Strikes on data centres as a question of economic security: an analysis of Anna Bon's position

On 25 September 2026, UNIAN published a column by Anna Bon, co-founder of the DeHealth Charitable Foundation, on the strikes against Ukraine's digital infrastructure. It ran in the opinion section and was reprinted the same day, among others by Protocol.ua. Because the author co-founded this Foundation, what follows is not a summary but an analysis: the facts, the argument, and what the available data does not contain, kept apart.

What happened: the record

Three days are at issue. On 23 and 24 September in Kyiv, the data centre hosting MiroHost was destroyed, and equipment belonging to Cityhost, the main Etherlink node and the UTELS, Pavutyna and Crazy Network networks was damaged. On 25 September, DataGroup and Cosmonova were hit. According to figures from Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation cited in the column, some 100,000 households had internet problems in the first days of these attacks, and that is Kyiv and the surrounding region alone.

The list of operators matters more here than their number. This was not a single site but several nodes belonging to different owners inside one metropolitan area across three days. The infrastructural signature of such a series is not the pursuit of one target but a systematic degradation of the environment.

The argument: disconnection versus degradation

The central claim of the column is not that Ukraine can be cut off from the network, but the opposite. A network has a property the author compares to a road system: destroy one bridge and traffic reroutes. A single-moment disconnection of the country is therefore not the realistic scenario.

The distinction is worth holding onto, because it changes the subject. A digital apocalypse is easy to disprove and therefore easy to dismiss. Gradual degradation - longer latency, higher tariffs, less predictability - has no dramatic news shape, yet it is what determines whether it makes commercial sense to place compute in the country. The cost accrues not at the moment of impact but over the quarters that follow.

Redundancy and relocation: where the line runs

After the strike, the founder of MiroHost said that 90 to 95 percent of the company's clients are hosted abroad, which is why the service kept running. That figure is at once evidence of an operator's professional preparedness and a measurement of something else.

The distinction carrying the argument is this: a backup copy in another jurisdiction is standard industry practice, while the systematic evacuation of compute after every attack moves where value is created. In the first case a copy sits abroad; in the second, production does. The model proposed is Ukrainian infrastructure plus geographically distributed redundancy, and the operative word is plus, not instead of.

The scale this is measured against

To show what countries are competing for, the column turns to the estimate of Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh in a study for the Brookings Institution: between 2025 and 2032 the United States will invest roughly 10.3 trillion dollars in data centres, power, networks and equipment, averaging 3.63 percent of GDP a year. We checked the figure against the source: it holds, and for comparison the railway boom of the late nineteenth century, until now the record, absorbed about 2.2 percent of GDP a year.

The logic of that money is compressed into a single chain: artificial intelligence needs chips, chips need data centres, and data centres need power plants, substations, fibre, cooling, water, land and very large amounts of capital. The practical consequence for a state is that compute policy is not a separate sectoral topic: it is simultaneously energy policy, land policy and investment policy.

What the available data does not contain

It is worth being precise about the limits of the record. Publicly known: the names of the affected operators, the dates, and the Ministry's estimate of affected households. Publicly unknown: how long each node was down, how much data was permanently lost, and how many clients had service restored and how quickly. Without those quantities any figure for damages would be an assumption, so we do not offer one. This does not weaken the column's case, which rests on the structure of the vulnerability rather than on the size of the loss.

The resilience criteria this produces

The author names international examples of hardened hosting without idealising them: a data centre in a former bomb shelter in Stockholm, a campus in a disused mine in Norway, data held in military bunkers in the Swiss Alps.

That observation has a practical edge, because it moves the question from the class of the building to the topology around it. Four quantities can actually be checked: the number of independent fibre routes reaching a node, how long it runs without external power, how far apart the redundancy is placed, and which jurisdiction holds that redundancy. The first two decide whether a node survives a given night. The last two decide whether its owner survives a longer period, and under whose law.

For an individual user, the column reduces this to three questions for a provider: what connection technology serves the building, how long the network runs without grid power, and whether a backup route exists. Starlink is not presented as a universal answer: it needs open sky, it is not protected against electronic warfare, and it depends on power like everything else.

Why this is the Foundation's subject

Health data does not exist apart from physical infrastructure. Registries, electronic records, telemedicine and every digital health service sit in data centres and depend on the same fibre routes and the same substations as everything else. The resilience of that infrastructure is therefore not a technical footnote to healthcare but the condition of having access to data on the day it matters most.

A jurisdictional requirement follows. For health data, where a copy physically sits is not the same question as whose law governs it: the legal regime of access, the grounds for disclosure and the rights of the patient are set by the jurisdiction of storage. In healthcare, a decision to hold redundancy abroad is thus technical and legal at once, and taking it on availability grounds alone would be a mistake.

The column closes on an analogy with energy that Ukrainians have already learned in practice: after 2022, words like inverter, substation and generation entered everyday speech, because it had become obvious that independence starts with electricity.

The full column is on UNIAN.