The Yandex of today isn't exactly the Yandex of 2020. The people who were at the helm back then whitewashed their reputations, renamed to Nebius, and are now supplying compute to Palantir.
If you gear up with a translator, you may read this in-depth post on the events made by well-known Ukrainian tech executive Sergiy Petrenko, who also happened to be the CEO of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex in its early days:
Outside say redundancy across sites (a thing many offer in one way or another) ... there's not much you can DO.
When I used to work with US bank and financial institutions we used to do "disaster recovery tests" and it effectively meant they shut off a whole site and ran on their backups to see what happened.
Offering redundancy across zones is one thing (and I'm pleased to offer it to my customers). Getting them to use it is quite another thing.
Even if it was "only" 2x or 3x the expense to have a completely multizone setup, the ongoing operational burden is too high to justify over the 2, 10, or 100 year timeframe when no outages happen which could have been avoided.
Companies dependent on a single Amazon zone just give up and wait during a zone outage, blame it on Amazon, then get back to making money the next day.
Well that's a long way of saying even in military offensive scenarios, Amazon is expected to have some zone up to use which is to say they're doing a decent job.
Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.
Preferably after they thought a little more about the more regular fire and/or water ingress hazards.
Now that you can stuff an entire room with only high-G-resistant solid state drives, there should be fewer excuses for losing machines before determining a fire suppression system to be either inoperable or insufficient (but never tested and measured under realistic conditions).
During the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022, it was realized that almost all of Ukraine's redundant offsite backups were in various locations in Kyiv.
>I think most of the opposition really wants is stability and a return to normality. Blowing shit up is diametrically opposed to that goal.
So there isnt terrorism because most opposition dont want to blow up data centers? You are identifying opposition as potential domestic terrorists. As opposed to saying there just arent these type of domestic terrorists. Which have nothing to do with normal opposition.
And then you seem to imply there may be reason to resort to domestic terrorism?!
>Maybe only once most people realize that normality isn't coming back will that change.
Space launches have never been "safe". It's always a risky endeavor for a variety of reasons.
But concerns over space junk are vastly overblown. Orbit is a big place and satellites can maneuver to avoid the riskiest paths. And if data center satellites ever actually get launched (might never happen) then they'll be in low orbit where any junk will burn up within a few years.
I should have qualified my usage of the term safe. Space launches of course have risks, because space is hard. I was simply trying to highlight that more space junk whizzing by at very very fast speeds could cause major damage and NASA & ISS have always been worried about this.
Except that nuclear reactors are very robustly built, unlike data centers. Nuclear stations are designed to withstand against the airplane dropping in.
Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.
Maybe the rules have changed in the US, but as of early 2023 SMRs were subject to the same "Aircraft Rule" regarding their containment structures as any other commercial reactor.
If we regard large nuclear power stations as emblematic of centralized power generation, rather than just the nuclear aspect of it, then another target is the step-up transformer and the rest of the connection to the transmission grid.
I don't think those are designed to withstand an aircraft dropping in, nor would their destruction count as the use of nuclear weapons.
I agree. The only real argument against large nuclear reactors is the negative security aspect. All other arguments are nonsense as far as I am concerned. Even this aspect can be reduced by using smaller reactors. The existence of a negative argument doesn't mean it should influence our decisions in the long run. In general, the argument is real but isn't significant enough to be taken seriously.
From reddit - "Right now, Yandex's biggest services are down: taxis, delivery, and Alisa. Moscow is paralyzed; it's impossible to order a taxi. Orders aren't going through."
7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable
Morelli explains this principle or commandment as follows: "With rare exceptions, people tend to join the victorious cause. In the case of war, the preference of public opinion depends very much on the apparent results of the conflict. If the results are not good, the propaganda must disguise our losses and exaggerate those of the enemy." [0]
You're not going to get Russians' point of view from Kremlin shills. The Russians that I know are utterly disgusted by what is going on in their country but they are not going to speak out publicly for fear of reprisals on their families.
All the Russians I know are outside Russia, for obvious reasons. I have zero idea what an average Russian in Russia thinks. Some distant acquiantances wrote some scary stuff on Facebook some years back. Mind, highly intelligent and educated people.
And with all respect, I'd hazard an unsubstantiated guess: you don't really know what average Russian thinks either, as you're probably in contact with Russian intelligentsia.
Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
In Vietnam, the USSR gave a considerable amount of equipment to Vietnam, they stationed 3,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and over a dozen of them were killed. The USSR told Vietnam where B-52s were heading so they could evacuate military leaders and get other military units out of the way. Soviet crews were firing SAMs at F-4 Phantoms and shooting them down, and Soviet pilots were flying planes.
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...
You also set up Hormuz and tariffs and spread discord between EU citiz ns through speeches of high officials and threaten Greenland, causing us to prepare to defend on multiple fronts while often publicly supporting Russia too.
I don't think the US even has any like that to give.
The long range strikes only started after Trump's "you have no cards" oval office shindig where he basically told Zelensky to surrender and cut aid. After that Trump lost a lot of influence to protect Russia.
The only reason the war has turned lately is because the USA was the greatest defensive shield for the Russians, by demanding that Ukraine not cross the red line of the border.
They're just using USA as political cover, which is how it has always been been. USA warned Europe for decades not to become reliant on cheap Russian gas because it would be weaponized against them. The Biden administration even sanctioned German companies [1] building Nordstream 2 because it was a Russian geopolitical project.
Stopping Russia is equivalent to stopping Germany and Japan in WW2. Not applicable. So the next thing is to hope it wears itself out, just like it did in Afghhanistan. And later maybe another dissolution, just like the USSR. But that would possibly also mean nukes getting left over in new jurisdictions.
Trump didn't ask Zelensky to stop the strikes because German diesel prices are high. He did it because the US midterm elections are coming up and his party's base are disproportionately harmed by high gas prices.
Europe is most certainly not doing this. Trump isn't even serious, he's just "telling them to stop" in order to aid European anti-Trump propaganda which is used in Europe ironically to support US interests. Trump doesn't care that diesel is going up, especially because his friends are selling it. Cutting off Russian ability to join in this smorgasbord by causing a local diesel shortage for them also cuts off any concern he could possibly have about diesel prices.
Notice that he didn't end US diesel exports, he entertained the idea.
If Europe thinks they're "in this alone," and Europe is the "only one left" who will "defend" Ukraine, then Europe has to rearm in fear and figure out how to send more support to Ukraine, like to cut social services and ignore their heat/power bills to do it (and to steal from Russian accounts, which is being debated again.)
They will buy the weapons from the US, they will shore up the Ukraine war for the US, the will buy more LNG from the US, they will destroy local anti-US politicians for the US in favor of NATO, all to own Trump. Remember, Trump "hates" NATO. Not that he doesn't support everything they're doing, he's just threatened to stop paying for it i.e. they'll serve us for free. He's going to build a Ukraine War, and Europe's going to pay for it.
As a tactic, it was obvious why the US/Ukraine had to be aggressive right now; not only is Russia doing exceedingly well financially due to what the dumb Iran War did to prices, but winter is coming. For Ukraine, they were convinced that this was their last chance to make an impact before they were frozen. For the US it was an opportunity to burn weapons (so we can grab US taxes to make more), to get Russia to stop exports (because LNG goes up in Europe, and US oil goes up in general) and lastly and maybe most importantly to raise political support in Russia for strikes to civilian infrastructure. Putin is the conservative in Russia, and the politicians who are against him are demanding that he escalate rather than continue to bleed Russian lives forever.
If the US can convince Russia, who has been very gentle with Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, to destroy Ukrainian power going into the winter, the misery and death that will hit Ukrainians will be talked about for the next century (barring an big warming effect of the extreme El Niño.) That might fire up Europe even more into a delusionally belligerent frenzy (European NATO elites are losing the population), and possibly shore up support for more spending on Ukraine in the US itself. The US has suffered through a distinct lack of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, and this would be a great time to get some.
Well, did Russia agree? They didn't and they won't so this is moot. You are certainly able to grasp the diff between Trump wanting unilateral Ukraine attack stop and Macron wanting a bilateral stop.
All I was trying to say is this wasn't a request at the EU level. I assume by Europe you meant EU. Correct me if I'm wrong.
You are correct that indeed France made the proposal that Russia stops destroying Ukrainian energy infrastructure and Ukraine would do the same thing. France as a country has that right to make such proposals. That doesn't make it a request or proposal at the EU level.
I have no idea how the no true scotsman fallacy applies to this. Maybe I'm missing something here
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
> So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire that can spread, but are not going to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
Energy facilities have the destructive energy stockpiled on-site. Don't need to fly in much force yourself.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
I think the energy facilities being hit are mostly refineries - not storage, and anyways any bulk storage is just temporary for bulk transport for export or to the front, etc, so having it in 25gal cans wouldn't be very helpful!
Countries still have strategic reserves, but usually of crude, not refined product --> decentralized reserves would help with supply cuts by any cause. The benefit would be too individual vs export/frontlines, so won't happen.
There are chemical based emp bombs, NNEMPs, if the penetrate through to the inside and set that off it seems like it would be pretty effective on datacenters.
Russian air defense is multi layered and relatively strong, so one of Ukraine's main strategies so far has been just to overwhelm them with volume. You want mass volume cheap and cheerful, not expensive ones, unless for the occasional strategic target.
Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.
This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.
After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
> Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
The continental USA has not yet been threatened by drones.
The USA is, however, the sovereign power controlling the smouldering ruins of military bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and the recently evacuated airfield in England. Some might say those constitute US soil.
