Struggle for Dominance and Leadership in AI (Part 2 – AI in the Conflict in Ukraine)
Forecast: “Outlines of the Global Future” (part 1 – February 9, 2026, part 2 – February 13, 2026).
S. Dragan:
In late August 2026, a dangerous phase of a grand struggle for power on a global scale begins. This may be related to the struggle for dominance and leadership in AI. These will be highly explosive times…
In confirmation of part 1, dated October 19, 2026, the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in armed warfare in the Ukrainian conflict was noted.
But the technical foundation of AI is important for its application, without which AI ceases to function. And in late August 2026, a dangerous phase of a grand struggle for dominance and leadership in AI began through the destruction of AI’s technical base—that is, by weakening the adversary.
For the first time, this practice—namely, selective strikes on data centers—began in the Persian Gulf region in spring 2026 by IRGC forces.
This experience, as an attempt to seize “leadership in AI,” became relevant in the Ukrainian conflict in early autumn 2026.
On September 11, 2026, a data center belonging to “Bi-Mobile” in Kyiv appeared in the Russian Ministry of Defense report among the usual targets—logistics centers, warehouses, and industrial facilities. Six days later, the Ministry of Defense reported a strike on the “De Novo Data Center.” On September 23, NewTelco and United DC became targets, and the following day, the “Kyivstar” and “Parkovyi” telecommunications centers. On September 26 and 27, drones struck Vodafone’s technical office. On September 30, a business center in Odesa was struck, where, according to some reports, a large data center was also located.
Ukraine’s data centers are dual-use facilities. The division of digital infrastructure into “civilian” and “military” is now largely conditional. The Russian Ministry of Defense attributed the same function to the targets hit—storage, processing, and transmission of data, including intelligence data, as well as the operation of network equipment in the interests of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Strikes on Ukrainian data centers demonstrate the characteristic logic of a new phase of infrastructure warfare. Until recently, the Russian campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure could be described as the systematic deprivation of the adversary’s material resources necessary for conducting military operations: electricity, fuel, transport, industrial products, and so on.
The appearance of data centers among the regularly named targets indicates a transition to the next, more subtle level. In modern military theory, it is described as a “war of system destruction”—systems enabled by artificial intelligence.
High-tech armed forces constitute a complex network of intelligence assets, communications systems, computing capacity, and strike capabilities. Such a system can be thrown off balance not so much by the systematic destruction of individual combat units as by targeting critical nodes through which information flows and command is exercised. And AI now plays an important role in this system.
While the Ukrainian Armed Forces, by striking data centers and data processing centers, are limiting AI capabilities and thereby attempting to create serious problems for the civilian population.
On October 8, 2026, a Ukrainian UAV struck a Yandex data center in the city of Sasovo, Ryazan Region. The center’s operations were suspended, and disruptions to some of the company’s services were reported. Russia’s Investigative Committee is investigating the strike on the center as a terrorist act.
On October 10, 2026, Ukrainian Armed Forces UAVs attacked a Yandex data center in Vladimir. The facility’s operations were halted. Users of the company’s apps in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan complained of disruptions. Later, problems with the company’s services spread to partner projects—Dodo, Vkusno i Tochka, and a number of other companies reported disruptions. Yandex is reconfiguring its services, and experts note that fully restoring the infrastructure could prove very costly.
It should be noted that the attack on the Yandex data center was already the third. Eldar Murtazin, lead analyst at Mobile Research Group, notes that restoring the damaged infrastructure will be very costly for the company. “The first attack hit a data center where there was a supercomputer—one of several. There were extremely few user services there. The second one was already noticeable to ordinary people. The third indicates that they had problems with data redundancy. Restoring all this will not be easy. Even before the rise in graphics card prices, memory shortages, and sanctions, Yandex’s first supercomputer cost around $15–20 million. Now, taking all the nuances into account, it is $35–40 million and 1.5–2 years of work,” Murtazin explained.
European media did not miss the opportunity to use the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ attacks on Yandex in the information and propaganda war to create fakes about a “drop in troll-bot activity.”
Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski wrote on social media that after Ukrainian Armed Forces strikes on Yandex data centers, the activity of pro-Russian troll bots on social networks had fallen: there were fewer “Polish” accounts directed against Ukrainians and “Ukrainian” ones that “harass” Poles. In addition, he said, social media recorded a sharp decline in support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, as well as the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement associated with U.S. President Donald Trump.
This information then spread across social media and the media, and Zelenskyy also commented on the matter. During a speech at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum, he said that after the strikes on Yandex data centers, “it suddenly became easier to breathe on many social media platforms” because there were fewer bots. “And it is clear where these bots came from if they disappeared when Yandex stopped working,” he said.
Later, this information about the connection between strikes on Yandex and changes in the activity of pro-Russian troll bots was recognized as fake, and Tomasz Zdechovsky himself admitted that he did not know who exactly had compiled the chart he published.
The popular Polish web portal and information security company Niebezpiecznik.pl noted that the graph looked strange: on October 11, it showed data for October 15. Specialists suggested that it had been created by AI.
At the same time, analysts at the Polish state research institute and data operator NASK stated that they saw no connection between the mentioned attacks and the reduced activity of accounts spreading disinformation.
After publishing inaccurate data, the popular Polish financial and economic online portal Wyborcza.biz apologized to readers for the false information. The editorial team stated: “Initially, we quoted military expert Jarosław Wolski in the text. However, he retracted his words about the decline in Russian disinformation. On behalf of the Wyborcza.biz editorial team, we apologize to readers for misleading them.”
The development of the technical and energy base for the advancement of artificial intelligence is more effective when efforts are combined internationally.
At the Russian Energy Week forum (REW-2026), Kirill Dmitriev—special representative of the President of the Russian Federation for investment and economic cooperation and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF)—stated: “Russia and the United States are working on joint projects in the field of data centers and are also considering the possibility of using the capacity of Russian nuclear power plants.”
The parties have not yet announced specific construction projects, but they have laid the groundwork for future cooperation: nuclear power plants can become a reliable source of energy for large data centers and, consequently, for the further development of artificial intelligence.
This is a vivid manifestation of U.S.-Russian interaction in the “struggle for dominance and leadership in AI”: grand plans are being created to build joint data centers near nuclear power plants in order to establish a new world order.
Continuation of the topic—in part 3.
