COMMENTARY: Moscow hits Kyivstar three times in September, and targets the phone that warns

The 11th, the 17th, the 27th

Three addresses, one operator

Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, was hit three times in September: its engineering team’s office in Kyiv on the 11th, a building housing its equipment in the Kyiv region on the 17th, then its headquarters on the 27th, according to the specialist outlet AIN.

On the 11th, an engineering office.

On the 17th, an equipment room.

On the 27th, the headquarters.

The list is short. It climbs a floor each time.

An office, a room, a headquarters. Everything suggests this is no accident of trajectory.

The phone in your pocket

At the end of that list is an object everyone carries. A phone. And on the screen, a notification.

That is the unit of this text: the alert that lights up in the dark. The one that says to go down to the shelter. The one you wait for without quite waiting for it.

At night, in a bedroom in Kyiv, that is what wakes you. Not the explosion. The screen, first.

A screen lights up. A thumb unlocks it. A red map. You get up.

Before the siren, there is the network.

The headquarters, on Sunday

A jet-powered drone

On Sunday, September 27, Russia struck Kyivstar’s headquarters in Kyiv, Reuters reports. An agency photo shows smoke above the building after a strike by a Russian jet-powered drone.

The company says there were no casualties.

“All employees are safe,” its press service writes, as quoted by Ukrainska Pravda. The company is assessing the damage and coordinating what comes next.

According to AIN, the company’s specialists are assessing the consequences and coordinating measures to stabilize operations.

Stabilize. The word of a company that has learned to work under drones.

Sixteen days

Three strikes in 16 days on the same operator.

That is no longer a coincidence of trajectory. It is an address Moscow keeps coming back for, and claims.

The same day, Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed to have struck a data center belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, the country’s second-largest operator, according to Reuters. Vodafone Ukraine did not respond to the agency.

Sixteen days, three addresses, one subscriber targeted: everyone.

What Moscow claims

Data centers serving the army

The Russian ministry does not hide the target. It says it chose it.

To claim a strike is to own it. The ministry owns the target. It offers no proof.

The ministry claims it bombed a Kyivstar data center in Kyiv, according to Al Jazeera. The ministry claims it hit another center, belonging to Omega Telecom. The ministry claims those companies provided services to the Ukrainian army.

Back on September 23, it had claimed two Kyiv data centers, New-Telco and United DC, asserting that they served Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and security services, the Kyiv Independent writes. Those claims could not be independently verified.

The decision

So here is my side. I stand with Kyivstar’s subscribers, and with everyone waiting for an alert on their phone. Against the Russian command’s decision to strike, one by one, the operators that connect Kyiv to the rest of the country. Because on September 27, a drone hit the headquarters of Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, for the third time this month.

Not against a people. Against a target list, signed by a ministry.

Moscow names the army. The network carries civilians first.

The alert runs through here

What Sybiha says

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, answered Moscow after the September 23 strikes, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Russia is targeting major data centers to disrupt the flow of information, he says. And rapid alerts about missiles and drones are essential. “They save lives.”

This is critical civilian infrastructure, he adds. Not a military target. It is indispensable to keeping everyday life running.

He accuses Moscow, having failed to reach its goals on the battlefield, of seeking other ways to destabilize life in Ukraine and to spread fear.

One argument

I keep only one of his points, because it is enough.

In wartime, a mobile operator is not just calls and videos. It is the channel through which a city learns it has to go down to the shelter.

Striking the operator means targeting the time between the alert and the impact. That time is counted in seconds. Sometimes in minutes. Never in hours.

That same Sunday, Zelensky counted 277 attack drones launched since the day before, 155 of them jet-powered. A jet-powered drone is faster. It leaves less time.

Less time to fly. Less time to warn. Less time to get down to the shelter.

An alert that arrives 30 seconds too late is no longer an alert. It is a memory.

Cutting the alert lengthens the distance to the shelter.

A hundred thousand households

September 23

Kyivstar is not alone.

After the September 23 attack, about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region had internet problems, according to Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Ministry. Its specialists were assessing the damage and repairing the network.

On September 24, the outages continued, the Kyiv Independent writes.

A list of providers

There is UTELS, one of whose data centers lost power.

There is Pavutyna, one of whose centers was hit.

There is another provider whose central traffic exchange was damaged, with disruptions reaching as far as the Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi regions.

There is Etherlink, which had to move the core of its network.

