Putin’s decree also allows a special commission of the Russian government to authorize the use of foreign data centers in consultation with Russia’s Federal Security Service. This marks a notable policy shift because Putin and the Russian parliament previously enacted Russia’s “Sovereign Internet Law,” which has prevented Russian companies from using cloud computing infrastructure outside Russia’s borders.
Russia’s push for a sovereign and increasingly closed Internet has resulted in a highly centralized system under a few Russian tech companies like Yandex. That hypercentralized system has now proven vulnerable during times of war, when Ukrainian drone attacks on key Russian data centers created widespread outages for popular digital banking and payments apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, and ride-hailing and food delivery apps, among others.
Yandex was also forced to relocate its three main supercomputers after Ukrainian drone attacks targeted the artificial intelligence data centers where they were originally housed, Meduza reported.
By comparison, Ukraine’s decentralized digital services have proven much more resilient despite years of Russian drone and missile attacks, especially as the government has taken more steps to disperse crucial energy and telecommunications nodes and bury more supporting infrastructure underground.
A big push came from American tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, which helped Ukraine migrate government resources and other crucial digital services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainian government has also used SpaceX’s Starlink satellite terminals, paid for by the United States and European countries such as Poland and Germany, as a backup communications system.
