Between October 8 and 11, Ukraine attacked with drones three Yandex installations located in the oblasts of Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimircausing firesdamage to servers and disruptions to numerous digital services, including electronic payments and transportation. There were even repercussions in countries such as Belarus, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, according to the daily assessment of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
According to data cited by the ISW, the cloud network of Yandex lost approximately 78% of its ability to respond to external connections since October 8, while a Russian opposition outlet reported that three of the five supercomputers The company’s largest could have been rendered useless.
The ISW said that Russia was able to contain widespread Internet outages, although the recovery of Yandex remains partial. He added that the company turned to other cloud service providers and limited some functions to reduce the load on your systems.
The institute warned that the attacks would also have a possible political effect in Russiasince they could serve as an argument to Kremlin for nationalize Yandexwhich would allow expand state control over Russia’s most popular search engine and access private data from its email services and cloud storage, strengthening its censorship and surveillance capabilities.
The history of Yandex
A Yandex delivery driver in Moscow, Russia, on February 16, 2024. (Photo by Alexander Manzyuk / Anadolu via AFP).
/ ALEXANDER MANZYUK
Yandex was born in 1993 as a technology development project searchofficially presented its search engine in 1997 and was established as an independent company in 2000. Currently It is Russia’s main technology giant.
Its founders are businessmen Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich.
With the passage of time, Yandex He stopped being just a search engine to become a technological ecosystem which integrates digital advertising, e-commerce, transportation, financial services, entertainment and cloud computing, and now artificial intelligence. The company claims to have more than 90 services.
Yandex debuted on the Nasdaq of the New York Stock Exchange on May 24, 2011under the stock symbol YNDX. The initial public offering raised around US$1.3 billionin one of the largest IPOs of a technology company since Google in 2004.
However, that quote no longer corresponds to the company that currently operates the services of Yandex in Russia. Following the sale of its Russian businesses in 2024, the former international parent company was renamed Nebius Group and resumed its listing on the Nasdaq with the symbol NBIS. The new Russian parent company of Yandex, for its part, is listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange under the symbol YDEX.
Yandex’s business model is similar to that of large international technology companies such as Google, Amazon and Uber, although it concentrates a good part of its activity in the Russian market.
Like Google, it earns revenue from digital advertising and offers search tools, maps, email, and artificial intelligence services. Like Uber, it operates transportation and food delivery platforms; and, like Amazon, is involved in e-commerce and cloud services.
Among its best-known products are Yandex Go, for taxis and mobility; Yandex Eats, for food delivery; Yandex Market, for online shopping; Yandex Pay, for digital payments; Yandex Music, for online music; Yandex Disk, for cloud storage; and Alisa, her digital assistant.
Manage data centers with the capacity to process large volumes of information.
The recent history of Yandex is marked by the war in ukraine and the restructuring of its Russian businesses, amid the political and economic pressure derived from the conflict.
In February 2024, Dutch parent company Yandex NV announced an agreement to sell its assets in Russia for US$5.2 billion. The operation gave rise to a new business structure under Russian control. The change in ownership occurred against a backdrop of the Kremlin’s growing influence over the technology sector and access to information in Russia.
Putin’s government has declared Yandex as a “strategic resource” and restricted foreign participation in the company. After the opposition protests of 2011 and 2012, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin intensified its efforts to control the circulation of information on the Internet, including that distributed through the company’s services.
Why is Ukraine attacking Yandex?
Yandex delivery robot (Yandex Rovers) in Moscow, Russia, on November 20, 2025. (Photo by SEFA KARACAN / Anadolu via AFP).
/ SEFA KARACAN
Ukrainian attacks on Yandex They seek to degrade Russia’s technological capacity and disrupt its digital economy, he maintains Francesco Tucciacademic director of the Communication and Journalism Career at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (UPC).
“A data center is not just a building that houses servers. It is an infrastructure that allows the operation of multiple digital services and processes. Therefore, attacks can impact applications used by the population, business operations, artificial intelligence tools and services that depend on the cloud,” explains Tucci.
So, It seeks to interrupt operations and transactions that are carried out through the Internet and that depend on the availability of these systems, he adds.
However, the analyst warns that the impact should not be confused with a permanent destruction of the country’s digital capabilities.
“The technological and economic impact is strong. However, it is temporary. This is not a blow to the heart”, he remarks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks via video conference during the opening session of the Security Forum in Warsaw, Poland, on October 12, 2026. (Photo by Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP).
/ WOJTEK RADWANSKI
He adds that Ukraine has demonstrated that it can hit targets of various types on Russian territory in long-range attacks, “but will it be able to do so in a sustained manner?… If it manages to maintain this type of attack, Russia could be forced to allocate more resources to protect its rear, with consequences for the distribution of its defensive capabilities operating on the front.says Tucci.
“Remember what Frederick II the Great of Prussia said: he who defends everything, defends nothing. That is the point”he emphasizes.
If kyiv manages to sustain this offensive, “the conflict could become more closed, more unpredictable, more bloody”he warns.
Yandex and the disinformation machinery
The Yandex Browser logo appears on the screen of a smartphone in Reno, United States, on December 6, 2024. (Photo by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via AFP).
/ JAQUE SILVA
Another possible consequence of the attacks is the interruption of activities linked to Russian digital influence. Tucci points out that a reduction of botnet and troll activity on social platforms.
“The downfall of bots may be real, but its effect is temporary and partial”, points out. Considers it premature to present attacks against Yandex as a definitive blow against Moscow’s disinformation machinery.
At this point, the analyst indicates that the relevance of Yandex It is not limited to its status as a technology company. Its search engine, email services, news aggregator and other platforms are part of the daily digital experience of millions of Russians. This position gives it particular weight in the circulation and visibility of information.
Although Yandex is not a state body, Tucci states that operates in an environment marked by strong regulatory pressure from the Kremlin. In this context, the restrictions it exercises on independent media and the control over the visibility of certain content condition access to alternative information.
“Yandex is part of this ecosystem that responds to the Russian Government”says Tucci, who maintains that The company has considerable value within the country’s information control structure.
Could Putin nationalize Yandex?
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the president of the all-Russian public organization “Delovaya Rossiya”, a union of businessmen, in Moscow on October 12, 2026. (Photo by Mikhail METZEL / AFP).
/ MIKHAIL METZEL
The Ukrainian offensive also raises the possibility that Putin use the attacks as an argument to increase your intervention on the Yandexeven through a possible nationalization. Tucci considers that this scenario is possible, because we are facing a war in which Russia and Ukraine have been increasing the intensity of their actions.
Tucci specifies that the nationalization of Yandex will depend, among other factors, on the evolution of the military escalation and the capacity of Ukraine to maintain attacks against high-value technological infrastructures.