Ukraine showed you can deploy from shipping containers delivered inside hostile lands quite successfully. As much stuff gets smuggled into US ports on a daily basis, sneaking a few of these into the US isn't impossible. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
I'm talking about as a response to already being attacked, not just someone sitting around looking to poke the bear. Iran has the drones, they've been attacked, and would make sense to be looking for a plan like this.
When the US gets directly attacked they do not play around anymore with little factories here and there getting tactically bombed. You will get boots on the ground, the government will fall, and the country probably occupied for 20+ years after. Japan is still basically occupied 80 years later.
Where have you been? Shock and awe is so twenty years ago. Ever since the shameful capitulation in Syria, American boots have been on the retreat, globally.
Ukraine is left to fend for itself. The Taliban runs Afghanistan. Iraq is still in bits. A new ceasefire with Iran is announced every other week.
No, the current policy is to shout loudly and carry a small stick.
Lots of "surgical" airstrikes, each lasting one media cycle and accompanied by a truckload of bluster and spin.
The current occupant of the White House appears to think foreign wars are principally a communications problem.
Yes they don't, mostly because it's a relatively small group of individuals dispersed in a huge country. The same cannot be said of the Iranian government.
Wiping out the Iranian government will only strenghten the IRGC and other rabid anti US Iranian groups politically. As demonstrated by the recent US strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, wiped out senior Iranian leadership and that girs' school.
Given how quickly this technology is proliferating I think that could change. Numerous non-state groups are using drones offensively in Africa and Colombia. If a drone hit something like a refinery and there was significant impact, don't you think the status quo could change quickly?
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
The air defense systems for merchant vessels will need to be modular and portable. Many countries have legal prohibitions on armed civilian ships entering their waters. Which is stupid but won't change quickly.
Someone can probably drop $10m/unit money to a third world ish defense company to have a fully automated, radar slaved, generator backed autocannon in semi trailer or 40ft container form and have couples on the deck, and that is going to recoup in like few years rather than multiple decades, But then there will be risks of the offensive side escalating into coastal defense guns and SRBMs, which are going to be more challenging to shoot at, so peace would be cheaper if attainable, but if that is not an option...
Nice strawman argument there. No one here is proposing changes to school or aviation security rules.
Merchant vessels typically used to carry a variety of artillery and small arms for defense against pirates and hostile navies. That practice largely ended when the UK and then the USA established global hegemony and secured the sea lines of communication for everyone. But now the USA is no longer willing or able to play that role, so either merchant vessels have to be able to defend themselves using deadly force again or else trade will largely cease along routes within range of shithole countries.
You are perhaps mistaken here. The FAA allows passengers to take guns on planes provided they are documented and secured and checked into the hold. What the FAA is concerned about is people being personally armed on planes and there are obvious reasons for that.
They are largely unrelated to the reasons countries might have for being nervous about merchant vessels packing anti aircraft weaponry.
You are I think getting lost in your analogy and in the process conflating two different things:
- the reasons countries might want to prevent people from entering with weapons
Vs
- the reasons countries might have for being nervous about armed merchant vessels in their navigational waters
You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.
Modified cropduster AEW drones for detection and coordination, airburst howitzer rounds for initial sweeping, camera controlled Gatling guns for the ones escaped it, and conventional warhead SRBM for launch sites. Should be both budget and methods proportionate.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single MOAB? Is it an impossible number to reach for those unable to deliver MOAB?
We're talking about bunker-busters - the MOAB is not a bunker buster. It's an airburst weapon designed to clear out large open spaces, and isn't effective against hardened bunkers.
No reasonable amount of quadcopters could match a bunker-buster. Surface explosions are not very effective against buried targets.
The weight and density of the bunker-buster is extremely important to its operation. When dropped from a high altitude, it breaks into the bunker with sheer kinetic force, and then explodes once inside.
Yeah, I'm not a military expert and confused the ordinance nick names. To be sure, the kinetic force is definitely something that cannot be recreated with drone swarm attacks.
>How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single <orders of magnitude larger purpose designed munition>?
How long do I have to piss on a steel plate to get the same effect as a waterjet cutter?
Those are entirely different missions. A GBU-43 MOAB is used against soft targets on the ground. A GBU-28 is used against hardened buried targets. It's simply physically impossible to dig a big enough hole with a bunch of small drones or bombs: the only way to penetrate deeply enough is with a hard object moving really fast.
A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.
A MOAB can only blow up one target, 60000 drones can do a lot more damage. Just ask Russia how many tanks they have today, from the thousands they had a few years back.
61111 * $200 is only a little over $12million. The plane to deliver the MOAB is more than that. Also, why does it need to be a grenade? Why not deliver C4 or other explosive material?
The 200$ drones have a couple of kilometers range at best. You won't deliver them from 400 km away. You still need a delivery vehicle. But this discussion went off the rails, it's obvious fantasy land at this point.
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.
The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
If you are referring to the recent UAE datacenter attacks, AFAIK Amazon's services worked as advertised, but obviously a redundant resource is only as good as the number of copies you have left, and eventually 3 of 3 datacenters were hit.
Apparently not all AWS resources/services are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. in a different region) or not.
This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.
The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
Nah. There's no practical way to jam tight beam satellite data links unless you place the jammer near the ground terminal. And the US government has already stated that they would consider kinetic strikes on US-owned commercial satellites as an act of war.
Yes, striking a data center in the US would also be an act of war. But deterrence isn't very effective against hybrid or "gray zone" warfare. Let's say a drone swarm launched from a random shipping container destroys an Amazon data center in Virginia. US intelligence analysts determine with 80% confidence that the attack was carried out by a terrorist group sponsored by Russia. Would that justify kinetic retaliation against a nuclear power?
There is value in hardening critical data centers. Whether that means placing them in orbit or underground or equipping them with air defenses remains to be seen.
Oh I'm pretty sure if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike of some massive orders of magnitude of higher cost - I doubt it would be tit-for-tat, but more like sinking a navy/submarines/airforce, or something in the likes of that.
I'm not saying there's no value in hardening data centers (which I'm assuming many already are against fires/earthquakes...), but their location and distribution are as safe as they can be - as in, any attack on them would probably be a declaration of war.
In space you will always have to deal with deniability.
You're really missing the point. Retaliation is uncertain if the USA can't reliably determine which state sponsored a terrorist attack. Russia in particular has gotten fairly good at this lately. We think they have sponsored a series of arsons and assassinations in other NATO / EU countries but so far there's no hard evidence that would stand up in a criminal court (or at least nothing publicly released). They seem to be trying to stay just under the threshold that would trigger NATO Article 5.
Kinetic attacks against satellites would be less deniable. All major launches and orbiting objects are tracked so it would generally be possible to trace any weapon back to a specific country.
> if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike
How do you know that this has not happened yet?
How many NATO forests had burnt to a crisp in the last two years. How many Americans lose their homes or their lives on those? Why so many disposable local idiots wake up some day with the same idea to provoke a wildfire near their city just now? Or to riot in Europe just now?
Any response from USA or Europe yet?
All that they need is to detect, isolate and groom a local moron from the other coin of the planet, And if is caught, is not their problem.
In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.
Yeah, it still is. You might not get a permanent runaway Kessler effect, but you could still have an event that denies access to LEO for several years before it clears.
An event at one orbital altitude is also not confined to that altitude; debris can reach higher altitudes and affect satellites in those orbits.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
This is your regularly scheduled wake-up call on HN that (1) Dyson Spheres are built around stars, not planets, and (2) it is way way more difficult and energetic, in our Sun's gravity well, to launch inwards than outwards. Just ask any comet.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/drone gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.
I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.
I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.
Exactly, long-range drone attack capability is an asymmetric advantage for Ukraine only relative to their other capabilities, not relative to Russia. Russia can easily make Kyiv unlivable, as they are just starting to do.
I mean "physically or psychologically impossible to continue living in"--I have Ukrainian colleagues living in Kyiv and they report that only in the last few weeks has it become absolutely unbearable with air raid sirens around the clock.
I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
Apparently Wildberries carry/carried over 1/4 million items tagged as "for SMO" (Special Military Operation), so they had become a major part of the supply chain for Putin's war, which is why they were hit.
In the case of Wildberries we're not talking about "dual use" items like a sleeping bag that your government fails to provide you, we're talking about specifically tagging items (1/4 million of them!!) as being for the war. It's Wildberries' business (literally) if they want to be a supplier for the war, and profit from it, but obviously that does mean they become a target.
Cutting off the enemy supply line is a classic and obvious military strategy. Ukraine didn't choose to be attacked, nor did they choose for Wildberries to become part of the supply line. They are playing the cards they were dealt, and I would say doing so with remarkable restraint.
Ukrainian military and security officials have stated on and off the record that a major objective of the Wildberries strikes was civilian terror. Russia has taken them at exactly their word.
of course that'd be fine, under the Geneva convention a civilian object loses its protective status when it makes effective military contributions and its destruction confers a military advantage.
What's supposed to be the argument against it, inconvenience for American shoppers during a war of aggression?
I don't think the Geneva convention is that unequivocal, I believe there's also a duty to assess proportionality of military advantage vs. civilian risk.
I don't know what sites you frequent but strikes on distribution centers by both sides has been covered by mainstream US news.
Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?
The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
This is a revolutionary concept that you've discovered in 2026 that was more or less universally observed until the 21st century.
It's what I've been saying all along. Data centers are only an evolutionary, external manifestation of things which have existed all along.
When computing resources became accessible to the average company, average companies introduced machine rooms. Below-average companies stashed computers in a closet or non-dedicated space, but the point is, that for decades, ordinary businesses had an ordinary complement of on-prem compute.
