex facilities in four days. On Thursday a drone attack took a data center in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, offline. A day later Ukrainian drones hit the company’s major site in the Kaluga region, southwest of the capital, and Yandex said it was partly put out of action. Yandex, often described as Russia’s Google, runs the country’s most popular search engine and a wide range of digital services, and is heavily involved in Russian artificial intelligence work.
Outages across several countries
Russian independent outlet Astra reported that the Vladimir strike left users in dozens of Russian cities, and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, unable to order taxis or reach banking services.
Igor Mann said he tried to check an order on the Yandex Market shopping platform, but the page would not load, and a VPN did not help. “Nothing worked,” he said. Another Moscow resident, Eduard Malyavko, said the outages had a “direct impact” and were not only about “convenience.” In his words: “It’s also about work.” He added that they reached “healthcare, and everything else.”
Zelenskyy and Trump trade blame
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that only Russia is responsible for the war, and that Ukraine would keep hitting Russian oil refineries. He was answering U.S. President Donald Trump, who said a day earlier that Ukraine should get a new president and blamed Zelenskyy for high diesel prices in the United States.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said on Saturday.
Zelenskyy wrote on X that Ukraine “will be ready to stop striking Russian oil refineries if Russia stops striking our energy infrastructure.” He said strikes on energy infrastructure could end “as early as today,” but that Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not want to do so.” Any de-escalation, he added, would have to be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha also answered Trump on X late Saturday. “He has the support of the Ukrainian people, and they have the right to decide,” he wrote. “Statements from abroad only confirm that he is doing his job well.”
On Friday Trump had struck a deal with Putin to buy diesel from Russia, an attempt to ease fuel prices before the U.S. midterm elections. He has pressed Zelenskyy for weeks to stop hitting Russian energy sites, and has pointed to Ukraine rather than the U.S.-led war in Iran as the reason for record diesel prices. Ukrainian and European officials reacted to the diesel deal with dismay, saying it will help pay for Russia’s war effort.
Other attacks
Zelenskyy said rescue work ended in Zaporizhzhia after a Russian bombing on Saturday that killed 23 people, four of them children. Ivan Fedorov, the former regional head, said more than 30 people were wounded and eight remain in hospital.
Local officials in Russia’s Bryansk border region said a Ukrainian drone strike killed a man and wounded two women on Sunday.
