Moscow named its Kyiv telecoms targets. Routing data tests the claims

Russia has named at least seven Kyiv telecoms and data centre targets since mid-September, and public routing data shows whether, and when, a named network lost connectivity. This issue shows you how to pull that record from IODA for free, network by network and hour by hour. We ran it ourselves this week: Kyivstar’s AS15895 and Vodafone Ukraine’s AS21497 show no recorded outage, Omega Telecom’s AS199995 shows a routing outage from 04:00 UTC on 27 September, and that gap is what Moscow’s statements leave out.

On Sunday 27 September a Russian strike hit Kyivstar’s headquarters on Dehtiarivska Street in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district; the company said no employees were hurt. It was Kyivstar’s third hit this month, after its engineering team’s office at the same location on 11 September and a building housing its equipment in the Kyiv region on 17 September, Interfax-Ukraine reported. The same day Russia’s defence ministry said it had struck a Vodafone Ukraine data centre; Vodafone did not respond to a request for comment. Separately, President Zelenskyy said Russia struck a Kyiv data centre twice that Sunday morning, wounding two children and an adult, Reuters reported.

The public record ran ahead of the operators’ statements. On the morning of 17 September Russia’s defence ministry announced an overnight strike on the De Novo data centre in Kyiv, which Russian officials, quoted by TASS, described as processing intelligence data for the Ukrainian army, as DCD reported on 18 September, citing TASS. After the 23 September strikes, NetBlocks recorded partial connectivity losses at Kyiv Link, Pautina, Utels and Crazy Network, and Ukraine’s digital ministry said around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the region had internet problems, The Record reported. Russia’s defence ministry claimed strikes on the New-Telco and United DC data centres on 23 September, and on 26 and 27 September it named Cosmonova, Vodafone Ukraine, Omega Telecom and Kyivstar, each described as serving the Ukrainian military.

So when did the record hold enough to flag a campaign? By 17 September. Kyivstar had been hit on 11 September and a second Kyivstar site on 17 September, and the same day Moscow named a commercial data centre as a military target in its own words. Once a ministry starts naming the companies it hits, every operator in that sector becomes a watch item, and the strikes of 23 September, six days later, with their cascade of outages from Kyiv to Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi, are what that watch would have been waiting for.

For a practitioner, this changes where the evidence sits. Operator statements after a strike are short. Moscow’s claims are specific about purpose and general about effect. The one continuous, independent, timestamped record of each network’s reachability is public measurement data, published by researchers and network operators for anyone to use.