The whole point of data centers is economy of scale, consolidation, and centralization. The whole point of "cloud services" is to aggregate services where they can be provided to dozens, hundreds, thousands of tenant companies and individuals, rather than everyone federating their machine rooms and closets in every location everywhere.
It is the ultimate paradigm shift of "thin client connects to time-share servers" being recapitulated. Instead of TN3270 and IBM's mainframes, we have AWS, Chromebooks, and mobile apps.
Why do you think there is a crisis in commercial properties and office space. Many companies have gutted their capex servers and networking gear because they moved to the cloud. New companies basically don't need to build out an enormous, resilient physical plant to support those resources, if they're cloud-based.
So if you believe that the entire tech industry is gonna reverse course, just because of the threat of some DCs being reduced to slag and melted rare earth, you live in a fantasy world, my friend.
I’m a bit older than that: I have lived the swing from centralized remote computing (long lines and/or dial in, both to the mainframe) to distributed local computing, back to centralized computing.
I remember datacenters being close to the humans and then migrating to be close to the power supply (check out The Dallas, OR, for example) to now locating where they can and scrambling for power, which has become the bottleneck.
At this point I think there’s a diseconomy of scale with the need for all these ad hoc power systems.
I’m not suggesting a return to the captive “machine room”. I’m saying that instead of a mega-plant, smaller, distributed ones might actually be a local optimum.
(Oh, and I have had a rack full of hardware in a data center for my personal compute for more than a quarter century. So yes, I have some experience in history)
>It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
In the current climate I think the less project approvals you need to get the better
Will it be possible? Yes. Will it be easy, or cheap? No.
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
I use ARM VPSes for quite some time and they are pretty performant. They don't have to replace with x86 systems. Linux on ARM is pretty mature and production ready at this point.
I don't know the hardware inside the data center, and it might not be a "AI" data center to begin with. NAND is a big problem, but DDR4 memory is not AFAICS, and if you need CPU power for serving stuff, getting it is easy.
If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!
my Arm/Android set-top box of choice for, ahem, streaming subscriptions, is up 50% in price despite no changes to the design since I bought it 2 years ago. And that's on aliexpress where margins are limited.
Problem is that RAM and disk manufacturing capacity is all sold out years ahead. Yandex while being largest IT company in Russia have nowhere near the money to compete with AI hyperscalers.
Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.
great question, I don't have a good answer. supposedly there are modern gpus in Russia, here you can rent a H200 (a GPU which was released after the war had started)
https://selectel.ru/services/dedicated/hgx-h200/
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
It's fine. Putin doesn't even know how to use computers, let alone Internet. So all this is not bothering him at all. And he is the only person who can decide to stop the war; nobody else has that ability.
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
Probably phoned it in because they know the ukranians can just not use yandex maps to bomb russia. But hey, boss gives you a dumb easy job you don't argue.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s shipping containers or even privately owned houses, filled with optically controlled or autonomous drones, sitting near high value infrastructure around the world. Mirroring those Ukrainian trucks.
What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
The only ones I know are the older timers with rosy soviet glasses. Young people, the ones who would do the actual fighting, seem to have incredibly low support for it.
Russians won't storm anything, but if you observe their actual behavior, it's easy to see that they don't attribute their problems to Ukraine. No one is volunteering to go fight there without very high signup bonuses and salaries.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
You know, things like coups exist. In many, many other countries leadership as bad as Russia's would have been ousted in a military coup long time ago, and the new regime would have pursued saner policy.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
Your opinions are much better thought-out than the most I have seen. I respect that. But you have several severe errors in your thinking I will try to convince you of:
1. Russia's military is not independent. FSB is above them. This "cutting the balls of the military" has been a long-term strategy. This is not comparable at all with the USA, let alone Turkey.
2. Military, power, strength resources are purposefully divided between different players, military does not have a monopoly on power. There are also FSB (with their own forces, judges, prison, killing teams), National Guard (have tanks), Private Companies (decreased/fractured after the Wagner debacle). Heck, Kadyrov's thugs are part of that equation as well.
3. There really aren't examples of successful coups from the bottom only.
4. No, I do not suggest negotiations with Putin, quite the opposite. Way more should be done to get rid of him and his family personally, and not pussyfoot around it.
5. EU's problem was and still is anemic, slow and stupid action (lack of). Damn morons.
6. No, a significant portion of the population does not support the war. Do North Koreans truly support their regime as witnessed by the voting results and by the fact that people are not protesting and are not organizing a coup?
7. Russia had Oligarchs, but doesn't have anymore. Oligarchy means that rich people can influence politics. In Russia they can't. The typical western "money brings political influence/power" does not apply in Russia. In Russia the rule is "political position (given by Putin) brings money (as long as Putin allows)". Businessmen have no independence. Check what happened to Tinkov (Tinkov bank). And he is the lucky one.
> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy
It doesn't matter, just like it didn't matter to British citizenry who endured the blitz that the Nazis had self-couped, and Germans couldn't vote Hitler out. The only 2 choices available are to roll over and be occupied, or fight back against the aggressor state.
The occupation will clearly not happen, therefore the most reasonable amd rational strategy is to hide your own feelings, not to do anything drastic that would endanger yourself, and just wait until the dictator dies.
Stop with the nonsense. You can actually see the real voting results from the foreign voting stations (Helsinki, Berlin, etc). The support of antiwar candidates is overwhelming. Putin's United Russia party gets very few votes, and even those typically come from pensioners and people who moved abroad 20+ years ago. These are the facts.
> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
And none of this matters, because Russia has no tradition of democracy and has always been ruled by dictators who derive their legitimacy through other means; mainly through their success in expanding the empire. The more you steal and the more people die in the process, the greater leader you are. Putin is a continuation of that tradition and enjoys widespread support among a population that shares the same vision: that Russia is a chosen nation and that being conquered by Russia is a privilege.
Russian history offers an excellent counterexample in the downfall of the USSR when Gorbachev and others lost their legitimacy. Formally, they remained the top figures in the government; in practice, people gradually stopped following them over a period of a few years as everything was disintegrating (shortage of basic products, pointless war in Afghanistan, disasters like Chernobyl, etc). The people simply chose new leaders from among themselves and turned their backs to Moscow.
For example, a police station might've simply ignored orders from the ministry of internal affairs and instead followed the recommendations of a popular local figure (often a factory manager, uni professor, journalist, artist or writer). As districts increasingly acted this way, Moscow gradually lost control over the police force, which became decentralized and locally run. In the end, bosses in Moscow could yell all they wanted into a phone, but that did not move a single police officer on the ground.
Russian central government is currently nowhere near such loss of legitimacy. Tens of millions of people carry out the orders of their Führer every day. Some have stepped into a foreign country while carrying a gun. Others are milling artillery shells or programming cruise missiles. Some are sitting on HN trying to convince the world how their Führer has no other option than to murder Ukrainian children every night.
There is no pushback worth mentioning. Last year, out of 140 million people living in Russia, only 38 were arrested for anti-war protests. Add a few hundred more for anti-war posts on the social media. Completely insignificant numbers. Russians on HN will gladly explain how oppressive the climate in Russia has become and how difficult (gasp!) it is to protest, but they fail to recognize the downstream effects: that Ukrainians have to pay with their lives every single day for the cancer that the cowardice of Russians has unleashed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are in mortal danger right now on the frontline, trying to stop what Russians are too afraid to confront themselves.
Either the Russian people are pro-war, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is good.
Or they are anti-war but helpless to stop it, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is also good.
Either way if your country's existence is threatened and your people are being killed you don't sit back and do nothing because you are scared it'll make the attacker unhappy.
> if your country's existence is threatened and your people are being killed you don't sit back and do nothing because you are scared it'll make the attacker unhappy.
Sure, but there are many different ways of making your attacker unhappy, and some of them might decrease your chances of winning, so you might not want to do those.
Not saying that's the case here (I don't think it is), but the concept is sound.
That has been said for four years. Due to russians using mobile incinerators to conceal causulties (and war crimes), not even caskets arrives home. Most russians know this, but what does it help.
The problem is Russians are too afraid to turn on their motherland because "reasons" but that is exactly what has to happen to end the war. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it.
Americans are so naive about the "turn on their motherland" part. It's not really a reply to you, I just remembered some american whom I met and he was treating us as kids, saying things as "alone you are weak but together you are strong!"
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people?
You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
When Navalny came back, over 300 000 people came out to protest, despite being terrorized. That did nothing. It's not like those people had guns and were ready to use them. And even if they did, that would only be an additional argument to use extra power of Putin's police state. Heck, if people did that, the very same "European anti-Putinists" would heavily condemn the violence and would support the crackdown on the "violent protestors" ("The future of the country is in stability and communication, not in violence. We urge people to lower their weapons. We support President Putin's attempts to keep the country stable and do what is necessary. We will send him an additional supply of tear gas and protest dispersal equipment. EU and Russia must stand together in these trying times.").
They could take accountability and face the consequences of resigning for their country responsibilities.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
Like the US, they are concerned about the cost of fuel and food. They, however, do not have a democratic process to fall back to, and therefore no hope of controlling these factors, ever. I suspect they would be a lot more willing to form a real rebellion once the issues get bad enough at Putins hand.
> The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like?
I don't think that's the primary goal here anyway, it's to disrupt the Russian economy so that it becomes harder to recruit, provision and rearm their war effort.
Though, like the Wildberries attacks, it's likely that these datacentres are also being used by the military for data processing too. The Russian military certainly aren't as worried about US/Europeans about using civilian infrastructure for their military efforts.
There are two points to answer this question.
First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
Tragically a lot Buchas happened[0], and there's plenty of videos of civilian executions - God only knows what atrocities are yet to be discovered in occupied territories.
