By Ядвига Полозова
Published on •Updated
On the morning of 11 October, the Russian army struck two blocks of flats in Sloviansk in the Donetsk region.
“At this point, four people are known to have been injured”, said the city’s mayor Vadym Liakh. “Everyone is receiving medical treatment”.
There may be people trapped under the rubble, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Warehouses are on fire outside Kyiv following an overnight Russian attack. Storage facilities at an industrial plant in the Bucha district of the Ukrainian capital caught fire, and firefighters are still working to extinguish the blaze.
A paramedic and a driver were injured when a Russian drone hit an ambulance in the Sumy region. According to the head of the regional military administration, Oleh Hryhorov, the medical workers managed to get out of the damaged vehicle on their own.
Emergency power cuts were introduced on Sunday in several regions of Ukraine because of the difficult situation in the energy sector caused by Russian shelling, the press service of the national energy company Ukrenergo said.
Previously published schedules for hourly power cuts are currently not in force. The emergency outages will be lifted once the situation in the power system stabilises.
Ukrainian drones hit Yandex, third data centre targeted
Overnight into Sunday, Ukrainian drones attacked Russian technology giant Yandex’s data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow in the third reported attack on the firm in days.
The company said the centre’s infrastructure had been damaged and its operations completely halted. According to the latest information, there were no casualties in the attack.
Yandex added that it is continuing to assess the state of the infrastructure and cannot yet say how long repairs will take. This is already the company’s third data centre to be attacked in October.
Yandex, often dubbed “Russia’s Google”, runs the country’s most popular search engine, as well as food-ordering and taxi apps used by tens of millions of people.
Governor Aleksandr Avdeyev confirmed (source in Russian) the UAV attack in Vladimir and the ensuing fire. He said residential areas had escaped destruction. Residents of the houses closest to the attack site have begun to be evacuated.
In Vladimir, two substations supplying electricity to 5,000 residents were switched off. An hour later, the governor said that 80% of the power supply had been restored and heating and water supplies were back to normal.
Preliminary reports suggest that a supercomputer housed at the Vladimir data centre was damaged. An identical machine is located at the Yandex data centre in Ryazan that was also targeted.
Taxi and navigation disruption
In the wake of the attack, users experienced widespread disruptions to the company’s services. People were unable to order taxis in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok, Ulan-Ude, Yekaterinburg and other Russian cities.
“I can’t get anything to work at all”, said Yevgeny, a 69-year-old sitting behind the wheel of a Yandex-branded taxi near Moscow.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It hasn’t happened in the last five years. Now I don’t know what to do”, he said.
Similar problems were reported in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia. Drivers say they cannot log into the app or are facing navigation failures, while passengers see no available cars. There have also been reports of outages across many of the company’s other services.
On 9 October, drones attacked (source in Russian) Yandex’s data centre in Kaluga. On the morning of 8 October, the Ukrainian armed forces struck (source in Russian) a Yandex data centre near Ryazan. After that, malfunctions began in the internal systems of major Russian companies. Websites of major Russian media outlets also stopped loading.
Ukrainian monitoring channels reported strikes on Sunday on a movable railway bridge (source in Russian) in Rostov-on-Don, near the Black Sea. The regional authorities have not yet reported it.
In early October, Russia repeatedly carried out (source in Russian) strikes on key bridges in Kyiv. According to The Telegraph, against the backdrop of military setbacks, Putin decided to switch to attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and the bridges in Kyiv.
The crisis centre of the Krasnodar region reported that “fragments of drones” had fallen on the grounds of Sochi airport. A fire broke out in one of the administrative buildings, with no casualties. Debris also fell in a residential area.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said that overnight air defence forces had shot down 479 Ukrainian drones over 17 regions of Russia and the annexed Crimea.