Russia’s effort to build a sovereign, increasingly centralized internet has left its digital infrastructure vulnerable to wartime attacks. A presidential decree now allows a special Russian government committee, consulting with the Federal Security Service, to approve the use of data centers located outside the country—an exception to restrictions imposed under Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law.
Russia’s centralized infrastructure faces wartime disruptions
President Putin and the Russian parliament previously announced that Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law prohibits Russian companies from using cloud-computing infrastructure beyond the country’s borders.
Russia has promoted a sovereign and increasingly closed internet, producing a highly centralized system built around several Russian technology companies, including Yandex. That concentration has proved vulnerable during the war. Ukrainian drone attacks on key Russian data centers caused widespread disruptions to popular payment and digital-banking applications, e-commerce platforms, video-streaming services, ride-hailing and food-delivery apps, and other services.
Yandex was also forced to relocate all three of its major supercomputers after a Ukrainian drone attack targeted the artificial-intelligence data center where they were housed, Meduza reported.
Ukraine relies on distributed systems
By comparison, Ukraine’s more decentralized digital services have proved considerably more resilient despite years of Russian drone and missile attacks. The approach has been reinforced as government policy, with critical energy and telecommunications nodes distributed across the country and additional support infrastructure placed underground.
Technology companies Amazon and Microsoft provided a significant boost to that strategy. They supported Ukraine’s transition of government resources to cloud infrastructure shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The move helped preserve critical government and other essential digital services by placing them in cloud facilities elsewhere in Europe.
The Ukrainian government also used SpaceX’s Starlink satellite terminals as a backup communications system. The terminals were paid for by the United States and European countries, including Poland and Germany.
Source: arstechnica.com
