There is a particular kind of satisfaction when a distant, abstract war suddenly produces something tangible, something you can point to and say: “Look, that was us. That mattered.” Last week, when Ukraine launched drone attacks against three data centres owned by the Russian tech giant Yandex, that feeling swept across the internet. Yandex, after all, is not simply a search engine; it is the backbone of much of Russia’s digital life, often described as “Russia’s Google,” but also so much more. Its cloud services carry everything from email to maps to the kind of behind-the-scenes infrastructure that ordinary people…

In early October 2026, a piece of international news began to move through the Bulgarian media landscape with quiet but unmistakable force: the data centers of Yandex, one of Russia’s leading technology companies, had been attacked. For many ordinary readers, the story may have seemed distant — a technical incident involving a foreign internet giant, far from everyday Bulgarian concerns. But for BROD, a Bulgarian media research and fact-checking organization and one of the fifteen national and regional hubs within the European Digital Media Observatory network, the story was worth a closer look. From 8 to 13 October 2026, BROD…