There is MiroHost, whose data center in Ukraine was destroyed.

There is CityHost, which lost equipment.

Anatolii Frolenkov, of the 1-IX internet exchange point, describes to the Kyiv Independent the start of a new phase: “since September, they have started taking it out systematically.”

Six companies in two days. For the subscriber, a single symptom: a screen spinning without loading.

A spinning wheel. A message that won’t send. A call that drops.

A hundred thousand times.

A hundred thousand households, and as many silent phones.

Three operators in one weekend

Vodafone, Omega, Kyivstar

Line up the claims end to end.

A Vodafone Ukraine data center, according to the Russian ministry quoted by Reuters. An Omega Telecom center and a Kyivstar center, according to the same ministry quoted by Al Jazeera. Kyivstar’s headquarters, according to the company itself.

On September 28, AIN also reported an Omega Telecom node destroyed in the attacks of September 27 and 28.

The subscribers’ map

For a Ukrainian, an operator is not a brand. It is their mother’s number. The building’s group chat. The app that rings when a missile takes off.

Three operators in one weekend means a good part of the country looking at its signal bars and wondering whether its own will be next.

Vodafone Ukraine did not respond. Kyivstar spoke about its employees. Omega Telecom, on the record, has made no statement.

Moscow is not striking a network. It is striking the idea that a network holds.

In every pocket, the same worry.

New-Telco and United DC

The ministry’s argument, in full

Moscow’s defense deserves to be laid out in its strongest form.

A modern army runs on civilian networks. Soldiers have phones. State agencies store their data in private centers. A data center that serves a defense ministry becomes, the Russian ministry would say, a military objective. And Kyiv does not publish the client list of its servers.

That is what a spokesman would sign. It takes facts to answer it, not adjectives.

The facts that answer it

None of those claims could be verified, the Kyiv Independent writes. A claim is not proof.

On September 27, what Kyivstar says it lost was its headquarters, an office building. On the 11th, it was its engineers’ office.

And President Zelensky writes, on the evening of the 27th, that communications facilities were hit in Kyiv, along with two kindergartens and two schools. He sees no military objective in it, only an attempt to break people.

A network that the alert, the hospital and the school depend on does not become a barracks because a soldier has a phone plan on it.

A soldier’s phone plan does not turn an antenna into a barracks.

The network held

Scattered outages

I also have to write what makes my own camp uncomfortable.

The network did not go down. On September 17, after the strike on its equipment building, Kyivstar said subscriber services were not affected, according to LB.ua.

The strikes are causing significant but scattered outages, not a nationwide blackout, the Kyiv Independent writes.

“The internet will not disappear completely,” Frolenkov says. There will be outages. There will be slowdowns. There will be operators down for a few hours.

What the alarm must not say

MiroHost’s founder says 90 to 95% of his customers use infrastructure outside Ukraine and felt nothing, according to the Kyiv Independent.

That is true. And it does not change this: a network that holds thanks to costly backups is still a network under attack, and every backup destroyed brings the outage that matters closer.

And yet the temptation is strong to write that Ukraine is going dark. It isn’t. It flickers.

The network flickers. It does not go dark.

Twice in one morning

One data center, two strikes

On the morning of Sunday, September 27, a data center in Kyiv was hit twice, according to President Zelensky, quoted by Reuters.

Two children and one adult were injured.

Twice. The same building. The same morning.

Who was on the sidewalk between the first strike and the second?

The word infrastructure

Two days earlier, on September 25, after a drone hit an office building in Solomianskyi where a Datagroup data center was damaged, Mayor Vitali Klitschko confirmed four dead, according to the Kyiv Post.

We say infrastructure. The word does not bleed. The people around it do.

A data center is a building on a street. There is a sidewalk in front. A bus stop nearby. Apartment windows across the way.

Two children injured near a data center on a Sunday morning. No one asked them which operator they subscribed to.

The phone protects against nothing. It only buys a few seconds. In war, a few seconds is a staircase.

Behind every server, there is a street.

July 2, a first warning

A key center, already

None of this came without warning.

On July 2, a Russian attack had already damaged a key data center in Kyiv, disrupting several providers, the Kyiv Independent recalls.

Then the summer. Then September 11. Then the 17th. Then the 23rd and 24th. Then the 25th. Then the 27th.