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
You should also look at the evidence for executions of "collaborators" after Ukraine recaptured e.g. Kherson, Kupyansk, Izyum (and, in fact, Bucha, although there is also plenty of evidence of Russian war crimes there).
Of course there are plenty of evidence, including video records. That's the most disconcerting thing, most of these crimes against humanity and war crimes were done out in the open.
Most like because they thought Ukraine was going to capitulate in few days, and they could hide the crimes of genocide, like it was done in the past.
That's how sickening this was, because Russia thought they were going to get away with it, they were just executing civilians for fun.
The whole world watched this in real time.
It's evil in at it's worst, for some sick illusion of ethnic superiority.
It's ordinary Russians that are going into Ukraine to kill Ukrainians. Or do you seem to forget that this is being driven by contractors?
These are people going into a neighboring country that posed no threat to them, or to their way of living, to make money killing what many deem an inferior ethnic group.
Couldn't they choose not to go? Don't they have family members? Friends?
Just because some don't want to have anything to do with it, they're still paying taxes, funding the war, they're part of the economy that supports it.
Going about their lives with head down is being part of the problem.
Should we call it "Yandex experiment" from now on? Because it seems like the experiment didn't go well:
April 27, 2020:
"Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."
https://zona-media.translate.goog/news/2020/04/27/navyandex?...
The Yandex of today isn't exactly the Yandex of 2020. The people who were at the helm back then whitewashed their reputations, renamed to Nebius, and are now supplying compute to Palantir.
If this was whitewashing... then war is deninitely piece.
Loose talk is noose talk
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If you gear up with a translator, you may read this in-depth post on the events made by well-known Ukrainian tech executive Sergiy Petrenko, who also happened to be the CEO of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex in its early days:
https://blognot.co/ataka-na-yandeks-v-sasovo/
Thank you this was the most insight of the current impact and of continued escalation of datacenter strikes
American and European data center providers should start thinking about design for resiliency versus drone and missile strikes.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...
Outside say redundancy across sites (a thing many offer in one way or another) ... there's not much you can DO.
When I used to work with US bank and financial institutions we used to do "disaster recovery tests" and it effectively meant they shut off a whole site and ran on their backups to see what happened.
Offering redundancy across zones is one thing (and I'm pleased to offer it to my customers). Getting them to use it is quite another thing.
Even if it was "only" 2x or 3x the expense to have a completely multizone setup, the ongoing operational burden is too high to justify over the 2, 10, or 100 year timeframe when no outages happen which could have been avoided.
Companies dependent on a single Amazon zone just give up and wait during a zone outage, blame it on Amazon, then get back to making money the next day.
Well that's a long way of saying even in military offensive scenarios, Amazon is expected to have some zone up to use which is to say they're doing a decent job.
Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.
>there's not much you can DO
AT&T used to put telecom switches in bunkers.
ATT was paid by the government to do that. I doubt the commercial market can support those costs.
Right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Offices for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_of_government
Preferably after they thought a little more about the more regular fire and/or water ingress hazards.
Now that you can stuff an entire room with only high-G-resistant solid state drives, there should be fewer excuses for losing machines before determining a fire suppression system to be either inoperable or insufficient (but never tested and measured under realistic conditions).
Not just data centers. Europe is close enough to need an all-encompassing national strategy against this.
Europe needs a "national" strategy? Do you mean regional or international strategy?
Supranational, at the EU level.
Yes, this makes sense! Got it.
During the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022, it was realized that almost all of Ukraine's redundant offsite backups were in various locations in Kyiv.
More sanctions, that will show ‘em!
Not reelecting Donald Trump to stop the aggressive destruction of global collaboration and peace would be a vastly cheaper strategy
I'm surprised domestic groups have not hit the US datacenters yet
deleted - misinterpreted parent comment
Um... is there another way to read this?
>I think most of the opposition really wants is stability and a return to normality. Blowing shit up is diametrically opposed to that goal.
So there isnt terrorism because most opposition dont want to blow up data centers? You are identifying opposition as potential domestic terrorists. As opposed to saying there just arent these type of domestic terrorists. Which have nothing to do with normal opposition.
And then you seem to imply there may be reason to resort to domestic terrorism?!
>Maybe only once most people realize that normality isn't coming back will that change.
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Once again Elon Musk thinks ahead of the curve a bit. Sticking the DC is space is a pain in some ways but sklces a ton of sociopolitical problems.
An in turn it's exposed to solar flares, fast space junk, Russian and Chinese anti satellite weapons.
What happens when dozens of space centers leave space junk in orbit ?
Say goodbye to safe space launches...
Space launches have never been "safe". It's always a risky endeavor for a variety of reasons.
But concerns over space junk are vastly overblown. Orbit is a big place and satellites can maneuver to avoid the riskiest paths. And if data center satellites ever actually get launched (might never happen) then they'll be in low orbit where any junk will burn up within a few years.
I should have qualified my usage of the term safe. Space launches of course have risks, because space is hard. I was simply trying to highlight that more space junk whizzing by at very very fast speeds could cause major damage and NASA & ISS have always been worried about this.
That's one of the reasons that ecologist push-back against "technologists" who say "just build nuclear reactors everywhere"...
we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure
Except that nuclear reactors are very robustly built, unlike data centers. Nuclear stations are designed to withstand against the airplane dropping in.
Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.
Lowest bid small reactors would be nothing like the more or less properly built old ones.
Maybe the rules have changed in the US, but as of early 2023 SMRs were subject to the same "Aircraft Rule" regarding their containment structures as any other commercial reactor.
If we regard large nuclear power stations as emblematic of centralized power generation, rather than just the nuclear aspect of it, then another target is the step-up transformer and the rest of the connection to the transmission grid.
I don't think those are designed to withstand an aircraft dropping in, nor would their destruction count as the use of nuclear weapons.
I agree. The only real argument against large nuclear reactors is the negative security aspect. All other arguments are nonsense as far as I am concerned. Even this aspect can be reduced by using smaller reactors. The existence of a negative argument doesn't mean it should influence our decisions in the long run. In general, the argument is real but isn't significant enough to be taken seriously.
It won't defend against Putin sending 50 drones against it. And yes, it is useful to worry about nuclear proliferation, and absolutely not "silly"
From reddit - "Right now, Yandex's biggest services are down: taxis, delivery, and Alisa. Moscow is paralyzed; it's impossible to order a taxi. Orders aren't going through."
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1x1q...
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Can you explain "the usual psy ops" please? Who benefits from people incorrectly believing Russia's taxis are down?
7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable
Morelli explains this principle or commandment as follows: "With rare exceptions, people tend to join the victorious cause. In the case of war, the preference of public opinion depends very much on the apparent results of the conflict. If the results are not good, the propaganda must disguise our losses and exaggerate those of the enemy." [0]
It's the same in Russia, if you are wondering
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Pr...
Thank you.
Now after third Yandex datacenter got hit the taxi is down
I went online in half an hour but some non-essential services were shed.
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GP is a russian shill that should have been kicked off HN long ago.
That may be so. As a pro-Western-values shill, who am I to judge?
[Edit]: I guess I meant to say, I'd love to understand Russians' point of view. I don't understand at all.
You're not going to get Russians' point of view from Kremlin shills. The Russians that I know are utterly disgusted by what is going on in their country but they are not going to speak out publicly for fear of reprisals on their families.
All the Russians I know are outside Russia, for obvious reasons. I have zero idea what an average Russian in Russia thinks. Some distant acquiantances wrote some scary stuff on Facebook some years back. Mind, highly intelligent and educated people.
And with all respect, I'd hazard an unsubstantiated guess: you don't really know what average Russian thinks either, as you're probably in contact with Russian intelligentsia.
I did not write nor did I suggest that I know what the average Russian thinks. I only wrote about the ones that I know.
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Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...
Thank you for the info.
Can't really blame Russia for returning the favor in Iran.
They are used to it. USA and Russia were "trading favors" in Syria for a decade. Unfortunately for Russia, those "favors" are now hitting Moscow.
In Vietnam, the USSR gave a considerable amount of equipment to Vietnam, they stationed 3,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and over a dozen of them were killed. The USSR told Vietnam where B-52s were heading so they could evacuate military leaders and get other military units out of the way. Soviet crews were firing SAMs at F-4 Phantoms and shooting them down, and Soviet pilots were flying planes.
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...
If you hand your opponent in which you actively shitstir a vietnafghanistiraqmongolia, they will use that. Life by the sword, die by the sword?
> USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles.
Translated, we give them the missiles, we give them the intelligence, we give them the target, we set it up… we let them push the red button.
You also set up Hormuz and tariffs and spread discord between EU citiz ns through speeches of high officials and threaten Greenland, causing us to prepare to defend on multiple fronts while often publicly supporting Russia too.
Are you sure the missiles are support?
I'm not sure the US has given Ukraine any long range missiles.
The ones hitting the data centers are I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Point_FP-1
I don't think the US even has any like that to give.
The long range strikes only started after Trump's "you have no cards" oval office shindig where he basically told Zelensky to surrender and cut aid. After that Trump lost a lot of influence to protect Russia.
The only reason the war has turned lately is because the USA was the greatest defensive shield for the Russians, by demanding that Ukraine not cross the red line of the border.
Yeah, apparently the US does all the work. Meanwhile, Trump is asking Zelenskyy to stop the strikes.
Europe is asking Zelenskyy to stop the strikes.
They're just using USA as political cover, which is how it has always been been. USA warned Europe for decades not to become reliant on cheap Russian gas because it would be weaponized against them. The Biden administration even sanctioned German companies [1] building Nordstream 2 because it was a Russian geopolitical project.
We see how it all turned out.
