Russia’s ‘Amazon’ already burning – now Ukraine has hit Russia’s ‘Google’

Thick smoke rose over an industrial complex in the Russian city of Sasovo following an overnight strike. Open source investigators from Exilenova+ and ASTRA quickly traced the flames to a massive facility housing Yandex DC Sasovo.

The site is widely known as the largest server hub for Russia’s dominant technology firm. It powers major parts of the company’s cloud network and online infrastructure.

According to The Kyiv Independent, Yandex Cloud acknowledged an “incident” and power issues in its “ru-central1-b availability zone” shortly after the blaze began. The tech firm has since confirmed that it was actually a drone attack.

Yandex is Russia’s leading online search engine and is sometimes called “Russia’s Google” as the e-commerce giant Wildberries is known as “Russia’s Amazon”.

Shared industrial ground

Public tracking services showed mixed results after the disruption. Monitoring groups noticed short hiccups across some digital tools, but main consumer services stayed online for most users.

Questions remain about the precise target of the raid. The data center sits directly inside the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool factory, a major industrial builder of heavy metalworking gear.

Sasta manufactures precision metal-cutting equipment used across aerospace, energy, and defense sectors. Because of its military ties, the United Kingdom placed the plant under economic sanctions back in 2024.

It remains unclear if attackers aimed for the server racks, the factory workshops, or both.

By Thursday morning, Ukrainian military leaders had not officially confirmed the attack, but Russian officials have stated that a shot-down Ukrainian drone caused the roof of a “local enterprise” to catch fire.

Russia targets Ukraine’s data centers

On September 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy slammed Russia for trying to disrupt the everyday life of the Ukrainian public after Russia had attacked data centers and internet providers in Ukraine.

“All this affects people’s ability to stay connected, study, work,” he said, according to the BBC.

Earlier this week, the Institute for the Study of War released an assessment saying that Russia had already launched its 2026-2027 winter campaign aimed at forcing Ukraine into submission.

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted the Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries throughout 2026, causing widespread disruptions. Ukraine says Wildberries offers military equipment for Russian soldiers, making it a legitimate target.

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation