‘They started it. We’re responding.’ Putin warns Ukraine over strikes on energy facilities, warehouses, and data centers

Russian authorities did not anticipate Ukrainian strikes on warehouses belonging to the online marketplaces Wildberries and Ozon, Vladimir Putin said at a congress of the business association Business Russia.

“I’m aware of the problems you mentioned — unfortunately, our platforms, Wildberries and Ozon, have come under enemy attack. By the way, they keep taking steps that, frankly, we probably should have anticipated, but we thought those things wouldn’t occur to them. They did,” Putin said in response to Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim, who mentioned Ukrainian strikes on the company’s warehouses.

Putin said that once Russia “starts responding” to such strikes, Ukraine turns “to its sponsors to ask them to put pressure on us and stop us.” He said the same thing happened with energy facilities and called Ukraine’s latest strikes on Russian oil refineries “insignificant.”

Russia has already begun responding to these attacks, Putin said: “They made the first move. We started responding. Now they’re squealing in the same way about energy facilities, too, and about other sites, including data centers and so on. They started it. They shouldn’t have started it.”

This was Putin’s first comment on strikes on data centers, the news outlet Agentstvo reported. The context, however, leaves it unclear whether he meant Ukrainian strikes on Yandex and Sber data centers or similar Russian attacks.

In September, Russia attacked several Ukrainian data centers, and the Russian Defense Ministry threatened Kyiv with a “digital detox.” On October 10, after Ukrainian forces had begun attacking Yandex, Russia struck a data center belonging to the Ukrainian provider Tenet in Odesa and UkrSibbank’s “ATM” facility in Kyiv.

On October 13, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the government was discussing the attacks on Russian data centers. The following day, Putin held a meeting on cybersecurity.

During the public portion of the meeting, Putin said he expected participants to put forward proposals “that will improve digital security.” He said cyberthreats were reaching a new level “against a backdrop of direct and hybrid aggression from abroad.” He did not mention the strikes on data centers.