[1] https://2021-2025.state.gov/nord-stream-2-and-potential-sanc...
Germany maybe, not whole Europe. Nordics, Poland and Baltic states certainly understand that stopping Russia requires hard measures.
It's too bad Eastern Germany never managed to deruzzify itself properly after DDR fell.
Stopping Russia is equivalent to stopping Germany and Japan in WW2. Not applicable. So the next thing is to hope it wears itself out, just like it did in Afghhanistan. And later maybe another dissolution, just like the USSR. But that would possibly also mean nukes getting left over in new jurisdictions.
Trump didn't ask Zelensky to stop the strikes because German diesel prices are high. He did it because the US midterm elections are coming up and his party's base are disproportionately harmed by high gas prices.
> Europe is asking Zelenskyy to stop the strikes.
Europe is most certainly not doing this. Trump isn't even serious, he's just "telling them to stop" in order to aid European anti-Trump propaganda which is used in Europe ironically to support US interests. Trump doesn't care that diesel is going up, especially because his friends are selling it. Cutting off Russian ability to join in this smorgasbord by causing a local diesel shortage for them also cuts off any concern he could possibly have about diesel prices.
Notice that he didn't end US diesel exports, he entertained the idea.
If Europe thinks they're "in this alone," and Europe is the "only one left" who will "defend" Ukraine, then Europe has to rearm in fear and figure out how to send more support to Ukraine, like to cut social services and ignore their heat/power bills to do it (and to steal from Russian accounts, which is being debated again.)
They will buy the weapons from the US, they will shore up the Ukraine war for the US, the will buy more LNG from the US, they will destroy local anti-US politicians for the US in favor of NATO, all to own Trump. Remember, Trump "hates" NATO. Not that he doesn't support everything they're doing, he's just threatened to stop paying for it i.e. they'll serve us for free. He's going to build a Ukraine War, and Europe's going to pay for it.
As a tactic, it was obvious why the US/Ukraine had to be aggressive right now; not only is Russia doing exceedingly well financially due to what the dumb Iran War did to prices, but winter is coming. For Ukraine, they were convinced that this was their last chance to make an impact before they were frozen. For the US it was an opportunity to burn weapons (so we can grab US taxes to make more), to get Russia to stop exports (because LNG goes up in Europe, and US oil goes up in general) and lastly and maybe most importantly to raise political support in Russia for strikes to civilian infrastructure. Putin is the conservative in Russia, and the politicians who are against him are demanding that he escalate rather than continue to bleed Russian lives forever.
If the US can convince Russia, who has been very gentle with Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, to destroy Ukrainian power going into the winter, the misery and death that will hit Ukrainians will be talked about for the next century (barring an big warming effect of the extreme El Niño.) That might fire up Europe even more into a delusionally belligerent frenzy (European NATO elites are losing the population), and possibly shore up support for more spending on Ukraine in the US itself. The US has suffered through a distinct lack of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, and this would be a great time to get some.
As recently as 2 weeks ago Macron specifically asked Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.
https://www.eurointegration.com.ua/eng/news/2026/09/25/72462...
Well, did Russia agree? They didn't and they won't so this is moot. You are certainly able to grasp the diff between Trump wanting unilateral Ukraine attack stop and Macron wanting a bilateral stop.
Macron is the leader of France. AFAIK there's no common EU position on this.
I think this is the No True Scotsman fallacy [1].
> Europe is asking Ukraine to halt destruction of Russia's oil infrastructure.
> Europe is not asking for this.
> France is asking Ukraine to halt destruction of Russia's oil infrastructure.
> No true European is asking for this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
All I was trying to say is this wasn't a request at the EU level. I assume by Europe you meant EU. Correct me if I'm wrong.
You are correct that indeed France made the proposal that Russia stops destroying Ukrainian energy infrastructure and Ukraine would do the same thing. France as a country has that right to make such proposals. That doesn't make it a request or proposal at the EU level.
I have no idea how the no true scotsman fallacy applies to this. Maybe I'm missing something here
> the misery and death that will hit Ukrainians will be talked about for the next century
Before that, more Ukrainian women and children would be refugees in Europe.
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And Ukraine provides extensive access to their mineral resources. "We sell them" would be more accurate.
Is not a gift if you pay for it.
Seems like a mistake to stagger these hits, doing both in the same hour could have taken out backups before they had a chance to replicate elsewhere.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
Backups with nowhere to restore to don’t do you much good.
They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
> They just re-host it on chinese clouds.
Isn't it difficult to get access to Chinese clouds without having legal entities registered in China?
It's illegal to store CID outside of russia. Tovarish from KGB is watching and ready for action.
coming soon on alibaba: data-centre-specific bomber drones, sales to all parties, no questions asked!
> So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Russia isn't a Western Democracy.
Every country is a democracy, some are just temporarily repressed ones :)
Did I just read that Russia has a local ISP called "SkyNet"? :joy:
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
There's little difference between 1 hour and 48 hours when it comes to the amount of data in question here.
20PB in 48 hours over a 1Tbps connection. Seems big enough for a lot of customers to recover their data or preserve backups.
> 1Tbps
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire that can spread, but are not going to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
Energy facilities have the destructive energy stockpiled on-site. Don't need to fly in much force yourself.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
I think the energy facilities being hit are mostly refineries - not storage, and anyways any bulk storage is just temporary for bulk transport for export or to the front, etc, so having it in 25gal cans wouldn't be very helpful!
Countries still have strategic reserves, but usually of crude, not refined product --> decentralized reserves would help with supply cuts by any cause. The benefit would be too individual vs export/frontlines, so won't happen.
it's storage being hit too.
There are chemical based emp bombs, NNEMPs, if the penetrate through to the inside and set that off it seems like it would be pretty effective on datacenters.
Russian air defense is multi layered and relatively strong, so one of Ukraine's main strategies so far has been just to overwhelm them with volume. You want mass volume cheap and cheerful, not expensive ones, unless for the occasional strategic target.
Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.
Taking out GPUs is more important than storage nowdays.
Replacing the RAM is going to be expensive
New Startup idea - private anti-air batteries for data centers
We have this already in Ukraine: https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/thirty-companies-have-already-joi...
The continued integration of companies with defense like this is fascinating
The original tabletop version of the Shadowrun RPG from FASA came out in the late 80s. We (friends and I) started getting into it in the early 90s.
We felt a lot of it was… unnervingly believable in multiple aspects. As in, what parent mentioned.
I do not look forward to the “Seretech Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Seretech_Decision), “Shiawase Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shiawase_Decision) or similar sorts of judicial rulings in the real world. True nightmare fuel.
——-
Somewhat… prescient, is the Shiawase Decision.
This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.
After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.
Unironically could be a legit business model.
Not just for datacenters either - warehouses, refineries, power stations, you could sell to anybody with a building full of expensive stuff.
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
Obviously your biggest customers would be in active warzones, or areas worried about soon becoming warzones.
Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
> Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
The continental USA has not yet been threatened by drones.
The USA is, however, the sovereign power controlling the smouldering ruins of military bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and the recently evacuated airfield in England. Some might say those constitute US soil.
Insurgents in several countries in Africa are using them. Narcos in Colombia are using them. Its inevitable that they will be used here.
Ukraine showed you can deploy from shipping containers delivered inside hostile lands quite successfully. As much stuff gets smuggled into US ports on a daily basis, sneaking a few of these into the US isn't impossible. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
It hasn't been done because when people do that kind of thing to the US they get regime changed.
How's that regime change working in Iran?
Dudes still dead. People don't want to directly order stuff that will get them killed.
I'm talking about as a response to already being attacked, not just someone sitting around looking to poke the bear. Iran has the drones, they've been attacked, and would make sense to be looking for a plan like this.
When the US gets directly attacked they do not play around anymore with little factories here and there getting tactically bombed. You will get boots on the ground, the government will fall, and the country probably occupied for 20+ years after. Japan is still basically occupied 80 years later.
Where have you been? Shock and awe is so twenty years ago. Ever since the shameful capitulation in Syria, American boots have been on the retreat, globally.
Ukraine is left to fend for itself. The Taliban runs Afghanistan. Iraq is still in bits. A new ceasefire with Iran is announced every other week.
No, the current policy is to shout loudly and carry a small stick.
Lots of "surgical" airstrikes, each lasting one media cycle and accompanied by a truckload of bluster and spin.
The current occupant of the White House appears to think foreign wars are principally a communications problem.
There's little reason to believe US soil is particularly safe from drone attacks.
> areas worried about soon becoming warzones.
So...the west if we go by the recent statements of chancellor Merz
> Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
This would be incredibly stupid. An attack on American soil could be met with a literally nuclear response against Iran or whoever perpetrated it.
This is trivially falsifiable. We didn't nuke Afghanistan after 9/11.
(We did nominally succeed in regime change in the country that didn't attack us, though...)
> Afghanistan after 9/11.
It wasn't Afghanistan (as a nation) that directly carried out 9/11. The government did have close ties with Al Qaeda and sheltered it though.
That's the point. Nuclear weapons don't deter a group like Al Qaeda.
Yes they don't, mostly because it's a relatively small group of individuals dispersed in a huge country. The same cannot be said of the Iranian government.
You said
> An attack on American soil could be met with a literally nuclear response against Iran or whoever perpetrated it.
Al Qaeda is in the "whoever" category that you claimed would be met with a nuclear response.
Wiping out the Iranian government will only strenghten the IRGC and other rabid anti US Iranian groups politically. As demonstrated by the recent US strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, wiped out senior Iranian leadership and that girs' school.
Stop watching Hollywood movies where America always wins, and look out the window at the real world.
America a super power ran away from the Houthis... who only have toyotas, no army, no navy and no airforce.
