Russia prides itself on its digital advances — from an extensive e-commerce services sector to ambitious plans for developing artificial intelligence.

But now, some of the key data centers at the heart of its technical prowess have been knocked out by Ukrainian drone attacks in the 4 1/2-year-old full-scale invasion, suffering damage that could take a long time to repair.

Ukraine this month hit three main data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, one for Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and one for social media platform VKontakte, the country’s equivalent to Facebook.

While Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte are coy about the damage, people and businesses across Russia have reported widespread interruptions to cloud services. Banking, e-commerce, geolocation and ride-hailing services, as well as Alisa, Yandex’s virtual assistant, and multimodal AI chatbots all have suffered lasting disruptions.

The fallout even spread to Russia’s judicial system, reportedly forcing arbitration courts to cancel or postpone sessions and cutting database access.

Most experts predict repairing the damage could take months, if not years. Some warn that Moscow’s aspirations to become a leader in AI development could be significantly set back.

“This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race,” said Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society activist group.

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No 10 says Russian president ‘has killed thousands of people, both innocent Ukrainians and his own people’

Downing Street has rejected the description of Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” made by Donald Trump’s chief negotiator on the Ukraine war.

Steve Witkoff met the Russian president in St Petersburg on Wednesday as he sought to make a new push to end the invasion of Ukraine, with the US putting pressure on Kyiv to agree to a settlement.