Russia struck the headquarters of Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile service provider, on Sunday, as Moscow widened a campaign that Ukrainian officials say is aimed at crippling the country's communications and data infrastructure. The attack is the latest in a week of strikes on data centres and telecom facilities that have knocked tens of thousands of households offline in the capital region.
A direct hit on the country's biggest mobile network
Kyivstar told the Interfax Ukraine news agency that its head office in Kyiv had been hit on Sunday, adding that there were no casualties. The company did not immediately detail the extent of the damage, but the strike marks a sharp escalation: the deliberate targeting of a civilian telecom operator's headquarters in the capital.
Russia's defence ministry also said on Sunday that it had hit a data centre belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, the country's second-largest mobile network. Vodafone Ukraine did not respond to a request for comment, and the claim could not be independently verified.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a data centre in Kyiv was struck twice on Sunday morning, wounding two children and an adult. The back-to-back hits underscored that the facilities Russia now calls military targets sit inside densely populated neighbourhoods.
A week of outages and a pattern of targeting
The Kyivstar strike did not come out of nowhere. Over the past week, Moscow has repeatedly hit data centres belonging to Ukrainian internet providers, causing service outages for about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region, according to Ukraine's digital ministry.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha warned of the pattern days earlier, writing on X that "Russia has targeted major Ukrainian data centres, seeking to disrupt the flow of information. Rapid alerts about missile and drone threats are essential — they save lives."
The targeting logic is grimly familiar. Russia spent the first years of the full-scale invasion hammering power stations and substations; now, analysts say, it is applying the same playbook to the digital infrastructure that keeps air-raid alerts, emergency coordination, and everyday life running. For a country where air-raid warnings arrive by smartphone app, taking down networks is not a side effect of war — it is a weapon.
Moscow frames the strikes as military; Kyiv says civilians pay
Moscow insists the strikes are legitimate. Russia's defence ministry said on Sunday its forces had carried out overnight drone strikes on logistics centres, port and transport infrastructure, communications centres, and vessels it claimed were linked to the Ukrainian military.
The ministry said the strikes hit a data centre in Kyiv, logistics hubs in the Kyiv and Odesa regions, two drone storage sites in Mykolaiv, the headquarters of a naval base, the headquarters of Ukraine's State Border Guard Service, and military stores at the Kiliya port. It also claimed to have struck a cargo ship carrying military and dual-use goods bound for Odesa — and said a second daytime wave hit two more data centres in Kyiv, a logistics hub in Odesa, and another cargo vessel headed for Odesa. Reuters could not independently verify any of the claims.
Kyiv rejects the framing. Ukrainian officials point to the wounded children, the shuttered internet for 100,000 households, and the strike on a mobile operator's office as evidence that the campaign is aimed at degrading civilian resilience, not degrading an army.
Conclusion
As the war grinds toward its fifth winter, Russia's targeting is shifting from the battlefield to the systems that hold a modern society together: the warehouses that feed cities, the cables that connect them, and now the data centres and phone networks that warn them of incoming missiles. Ukraine's crews will repair the damage — they always do — but each repair comes at a cost Moscow is counting on: time, money, and the slow erosion of normal life.
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