Putin decree opens door to foreign data centers after drone strikes

Vladimir Putin signed a decree that lets a special Russian government commission authorize companies to use foreign data centers, in consultation with Russia's Federal Security Service. It's a striking reversal for a country that spent years walling off its internet. Under the Sovereign Internet Law, Putin and the Russian parliament had blocked Russian companies from touching cloud infrastructure sitting outside the country's borders. Now the wall has a door.

The reason is on the battlefield. Ukrainian drone strikes on key Russian data centers caused widespread disruptions across the country's most-used digital services — payment and digital banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming, ride-hailing and food delivery. Russia's push for a sovereign and increasingly closed internet squeezed everything into a handful of domestic players, and wartime exposed how badly that concentration can backfire.

Yandex felt it directly. The tech giant has been forced to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after drone strikes targeted the AI data centers where they lived, according to Meduza. Yandex is the poster child for Russia's hyper-centralized digital stack — and for how fragile that stack looks under fire.

Ukraine's setup has held up better, precisely because it isn't centralized. Kyiv has spent years scattering critical energy and telecommunications nodes and burying supporting infrastructure underground, blunting the impact of Russian drone and missile attacks. Decentralization, it turns out, is a defense strategy.

Ukraine got a major assist right after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, when Amazon and Microsoft helped migrate government resources and other critical digital services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe. The government also leans on SpaceX's Starlink satellite terminals as a backup communications system — hardware paid for by the United States and European countries including Poland and Germany.