Putin Lets Russian Firms Use Foreign Data Centers After Drone Hits

What the decree actually allows

Russian companies can now be approved to host workloads in overseas data centers — but it is a permission slip, not an open door.

The decree is framed as temporary, and the state keeps its hand on the switch. Any arrangement has to clear government review, which will likely weigh whether domestic compute is available before letting a company move work abroad. In practice, that means the biggest Russian cloud and AI customers will be negotiating with officials, not shopping for the cheapest rack space in Frankfurt or Dubai.

The second half of the decree matters just as much for the companies staying home. Russian data center operators must reserve 10% of their capacity for emergency government use, and hand it over with as little as 24 hours' notice. That turns private facilities into a kind of national reserve, and it gives the state priority access to the same servers that Russian businesses depend on.

Why now: the Yandex strikes

The decree follows a wave of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian digital infrastructure, including three major Yandex facilities.

The affected sites were in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir. According to TechRadar's reporting, the strikes took some Yandex services offline and disrupted third-party services that run on Yandex infrastructure. That second part is the underrated damage: Yandex is not just a search company, it is a platform other Russian businesses build on.

Yandex operates three major supercomputers, one of which ranked 19th globally in a 2021 study. Two were housed in Sasovo and were instrumental to model training. The facilities are believed to be intact, but they have likely been relocated or are in the process of moving. For a company trying to compete in AI, losing stable training capacity — even temporarily — is a serious problem.

Russia is also reportedly looking underground. State-owned Rostelecom is said to be in discussions with mining company Norilsk, and one governor has floated building data centers inside open-pit coal mines. It sounds extreme, but when drones can reach your servers, physical protection becomes a compute strategy.

A reversal for digital sovereignty

Russia has spent years trying to keep its internet traffic and data inside its own borders. This decree admits that plan has a physical vulnerability.

The push for digital sovereignty — domestic hosting, domestic DNS, domestic platforms — was supposed to make Russian infrastructure harder to influence from outside. It did not make it harder to hit from the air. Allowing companies to use foreign data centers is an admission that concentration inside Russia is now a risk, not just a shield.

The comparison with Ukraine is hard to avoid. Ukraine has moved many critical services into overseas cloud infrastructure after Russia struck its data centers. Now Moscow is edging toward the same logic, while insisting it is temporary and state-controlled. Data centers have become military targets, and the countries fighting over them are learning the same lesson from opposite sides.

What it means for you

For readers in the US, UK and EU, the decree is unlikely to change anything you can buy or use directly. Foreign data center operators that host Russian clients will, however, be watching their compliance obligations closely: US and EU sanctions rules already restrict some services to Russian customers, and a Russian government-approved hosting arrangement does not override those rules.

The more practical takeaway is for anyone running infrastructure in Europe. The strikes show that commercial data centers are now part of the battlefield, and that redundancy across countries is no longer just an uptime strategy — it is a resilience strategy. Expect more scrutiny of where critical workloads sit, and more demand for facilities that can prove they are outside obvious target sets.

The decree is a stopgap dressed up as policy. It buys Russian companies room to keep running while the state decides how much of its digital infrastructure it can actually protect — and whether the answer is foreign soil, or a hole in the ground.