Server racks and power equipment in a data center (file photo; not Kyivstar or Vodafone). Photo: Derrick Coetzee from Berkeley, CA, USA (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons (source)
Russia struck the Kyiv headquarters of Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile carrier, on Sunday, the company told Interfax Ukraine, Reuters reported. Kyivstar said nobody was hurt. DatacenterDynamics reported the same company confirmation and said Russian drones carried out the attack.
Russia’s Defense Ministry also said Sunday that it struck a Vodafone Ukraine data center. Vodafone Ukraine is the country’s No. 2 mobile operator, Reuters reported. The company did not answer Reuters’ request for comment and had issued no public statement when DatacenterDynamics published its account.
Context
The Sunday attacks extend a week-long campaign against Ukrainian communications and computing sites. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia hit a Kyiv data center twice on Sunday morning. The strikes wounded two children and one adult, Reuters reported.
Over the past week, Moscow also struck facilities used by Ukrainian internet providers, leaving about 100,000 households in Kyiv and nearby areas without service, Ukraine’s digital ministry said, according to Reuters. DatacenterDynamics said the Sunday Kyivstar strike was the carrier’s third hit this month, after a Sept. 11 drone attack on a Kyivstar office and a later September strike on another Kyivstar building in the capital.
Russia earlier this month said it was behind a strike on Kyiv’s De Novo facility, among the country’s largest data centers, DatacenterDynamics reported. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X last week that “Russia has targeted major Ukrainian data centres, seeking to disrupt the flow of information,” and that rapid alerts about missile and drone threats “save lives,” according to both Reuters and DatacenterDynamics.
Ukrainian telecom operators have spent years rebuilding mobile networks during the war, DatacenterDynamics noted. The outlet also reported that Ukrainian forces earlier this year hit a Russian data center in occupied Prymorsk, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
The pattern matters for operators that keep emergency alerts, banking systems and media online under fire. DatacenterDynamics linked the weekend hits to a broader Russian focus on telecom and hosting sites in the capital, while Reuters tied the household outages to Ukraine’s digital ministry figures.
What's next
Neither Kyivstar nor Vodafone Ukraine had released detailed damage assessments in the Reuters or DatacenterDynamics reports. Vodafone Ukraine had not publicly confirmed the Defense Ministry’s claim that one of its sites was hit. Ukrainian officials have framed the recent strikes as an effort to disrupt information flows and civilian warning systems used during air attacks.
Sources
- Reuters: Russia hits Ukraine’s largest mobile provider, strikes data centres (2026-09-27)
- DatacenterDynamics: Russian drones hit Kyivstar HQ, Vodafone data center in Ukraine (2026-09-28)
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