Glad no one has taken the invitation from the President to “take out” San Diego/LA.
Prediction markets are betting on a false flag attack around midterms.
Given how quickly this technology is proliferating I think that could change. Numerous non-state groups are using drones offensively in Africa and Colombia. If a drone hit something like a refinery and there was significant impact, don't you think the status quo could change quickly?
Yes, you can - but you need to fill out a few forms first, before you start the music.
believe it or not but legislation can change pretty quickly when shit actually hits the fan
I'm waiting for someone to try the self defense angle :)
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
Russia has serious supply chain restrictions against them making life pretty difficult and expensive.
HN discover the defence industry…
Oil tankers..
The air defense systems for merchant vessels will need to be modular and portable. Many countries have legal prohibitions on armed civilian ships entering their waters. Which is stupid but won't change quickly.
Someone can probably drop $10m/unit money to a third world ish defense company to have a fully automated, radar slaved, generator backed autocannon in semi trailer or 40ft container form and have couples on the deck, and that is going to recoup in like few years rather than multiple decades, But then there will be risks of the offensive side escalating into coastal defense guns and SRBMs, which are going to be more challenging to shoot at, so peace would be cheaper if attainable, but if that is not an option...
Why do you think, airports and planes ban people with weapons other than the host country ?
Why do you think schools ban kids to carry weapons ?
Do you think letting anyone to bring weapons into any country might end well ?
Nice strawman argument there. No one here is proposing changes to school or aviation security rules.
Merchant vessels typically used to carry a variety of artillery and small arms for defense against pirates and hostile navies. That practice largely ended when the UK and then the USA established global hegemony and secured the sea lines of communication for everyone. But now the USA is no longer willing or able to play that role, so either merchant vessels have to be able to defend themselves using deadly force again or else trade will largely cease along routes within range of shithole countries.
So what reason does the FAA give for not allowing passengers to take weapons such as guns on a plane ?
You are perhaps mistaken here. The FAA allows passengers to take guns on planes provided they are documented and secured and checked into the hold. What the FAA is concerned about is people being personally armed on planes and there are obvious reasons for that.
They are largely unrelated to the reasons countries might have for being nervous about merchant vessels packing anti aircraft weaponry.
You are I think getting lost in your analogy and in the process conflating two different things:
- the reasons countries might want to prevent people from entering with weapons
Vs
- the reasons countries might have for being nervous about armed merchant vessels in their navigational waters
You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
More DCs are than obviously required for the battery stores that these laser turrets will shoot.
Obelisks from Command and Conquer pinned to the roof of the DC would be amusing although personally I'm leaning towards prism towers.
The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.
Smart munitions for the early warning, signal intelligence, and radar, second wave is dumb, fast, cheap munitions for kinetic solving.
Modified cropduster AEW drones for detection and coordination, airburst howitzer rounds for initial sweeping, camera controlled Gatling guns for the ones escaped it, and conventional warhead SRBM for launch sites. Should be both budget and methods proportionate.
MTCR, ITAR, EAR, NFA ...
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
There surely is a point where it's cheaper and safer to bury them underground.
I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.
> it's cheaper and safer to bury them underground.
It did not help the Iranians and their nuclear facilities.
Cyberbunker was shut down too soon.
Look up the capabilities of GBU-28 and other Bunker Busters first.
These are a lot more expensive and difficult to deploy. They weigh several tons. You can't just strap one to a $200 quadcopter and fly it over.
How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single MOAB? Is it an impossible number to reach for those unable to deliver MOAB?
We're talking about bunker-busters - the MOAB is not a bunker buster. It's an airburst weapon designed to clear out large open spaces, and isn't effective against hardened bunkers.
No reasonable amount of quadcopters could match a bunker-buster. Surface explosions are not very effective against buried targets.
The weight and density of the bunker-buster is extremely important to its operation. When dropped from a high altitude, it breaks into the bunker with sheer kinetic force, and then explodes once inside.
Yeah, I'm not a military expert and confused the ordinance nick names. To be sure, the kinetic force is definitely something that cannot be recreated with drone swarm attacks.
>How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single <orders of magnitude larger purpose designed munition>?
How long do I have to piss on a steel plate to get the same effect as a waterjet cutter?
About the same answer.
Those are entirely different missions. A GBU-43 MOAB is used against soft targets on the ground. A GBU-28 is used against hardened buried targets. It's simply physically impossible to dig a big enough hole with a bunch of small drones or bombs: the only way to penetrate deeply enough is with a hard object moving really fast.
A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.
A MOAB can only blow up one target, 60000 drones can do a lot more damage. Just ask Russia how many tanks they have today, from the thousands they had a few years back.
61111 * $200 is only a little over $12million. The plane to deliver the MOAB is more than that. Also, why does it need to be a grenade? Why not deliver C4 or other explosive material?
The 200$ drones have a couple of kilometers range at best. You won't deliver them from 400 km away. You still need a delivery vehicle. But this discussion went off the rails, it's obvious fantasy land at this point.
When will the payload be quadruped robots that can walk in through the door?
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.
to use a GBU-28 or similar you need to establish air superiority first
"Silo"
The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
If you are referring to the recent UAE datacenter attacks, AFAIK Amazon's services worked as advertised, but obviously a redundant resource is only as good as the number of copies you have left, and eventually 3 of 3 datacenters were hit.
Apparently not all AWS resources/services are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. in a different region) or not.
This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.
https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind
The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
Weren't the Yandex facilities behind multiple layers of defense systems?
I feel like China and US are the only ones in the next 50 years who'll have launch capability cheap enough to hit satellites.
Behind the same defense systems as the refineries and Wildberries I'm sure.
Nah. There's no practical way to jam tight beam satellite data links unless you place the jammer near the ground terminal. And the US government has already stated that they would consider kinetic strikes on US-owned commercial satellites as an act of war.
But striking a data center in the US isn't an act of war?
I don't get the defense argument for space data centers.
Yes, striking a data center in the US would also be an act of war. But deterrence isn't very effective against hybrid or "gray zone" warfare. Let's say a drone swarm launched from a random shipping container destroys an Amazon data center in Virginia. US intelligence analysts determine with 80% confidence that the attack was carried out by a terrorist group sponsored by Russia. Would that justify kinetic retaliation against a nuclear power?
There is value in hardening critical data centers. Whether that means placing them in orbit or underground or equipping them with air defenses remains to be seen.
Oh I'm pretty sure if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike of some massive orders of magnitude of higher cost - I doubt it would be tit-for-tat, but more like sinking a navy/submarines/airforce, or something in the likes of that.
I'm not saying there's no value in hardening data centers (which I'm assuming many already are against fires/earthquakes...), but their location and distribution are as safe as they can be - as in, any attack on them would probably be a declaration of war.
In space you will always have to deal with deniability.
You're really missing the point. Retaliation is uncertain if the USA can't reliably determine which state sponsored a terrorist attack. Russia in particular has gotten fairly good at this lately. We think they have sponsored a series of arsons and assassinations in other NATO / EU countries but so far there's no hard evidence that would stand up in a criminal court (or at least nothing publicly released). They seem to be trying to stay just under the threshold that would trigger NATO Article 5.
Kinetic attacks against satellites would be less deniable. All major launches and orbiting objects are tracked so it would generally be possible to trace any weapon back to a specific country.
> if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike
How do you know that this has not happened yet?
How many NATO forests had burnt to a crisp in the last two years. How many Americans lose their homes or their lives on those? Why so many disposable local idiots wake up some day with the same idea to provoke a wildfire near their city just now? Or to riot in Europe just now?
Any response from USA or Europe yet?
All that they need is to detect, isolate and groom a local moron from the other coin of the planet, And if is caught, is not their problem.
In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.
Kessler syndrome isn't a real concern in low orbit due to atmospheric drag.
Yeah, it still is. You might not get a permanent runaway Kessler effect, but you could still have an event that denies access to LEO for several years before it clears.
An event at one orbital altitude is also not confined to that altitude; debris can reach higher altitudes and affect satellites in those orbits.
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Batch processing could be done in solar orbit.
Just add standardized bremer walls and bulkheads to the interior?
Sounds like Snow Crash becoming slowly a reality.
Russian companies have had mercenaries of different kinds for some time now. Im sure Redut has anti air batteries.
Much of this was taken back into government control after Wagner shot down government helicopters and a plane.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
Do the maths, defending any target with multi million defensive missiles against MIRV or drones that cost thousands is not sustainable.
Ask the US bases around the gulf who well the Patriots and other systems worked.
Russia recently ordered corporations to start funding their own air defense.
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
It is, or at least it's expected that Russian companies get their own air defense:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/28/russia-lets-privat...
Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
A lot of dystopian science fiction is turning out to be a bit more on the optimistic side.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build a fence around the building? They are cheap and easily repaired.
It can be hard making one good enough to stop incoming threats.
New Startup idea - A railgun that launches dictators and fascists into the sun.
This is your regularly scheduled wake-up call on HN that (1) Dyson Spheres are built around stars, not planets, and (2) it is way way more difficult and energetic, in our Sun's gravity well, to launch inwards than outwards. Just ask any comet.
Giant leap for mankind
Kickstarter? I'll contribute.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/drone gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
The irony of your username is not lost on me.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
What do you suggest for Ukraine? What's their alternative if they don't want to be forced to become a Belarus?
The industrial military complex is doing just fine thank you very much.
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You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
Probably going to be what this style of drone warfare incentivizes over time.
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.
I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.
I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.
Still not necessarily wise to voluntarily escalate an air war when you have very little air defence. But hey what do I know
Exactly, long-range drone attack capability is an asymmetric advantage for Ukraine only relative to their other capabilities, not relative to Russia. Russia can easily make Kyiv unlivable, as they are just starting to do.
