Ukrainian strikes damage Russian tax data center 425km from Moscow

Ukrainian drone strikes damaged a data center operated by Russia's Ministry of Finance and its tax department in Gorodets, about 425km (264 miles) east of Moscow, Data Center Dynamics reported on Oct. 23.

Exilenova+ and Astra reported the overnight strikes hit the Federal Tax Service and Ministry of Finance facility in Gorodets. Governor Gleb Nikitin said three people were injured and that the damage included several residential buildings, an educational facility and an infrastructure facility. The site opened in December 2015 and stores and processes state registries, including tax databases. Gorodets sits more than 900km (559 miles) from Russia's border with Ukraine.

For allocators holding data center exposure through a fund, the strike makes physical damage a concrete underwriting term. The report lists commercial data centers hit around Kyiv — among them Parkovyi Data Center, UTELS, MiroHost, Datagroup, Vodafone Ukraine, De Novo, Cosmonova and Ukrtelecom — as well as Tenet's Odesa facility and RX-Name near Mykolaiv, and says Ukraine has struck data centers owned by Yandex and Sberbank. That raises specific due-diligence questions: distance from a conflict border, whether processing is duplicated, and who carries damage risk under the lease.

Exilenova+ described Gorodets as one of two key processing centers for the Federal Tax Service operating in a geo-distributed mode and said damage there could potentially affect the operation of Russian state information systems. The finance ministry also operates from the Federal Data Processing Center in Dubna, Moscow Region, and a facility in Yerzovka, Volgograd Region.

Whether the second processing center absorbed the workload is the open question, and would show whether the geo-distributed design worked as intended.