Skolkovo, Get Ready

• 14.10.2026, 12:25

The prediction came true literally the very next day.

This was a case where a short-term forecast came true literally the very next day: Overnight, Ukrainian drones attacked Sberbank’s data center. True, I had said that Sberbank’s data center in Skolkovo seemed to be the primary target, because the data center in Balakovo, Saratov Oblast, is still under construction. But they struck that one specifically—perhaps simply because the air defense system in the Saratov Region is much weaker than in the Moscow Region and Moscow.

That said, according to reports, the data center in Balakovo is actually already partially operational, although it hasn’t been fully launched yet. Therefore, the attack is unlikely to have a critical impact on Sberbank’s operations; its main infrastructure is probably still in the Moscow Region. But now the new target is clear, and if they managed to hit Kapotnya by breaking through the air defense rings, they can likely hit Skolkovo as well. If the outage of “Yandex Pay” caused such anxiety, one can imagine the shock many people would feel if, one morning, the Sberbank app stopped working. In principle, such a threat—even in the form of an attack on a data center still under construction—could fuel anxiety and provoke panic among customers of a systemically important bank.

Dmitry Kolezev, “Telegram”