Russia has tried to make Kiev unlivable for four years.
I mean "physically or psychologically impossible to continue living in"--I have Ukrainian colleagues living in Kyiv and they report that only in the last few weeks has it become absolutely unbearable with air raid sirens around the clock.
I just hope my elite understand the concept of pecking order ...
I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
I think the Wildberries strikes were a unilateral escalation on the part of Ukraine and the current escalation cycle has ensued from that.
Russia has been hitting comparable logistics centers in Ukraine from the first year of the war. If someone has been escalating, it's Russia.
Apparently Wildberries carry/carried over 1/4 million items tagged as "for SMO" (Special Military Operation), so they had become a major part of the supply chain for Putin's war, which is why they were hit.
So presumably you'd be fine with Iran bombing Amazon warehouses if there was evidence they carried dual-use merchandise used by US military members?
In the case of Wildberries we're not talking about "dual use" items like a sleeping bag that your government fails to provide you, we're talking about specifically tagging items (1/4 million of them!!) as being for the war. It's Wildberries' business (literally) if they want to be a supplier for the war, and profit from it, but obviously that does mean they become a target.
Cutting off the enemy supply line is a classic and obvious military strategy. Ukraine didn't choose to be attacked, nor did they choose for Wildberries to become part of the supply line. They are playing the cards they were dealt, and I would say doing so with remarkable restraint.
Ukrainian military and security officials have stated on and off the record that a major objective of the Wildberries strikes was civilian terror. Russia has taken them at exactly their word.
of course that'd be fine, under the Geneva convention a civilian object loses its protective status when it makes effective military contributions and its destruction confers a military advantage.
What's supposed to be the argument against it, inconvenience for American shoppers during a war of aggression?
I don't think the Geneva convention is that unequivocal, I believe there's also a duty to assess proportionality of military advantage vs. civilian risk.
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The man have been conscripted into the military to fight against an invasion of their homeland.
I heard from friends that a lot Ukraine's large distribution centers were also hit lately after Ukraine hit Russia's.
I haven't seen any site I frequent mention this once. The PR bubble is very real.
I don't know what sites you frequent but strikes on distribution centers by both sides has been covered by mainstream US news.
Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?
Russia has been hitting civilian logistics centers for years now. At least 2 of my packages were destroyed :C
Complaining about an information bubble while being in one is pretty funny.
That's because it's nonsense. Russia has been targeting Ukrainian civilian logistics for years.
You frequent bad sites then. Don't make a conspiracy based on your own bad media consumption.
The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
> “Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized
This is a revolutionary concept that you've discovered in 2026 that was more or less universally observed until the 21st century.
It's what I've been saying all along. Data centers are only an evolutionary, external manifestation of things which have existed all along.
When computing resources became accessible to the average company, average companies introduced machine rooms. Below-average companies stashed computers in a closet or non-dedicated space, but the point is, that for decades, ordinary businesses had an ordinary complement of on-prem compute.
The whole point of data centers is economy of scale, consolidation, and centralization. The whole point of "cloud services" is to aggregate services where they can be provided to dozens, hundreds, thousands of tenant companies and individuals, rather than everyone federating their machine rooms and closets in every location everywhere.
It is the ultimate paradigm shift of "thin client connects to time-share servers" being recapitulated. Instead of TN3270 and IBM's mainframes, we have AWS, Chromebooks, and mobile apps.
Why do you think there is a crisis in commercial properties and office space. Many companies have gutted their capex servers and networking gear because they moved to the cloud. New companies basically don't need to build out an enormous, resilient physical plant to support those resources, if they're cloud-based.
So if you believe that the entire tech industry is gonna reverse course, just because of the threat of some DCs being reduced to slag and melted rare earth, you live in a fantasy world, my friend.
I’m a bit older than that: I have lived the swing from centralized remote computing (long lines and/or dial in, both to the mainframe) to distributed local computing, back to centralized computing.
I remember datacenters being close to the humans and then migrating to be close to the power supply (check out The Dallas, OR, for example) to now locating where they can and scrambling for power, which has become the bottleneck.
At this point I think there’s a diseconomy of scale with the need for all these ad hoc power systems.
I’m not suggesting a return to the captive “machine room”. I’m saying that instead of a mega-plant, smaller, distributed ones might actually be a local optimum.
(Oh, and I have had a rack full of hardware in a data center for my personal compute for more than a quarter century. So yes, I have some experience in history)
>It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
In the current climate I think the less project approvals you need to get the better
Snowball's chance in hell of getting a project off the ground that involves breaking ground on hundreds of data centers spread out across the country.
You could renovate existing warehouses
Is Kagi search still relying on Yandex?
A second data centre has been attacked and I've seen reports of Yandex crawlers stopping their work.
"United24Media" is mostly just Ukrainian military propaganda. I wouldn't trust it given some of their other articles.
Here's a better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
Fixed link: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
(looks like they changed "center" to "centre")
A new reason to not want a DC in my neighborhood.
The DC fire is usually contained. Fertilizer plant or a refinery is much worse.
I also would not want those in my neighborhood.
Don't worry - this could never happen to your cloud provider.
It's a totally different situation - they're at war.
How effective are the western embargos? Will it be possible for them to replace destroyed hardware?
Will it be possible? Yes. Will it be easy, or cheap? No.
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
I use ARM VPSes for quite some time and they are pretty performant. They don't have to replace with x86 systems. Linux on ARM is pretty mature and production ready at this point.
Seems like GPUs and RAM/NAND are the problem, and that's a common problem for arm64 and x86
I don't know the hardware inside the data center, and it might not be a "AI" data center to begin with. NAND is a big problem, but DDR4 memory is not AFAICS, and if you need CPU power for serving stuff, getting it is easy.
If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!
my Arm/Android set-top box of choice for, ahem, streaming subscriptions, is up 50% in price despite no changes to the design since I bought it 2 years ago. And that's on aliexpress where margins are limited.
Do you stream Linux ISOs?
Asking for a friend. ;)
Those are even less commoditified than x86 server platforms. Which, when it comes to grey market shopping, is a disadvantage.
I believe China can just build and send them their way. They build a lot of these.
China is not part of the embargo, so I suspect commodity server and networking hardware isn't hard to come by.
Problem is that RAM and disk manufacturing capacity is all sold out years ahead. Yandex while being largest IT company in Russia have nowhere near the money to compete with AI hyperscalers.
Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.
If you’re using AI to describe SI - super intelligence - you’re THE ENEMY.
great question, I don't have a good answer. supposedly there are modern gpus in Russia, here you can rent a H200 (a GPU which was released after the war had started) https://selectel.ru/services/dedicated/hgx-h200/
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
Computers aint cheap right now off the shelf. Can't imagine the embargo busting surcharge.
It'll be much harder to replace lost data than destroyed hardware.
Nebius Slack channels going wild now
someone go correlate whether this leads to a drop in bot/AI traffic.
I bet reddit and facebook are awfully quiet today.
slight drop - probably. i'd wager the drop in the ocean is because majority of the bot traffic are from it's cousins in China :>
Actually happened when internet went down in Iran
One of the sources:
>Scottish independence accounts go dark after Iran internet blackout
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/12/scottish-ind...
They should consider withdrawing from Ukraine
It's fine. Putin doesn't even know how to use computers, let alone Internet. So all this is not bothering him at all. And he is the only person who can decide to stop the war; nobody else has that ability.
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
What are you referring to?
Yandex has obscured all their other data centres on Yandex Maps with a censored blur rather than just removing the location from environment view.
https://united24media.com/world/yandex-hides-all-four-cloud-...
Probably phoned it in because they know the ukranians can just not use yandex maps to bomb russia. But hey, boss gives you a dumb easy job you don't argue.
Imagine when something hits us-east-1 as part of the opening shot of a major future conflict..
The way it actually works is that the Russians will hire a disposable agent, pay them in crypto, and incite them to commit arson or a bombing.
If a foreign nation gets the capabilty to directly strike US soil we are way past worrying about us-east-1
Unless they are dumb, there are foreign nations that have sleeper agents with stockpiles of drone hidden on US soil.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s shipping containers or even privately owned houses, filled with optically controlled or autonomous drones, sitting near high value infrastructure around the world. Mirroring those Ukrainian trucks.
You don't need to guess about that. To the extent it's doable, the Russians are doing grey zone warfare in Europe.
us-east-1 is located close to the NSA and a huge fraction of the American military and intelligence apparatus. And Washington, D.C.
It's probably one of the safest places on the planet.
Huum. In a hypothetical scenario with a world war and I can chose between staying in us-east-1 or in the maquis[1], I would go for the maquis.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_shrubland
It’s as safe as the west wing of Pentagon! I.e. not safe at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77#Cr...
Like that stopped the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon?
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us-owned media citation is not what you need, you need to use brain, while reading as much sources from as much sides as possible.
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What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.
But not with widespread public support...
There is a (massive) difference between soldiers there to get a paycheck, and soldiers there to avenge their communities.
its much more widespread than you think
The only ones I know are the older timers with rosy soviet glasses. Young people, the ones who would do the actual fighting, seem to have incredibly low support for it.
Most of the old timers was sent in the first or second wave and got to taste ukrainian bullets. They are gone.
12 years
Russians won't storm anything, but if you observe their actual behavior, it's easy to see that they don't attribute their problems to Ukraine. No one is volunteering to go fight there without very high signup bonuses and salaries.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
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> What is a Russian citizen supposed to do?
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
As of the last election, judging by actual votes cast, only a third of the country isn't opposed to the war.
I hate to break it to you, but about those elections...
You may want to read my comment again.
> They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
You know, things like coups exist. In many, many other countries leadership as bad as Russia's would have been ousted in a military coup long time ago, and the new regime would have pursued saner policy.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
Your opinions are much better thought-out than the most I have seen. I respect that. But you have several severe errors in your thinking I will try to convince you of:
1. Russia's military is not independent. FSB is above them. This "cutting the balls of the military" has been a long-term strategy. This is not comparable at all with the USA, let alone Turkey.
2. Military, power, strength resources are purposefully divided between different players, military does not have a monopoly on power. There are also FSB (with their own forces, judges, prison, killing teams), National Guard (have tanks), Private Companies (decreased/fractured after the Wagner debacle). Heck, Kadyrov's thugs are part of that equation as well.
3. There really aren't examples of successful coups from the bottom only.
4. No, I do not suggest negotiations with Putin, quite the opposite. Way more should be done to get rid of him and his family personally, and not pussyfoot around it.
5. EU's problem was and still is anemic, slow and stupid action (lack of). Damn morons.
6. No, a significant portion of the population does not support the war. Do North Koreans truly support their regime as witnessed by the voting results and by the fact that people are not protesting and are not organizing a coup?
7. Russia had Oligarchs, but doesn't have anymore. Oligarchy means that rich people can influence politics. In Russia they can't. The typical western "money brings political influence/power" does not apply in Russia. In Russia the rule is "political position (given by Putin) brings money (as long as Putin allows)". Businessmen have no independence. Check what happened to Tinkov (Tinkov bank). And he is the lucky one.
> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy
It doesn't matter, just like it didn't matter to British citizenry who endured the blitz that the Nazis had self-couped, and Germans couldn't vote Hitler out. The only 2 choices available are to roll over and be occupied, or fight back against the aggressor state.
The occupation will clearly not happen, therefore the most reasonable amd rational strategy is to hide your own feelings, not to do anything drastic that would endanger yourself, and just wait until the dictator dies.
Ah yes. And every russian living abroad has a hit squad following them forcing them to support the war.
Stop with the nonsense. You can actually see the real voting results from the foreign voting stations (Helsinki, Berlin, etc). The support of antiwar candidates is overwhelming. Putin's United Russia party gets very few votes, and even those typically come from pensioners and people who moved abroad 20+ years ago. These are the facts.
Russian history offers an excellent counterexample in the downfall of the USSR when Gorbachev and others lost their legitimacy. Formally, they remained the top figures in the government; in practice, people gradually stopped following them over a period of a few years as everything was disintegrating (shortage of basic products, pointless war in Afghanistan, disasters like Chernobyl, etc). The people simply chose new leaders from among themselves and turned their backs to Moscow.
For example, a police station might've simply ignored orders from the ministry of internal affairs and instead followed the recommendations of a popular local figure (often a factory manager, uni professor, journalist, artist or writer). As districts increasingly acted this way, Moscow gradually lost control over the police force, which became decentralized and locally run. In the end, bosses in Moscow could yell all they wanted into a phone, but that did not move a single police officer on the ground.
Russian central government is currently nowhere near such loss of legitimacy. Tens of millions of people carry out the orders of their Führer every day. Some have stepped into a foreign country while carrying a gun. Others are milling artillery shells or programming cruise missiles. Some are sitting on HN trying to convince the world how their Führer has no other option than to murder Ukrainian children every night.
There is no pushback worth mentioning. Last year, out of 140 million people living in Russia, only 38 were arrested for anti-war protests. Add a few hundred more for anti-war posts on the social media. Completely insignificant numbers. Russians on HN will gladly explain how oppressive the climate in Russia has become and how difficult (gasp!) it is to protest, but they fail to recognize the downstream effects: that Ukrainians have to pay with their lives every single day for the cancer that the cowardice of Russians has unleashed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are in mortal danger right now on the frontline, trying to stop what Russians are too afraid to confront themselves.
> I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine
As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?
Most Russians see the war as Putins war and have zero animosity towards Ukrainians.
So my fear is that Ukraine attacking Russian societal pillars will begin to manifest animosity.
Either the Russian people are pro-war, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is good.
Or they are anti-war but helpless to stop it, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is also good.
Either way if your country's existence is threatened and your people are being killed you don't sit back and do nothing because you are scared it'll make the attacker unhappy.
> if your country's existence is threatened and your people are being killed you don't sit back and do nothing because you are scared it'll make the attacker unhappy.
Sure, but there are many different ways of making your attacker unhappy, and some of them might decrease your chances of winning, so you might not want to do those.
Not saying that's the case here (I don't think it is), but the concept is sound.
That has been said for four years. Due to russians using mobile incinerators to conceal causulties (and war crimes), not even caskets arrives home. Most russians know this, but what does it help.
The problem is Russians are too afraid to turn on their motherland because "reasons" but that is exactly what has to happen to end the war. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it.
Americans are so naive about the "turn on their motherland" part. It's not really a reply to you, I just remembered some american whom I met and he was treating us as kids, saying things as "alone you are weak but together you are strong!"
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people? You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
This is how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committees_of_correspondence#F...
man if you organize a group which can assemble in public like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committees_of_correspondence#/... in Russia, you won't be coming home tonight
When Navalny came back, over 300 000 people came out to protest, despite being terrorized. That did nothing. It's not like those people had guns and were ready to use them. And even if they did, that would only be an additional argument to use extra power of Putin's police state. Heck, if people did that, the very same "European anti-Putinists" would heavily condemn the violence and would support the crackdown on the "violent protestors" ("The future of the country is in stability and communication, not in violence. We urge people to lower their weapons. We support President Putin's attempts to keep the country stable and do what is necessary. We will send him an additional supply of tear gas and protest dispersal equipment. EU and Russia must stand together in these trying times.").
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Holy mother of whataboutism.
Prigozhin had the chance to do something but bottled out.
Prigozhin's primary concern was that they weren't warring against Ukraine hard enough.
The only value his coup provided to Ukraine was being a distraction. If they had succeeded, the war would have continued.
They could take accountability and face the consequences of resigning for their country responsibilities.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
> I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine
In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?
Well, right now only 65% support this, even when reported by Russian Public Opinion Research Center (state owned):
https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/spe...
So, most russians have already turned on ukraine. q.e.d.
65% reported by the state agency (in Russia) means the real number is quite lower.
Like the US, they are concerned about the cost of fuel and food. They, however, do not have a democratic process to fall back to, and therefore no hope of controlling these factors, ever. I suspect they would be a lot more willing to form a real rebellion once the issues get bad enough at Putins hand.
I think you missed the news, war is going on for 5 years already, and yet russians don't do jack shit about it
> The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like?
I don't think that's the primary goal here anyway, it's to disrupt the Russian economy so that it becomes harder to recruit, provision and rearm their war effort.
Though, like the Wildberries attacks, it's likely that these datacentres are also being used by the military for data processing too. The Russian military certainly aren't as worried about US/Europeans about using civilian infrastructure for their military efforts.
Russian citizens have no voice anyway, so their opinion isn’t a part of equation about strikes planning. 90% of them support aggression anyway
"For the love of god, won't somebody think of the oppressor?!"
There are two points to answer this question. First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
Ask Nicholas II.
The war has public support in russia, even though russia is trying to genocide ukrainians (see Bucha). How much more can they "turn on Ukraine"?
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How many settlemens still inhabited by Ukrainians has Russion controlled in the last couple of years? How many of those were liberated?
Tragically a lot Buchas happened[0], and there's plenty of videos of civilian executions - God only knows what atrocities are yet to be discovered in occupied territories.
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
You should also look at the evidence for executions of "collaborators" after Ukraine recaptured e.g. Kherson, Kupyansk, Izyum (and, in fact, Bucha, although there is also plenty of evidence of Russian war crimes there).
Just look at the wikipedia article, it has multiple independent credible sources naming russians as the perpetrators.
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Isn't there enough independent sources and reputable organizations in the Wikipedia article with facts, not opinions?
Or you're going to okay the card that every organization is in cahoots in the big American conspiracy to control the world?
Could it be that it's maybe you the victim of propaganda?
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Of course there are plenty of evidence, including video records. That's the most disconcerting thing, most of these crimes against humanity and war crimes were done out in the open.
Most like because they thought Ukraine was going to capitulate in few days, and they could hide the crimes of genocide, like it was done in the past.
That's how sickening this was, because Russia thought they were going to get away with it, they were just executing civilians for fun.
The whole world watched this in real time.
It's evil in at it's worst, for some sick illusion of ethnic superiority.
History will not forget this.
But what do ordinary Russians, who are not guilty of anything, have to do with it?
It's ordinary Russians that are going into Ukraine to kill Ukrainians. Or do you seem to forget that this is being driven by contractors?
These are people going into a neighboring country that posed no threat to them, or to their way of living, to make money killing what many deem an inferior ethnic group.
Couldn't they choose not to go? Don't they have family members? Friends?
Just because some don't want to have anything to do with it, they're still paying taxes, funding the war, they're part of the economy that supports it.
Going about their lives with head down is being part of the problem.
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What are you talking about? Russians are at war with Ukraine. Putin isn't the one marching and operating the tanks.
No, it's only the government's fault. Citizens are not complicit in the war, they need to be completely separated.
Would you say that about Germany during WWII?
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If only Ukraine could understand that it is actually doing Russian citizens a favor.
Ukraine also hit Russian oil refineries. The EU buys lots of Russian oil....
Much less than they used to, and continuing to wind down: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (scroll down to “Imports of petroleum oils from main partners”)
Everything except for LNG is down a lot. LNG seems to be basically at the same level. Does anyone know why this is?