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Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
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The Russian milblogger writing under the name Ratio Militaris warned that Yandex’s hypercentralized digital ecosystem had become a wartime weakness for Russia, in a post translated by ChrisO_wiki:
Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia’s advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—including, and even primarily, due to hyper-centralization—both at the market level, where Yandex had become a powerful monopolist, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where the entire power of the information giant was concentrated in a few (the exact number is no secret, but perhaps inappropriate to specify) large nodes—those aforementioned data centers.
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Russian companies like Yandex will also have a hard time establishing infrastructure backup systems outside of Russia to provide additional wartime resiliency. That is partly because of the “Sovereign Internet Law” passed by the Russian parliament and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in 2019.
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By comparison, Ukraine has a much more decentralized digital ecosystem consisting of smaller data centers. It has also taken steps to build out backup infrastructure, including moving some equipment and networks underground or outside the country.
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Meanwhile, Russians may be waiting up to six months until Yandex can replace damaged data center equipment, according to an unnamed IT expert interviewed by Russian newspaper Kommersant.
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