On September 23, an office building in Solomianskyi, which housed a data center and communications nodes serving Kyiv, was damaged by a Russian Geran-5 jet-powered drone, according to the caption of a photo published by the Kyiv Independent.

A cadence

On September 11, the day of the first strike on Kyivstar, Russian attacks also hit the Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipro, Odesa, Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, according to LB.ua.

The network is not one target among others. It is becoming a target that keeps coming back.

Frolenkov puts it his own way: attacks on communications are not new, but the escalation against data centers and nodes marks a shift in intensity.

July warned. September confirms.

What winter brings

The worst case

I can see what comes next, and I am not the only one.

Ukraine’s prime minister, Serhiy Koretskyi, says the country has to plan for the worst case, AIN reports. In his view, the threat to data centers will last until the end of the war. To protect them, the government will combine underground shelters, cloud computing and sites abroad.

Until the end of the war. The phrase has no date.

Winter and silence

In winter, power cuts lie in wait. An antenna without power runs on battery, then goes dark.

A city without a network, in January, at night, when the sky…

Without electricity, without a network, the alert only gets through by the neighborhood siren. And the siren can’t always be heard from a bedroom at the end of a hallway.

This is not a prediction. It is an addition: winter, plus the network, plus the strikes.

An underground shelter for the servers. A cloud for the data. A site abroad for the network’s core. The government is preparing all three.

And the subscribers? They keep their phones charged. They keep a flashlight by the bed. They keep an ear on the street.

Winter will do the rest, if the network gives way.

A notification at three in the morning

The bedroom at the end of the hall

Tonight, in a Kyiv high-rise, there is a phone on a nightstand.

An alert is a vibration against the wood. An alert is a blue light on the ceiling. An alert is a family on the stairs, a child in someone’s arms.

That is all an alert does. It is enormous.

Parents sleep with the phone under the pillow. Teenagers have learned to tell an alert’s vibration from all the others. Grandparents keep a charger plugged in by the bed, all night.

From a city without sirens

I write from a city where my phone only announces emails.

I admit I had never thought of my carrier as a line of defense. I paid it every month without thinking, the way you pay for water.

In Kyiv, people pay for it too. And they count on it to wake them in time.

A blue light on the ceiling, and a family getting up.

The price of backups

Duplicate, disperse, export

Operators know how to defend themselves, Frolenkov says. Duplicate the equipment. Keep backup routes. Disperse the infrastructure, even abroad.

But that strategy is expensive, he adds, and many providers lack enough backups. They become more vulnerable when their equipment is destroyed.

It costs to duplicate. It costs to disperse. It costs to rebuild everything after each night.

Who pays for the backup battery on a neighborhood antenna?

5G will have to wait

Kyivstar does not plan a mass rollout of 5G in Ukraine before the end of the war, AIN reported in August.

A country rebuilding its antennas under drones does not modernize. It repairs. It duplicates. It hides.

Elsewhere, 5G means speed. In Kyiv, the speed that counts is a notification’s.

And yet the network holds. Every night, the notifications arrive.

Every duplicated server is one more wartime bill.

The invisible front line

What the list foretells

On the 11th, an engineering office. On the 17th, an equipment room. On the 27th, a headquarters. In between, 100,000 households without internet and a data center hit twice.

The Russian ministry calls these military targets. It has not shown a single one of them to be so in any verifiable way.

A list. Dates. Addresses. And one constant: each strike moves the alert a little further from the people waiting for it.

And yet the list keeps getting longer.

Here at home, we talk a lot about missiles and interceptors. We talk little about antennas, servers and backup batteries.

The antenna and the interceptor

When will a neighborhood antenna become, for Ottawa and its allies, part of Kyiv’s air shield?

An interceptor stops a drone. An antenna wakes a family.

Both are part of the same shield.

Three strikes in 16 days, and the phone still warns.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Reuters — Kyivstar headquarters hit, Vodafone Ukraine data center claimed by Moscow, September 27, 2026
• Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation — 100,000 households without internet in Kyiv and the region, September 23, 2026
• Volodymyr Zelensky — communications facilities, schools and kindergartens hit in Kyiv, September 27, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Ukrainska Pravda — Kyivstar headquarters damaged, company statement, September 27, 2026
• AIN.ua — three strikes on Kyivstar in September and data center protection, September 28, 2026
• Kyiv Independent — Ukraine’s internet in Russia’s sights, September 24, 2026