Russia’s Drones Zero In On Ukraine’s Data Centers, Mobile Providers

The Russian defense ministry on Tuesday indicated that it attacked and struck two military cargo vessels in the Black Sea as well as two data centers in the Ukrainian capital overnight.

The vessels, which were sailing foreign flags, were struck off Odessa, President Zelensky also confirmed in a Tuesday statement.

The Kyiv region along with ten other areas came under attack overnight, Zelensky acknowledged. But it is the capital which has been getting pounded, also following many weeks and months of Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on Russian territory.

On Monday at least two people were killed when a drone hit National Academy of Sciences in the central part of the capital. The academy in a statement blasted the attack as “Russian terror” and “barbarity” aimed at “peaceful people who were simply at their workplaces.”

A couple of new ‘themes’ have emerged in what have long been a nightly reality of devastating air raids. First, high flying jet-powered drones have been increasingly deployed by Russia.

The new Geran-5 is said to have anti-jamming capabilities and can travel up to an estimated 370mph, reports say. All of this makes them extremely hard to intercept.

Another theme is the war on data centers and mobile infrastructure. One regional source cited the Russian Defense Ministry as calling the campaign a ‘mandatory digital detox’ with grim sarcasm.

The same source documents the following recent attacks on data centers in Ukraine:

Russian forces continue to strike Ukrainian data centers. On September 25, they attacked an office building in Kyiv that houses a Datagroup data center. The center was damaged, but the company said all its services continued to run from backup sites.

On September 26, a Cosmonova data center in another Kyiv office building was hit. It had to shut down, interrupting broadcasts by several television channels. The strikes on data centers also left some Kyiv residents without internet access.

On September 28, a Russian drone struck an office building in Dnipro. The regional administration reported damage and casualties but did not say which companies occupied the building…

On September 26, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it was striking data centers because they “process and transmit intelligence data for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” The next day, the ministry posted an image of a drone on social media with the caption “Digital detox” and the comment “Mandatory!”

At the start of this week Russia hit the headquarters of Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile service provider, according to a statement by the company.

Reports of at least seven total killed and over 50 injured in the capital on Monday amid the major attack:

11-year-old Mariana tells CBS News’ @aidan_stretch she was scared when she heard explosions from Russian strikes near her home in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine.

Officials said Monday at least seven people were killed and more than 50 others were injured in the daytime attack as… pic.twitter.com/GhuCAcuuYc

— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 28, 2026

Additionally the Russian military had on Sunday announced hitting a data center belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, which is Ukraine’s second-largest cell network provider – all of which strongly points to the campaign on comms infrastructure set to continue.