FIELD REPORT: In broad daylight, Moscow hits a Kyiv internet hub and leaves four dead in a parking lot

Three bodies in a parking lot

Shuliavka, just after three

Three bodies in a parking lot.

It is the mayor’s second message on September 25. At 3:03 p.m. Kyiv time, Vitali Klitschko writes that cars are burning at the foot of an office building in the Solomianskyi district. In the parking lot, rescuers have found three dead. Seven injured. The information, he warns, will be updated.

A parking lot. Not a shelter. Not a trench. The place where you leave the car before going up to the office, and where you come back, keys in hand, once the workday is over.

Where nobody takes cover

At 3:34 p.m., a third message corrects the count. Four dead. Seven injured, including a child. The fire in the parking lot is out.

This report makes no claim to have stood on that sidewalk. It follows the time-stamped messages of the mayor, the air force and the operator that was hit. That is the only honest ground available from here.

The mayor gives neither the address nor the name of the building. He gives the order of things. The facade. The windows. The cars. The bodies. In that order.

And that ground begins with an ordinary word. Parking lot.

Nobody takes shelter in a parking lot. You walk across it.

Thirteen minutes

2:30 p.m., the air force

At 2:26 p.m., Ukraine’s air force reports jet-powered drones heading toward Vyshhorod and Kyiv from the north.

At 2:30 p.m., it posts that jet drones are over the city and tells people in Kyiv to stay in shelters.

According to Glavcom, the air-raid alert had started at 2:27 p.m. The eighth of the day. It lasted 23 minutes.

2:43 p.m., the mayor

At 2:43 p.m., the mayor’s first message comes in. A drone has hit an office building in Solomianskyi. Facade damaged. Windows blown out. Casualties, according to initial information.

Thirteen minutes between the order to take shelter and that message. Thirteen minutes to read the alert. Thirteen minutes to decide whether this is the real one. Thirteen minutes to leave the screen on and find the stairs.

A jet-powered drone is not the propeller drone of winter nights. It is faster. UNITED24 writes that it was a drone of this type that hit the building.

Everyone in Kyiv knows the siren by heart. Too well. The day had started before dawn, and it was not over.

The eighth alert of a day does not weigh what the first one does. It is unfair. It is human.

Thirteen minutes is a coffee break. Not a shelter.

The building people still call Inkom

At the corner of Vadym Hetman Street

The mayor writes office building. The local press gives the name.

According to the Kyiv news site Informator, the drone hit the Compass FM business center, at the corner of Vadym Hetman and Brodsky Family streets, in Shuliavka. Kyiv residents still call it by its old sign. Inkom.

The building sits 300 meters from a metro entrance, the site specifies. An IT integrator has offices there. So does the Ukrainian Esports Federation. And the operator Datagroup.

A hub, not a barracks

Tvoemisto and Glavcom make the same link: Inkom houses the infrastructure of Datagroup, an internet service provider.

An office hub. People who write code, answer phones, watch server racks. A metro entrance a few minutes’ walk away. Nothing the press describes looks like a barracks.

A neighborhood address. A metro stop name. The kind of place you give a cab driver without having to spell it.

What sits there looks more like a node. Part of a capital’s internet runs through it.

The city still says Inkom. The drone found the address.

The servers had a backup

Datagroup’s statement

At 4:19 p.m., Interfax-Ukraine publishes the operator’s statement. Datagroup, part of the Datagroup-Volia-lifecell group since September 2024, confirms that its data center was damaged in the afternoon attack.

The main thing, the company writes, is that none of its employees were injured. Customer data is safe. All services, it says, are running from backup sites. The infrastructure had been duplicated. It is holding.

What the backup does not cover

I read that message with relief. I admit it. A city at war that keeps its internet keeps its alerts, its bank transfers, its calls to family.

Then I reread the one from 3:03 p.m.

The servers had a backup. The people did not.

I stand with the people of Shuliavka and the engineers who duplicated that network. Against the decision to strike a capital’s telecommunications nodes in broad daylight. Because on September 25, the data center switched to its backup sites, and four people died, three of them found in the parking lot.

There is a backup copy for data. Not for passersby.

Wednesday, already

September 23, 100,000 homes

This is not the first data center hit this week.

On September 23, according to Ukrainska Pravda, a Russian attack damages the data center housing the equipment of the provider UTELS. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation estimates that about 100,000 households lose internet in Kyiv and the surrounding region.

Interfax-Ukraine lists the providers hit that Wednesday. MiroHost. Pavutyna. UTELS. Domonet. Kievnet. Faust. And the data center at the Parkovyi exhibition center.

That Wednesday, at 12:55 p.m., Interfax-Ukraine was already warning of possible network disruptions, with two providers hit.

The next day, Ukrainska Pravda writes that the MiroHost data center has been destroyed. Its founder cannot say when service will resume in Ukraine.

September 25, Datagroup

This is not an outage. It is not a building picked at random. It is not an isolated night. It is not one unlucky provider.

Wednesday, half a dozen operators. Friday, an operator present, according to Glavcom, in more than 90 communities across the country.

Each time, the same term comes back in the Ukrainian press: data center. Each time, an operator’s name that Kyiv residents know from their bill.

Two days apart.

Two days apart, one family of targets.

What Moscow writes down

September 25, the week in review

That same September 25, the Russian defense ministry publishes its summary of the week.

From September 19 to 25, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports, Russian forces carried out two massive strikes and seven group strikes on Ukraine. Among the targets claimed: logistics and telecommunications centers.

The word is in writing. Telecommunications. Kyiv does not need to guess what Moscow is after. Moscow published it.

September 20, Bi-mobile

On September 20, according to Vedomosti, the same ministry was already claiming a strike on a Kyiv data center, named Bi-mobile. Moscow claims it stored and processed intelligence data for the Ukrainian army.

I note it without irony. A government that publishes its categories of targets adds a piece to the file itself.

The ministry claims the week. The ministry claims the category. The ministry claims Bi-mobile, by name. Its weekly summary names neither Kyiv nor Shuliavka.

The target of this text is not a people. It is that decision, signed by a ministry, dated to the week, which puts a capital’s internet nodes on the list of targets.

Moscow writes telecommunications. Kyiv writes four dead.

Dual use, Moscow argues

An army runs on data

The argument deserves to be stated without caricature.

A modern army runs on data. It uses the same cables, the same centers, the same providers as civilians. Hitting a data center, Moscow would argue, means hitting a tool of war. On September 20, its ministry wrote exactly that about Bi-mobile.

That argument calls for proof. Not an adjective.

100,000 homes and an alert

Datagroup, according to Glavcom, serves businesses and households. On September 23, the same family of strikes cut internet to about 100,000 households, according to the Ministry of Digital Transformation.

This week, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha pointed out, according to The Record, that connectivity is critical civilian infrastructure. It is what carries the missile alerts.

The argument proves too much. If it were enough that a soldier might use a cable, no network in any capital would be civilian. Not in Kyiv. Not in Montreal.

And in Shuliavka, the dead were not in a server room. Three were found in a parking lot.

In other words, even if a soldier had once logged on to a Datagroup server, it was people in a parking lot who paid, on a Friday afternoon.

The civilian network also carries the alert that saves lives.

Today, the network held

Datagroup runs on its backups

What unsettles my own argument has to be written too.

This Friday, Kyiv’s internet did not go down. Datagroup says so: its services are running from backup sites. As I write, no general outage has been announced. Anyone who wanted a headline about a capital cut off will have to shelve it.

The series of strikes on data centers, if it is one, did not produce its effect that day. Ukrainian engineers had gotten ahead of it.

That success makes no noise. A backup site starting up is heard nowhere, and nobody films it.

And the sky was not enough

There is a second admission, heavier for our camp. The air force sounded the alert at 2:30 p.m. The drone hit anyway.

Kyiv’s air defense did not stop that one. In broad daylight. In the heart of the city. It is a fact, and it does not fit in a drawer.

And yet none of this lightens the count. It is true, and it does not change this: the backup saved the data, not the four.

The network held. The sky, not this time.

Four

From three to four in 31 minutes

3:03 p.m.: three bodies.

3:34 p.m.: four dead.

Between the two messages, 31 minutes. Time for an injured person to die, or for a body to be found farther away. The message does not say which.

What the tally leaves out

The tally says four. The tally says seven injured. The tally says one child among them. The tally says the fire is out. It gives no names, no ages, nothing about what they were doing there.

A mayor’s tally is emergency information. It is written for rescuers and for families. It is not an obituary. That will come, or it won’t.

Who were they?

In an office parking lot, around the middle of the afternoon, there is always someone coming back from lunch. Someone leaving early. Someone looking for their keys, a hand deep in a pocket.

Four.

Datagroup writes that its employees were not injured. So the four were apparently not from the company that was hit. They were next to it.

The server switched over. They had nowhere to switch to.

The same district, twice

Two messages before dawn

Solomianskyi did not wait for the afternoon.

At 4:33 a.m., the mayor writes that a drone has fallen on a nonresidential building in the district. Missile threat over the capital, he adds. Stay in shelters.

At 5:24 a.m., a new message. A 25-story apartment building is hit at the level of the fourth floor. A fire in open ground near a nonresidential building. One injured, according to initial information.

3:51 p.m., a health facility

4:33 a.m.: a nonresidential building. 2:43 p.m.: an office building.

Then 3:51 p.m. Another health facility in the capital is damaged, again in Solomianskyi. Three people who were close by are hospitalized, including a child.

The same mayor, the same format, message after message. The district. The floor. The victims. He writes the way you put on bandages, fast, without adjectives.

One district. One night. One afternoon. One clinic. Nobody, in these messages, mentions a barracks.

One district, one day, four messages from the mayor.

Why a Friday afternoon

The offices are full

A night strike on a data center hits machines. A daytime strike also hits the people working around them.

On a Friday, around 2:40 p.m., an office building is occupied. So is its parking lot. Any general staff knows that.

Who chooses the hour?

What the jet drone changes

The jet-powered drone shortens the warning. The afternoon fills the floors. Together, they shift the cost onto people.

And yet the Russian weekly summary speaks of telecommunications centers without ever giving the time. As if a full parking lot were a detail of execution.

The purpose of this strike would not only be to cut a network. It would remind a capital that no office hour is safe. That is a deduction, not a quotation. Nobody in Moscow will write it down.

Striking in the afternoon means striking a full parking lot.

Eight alerts before dinner

A capital’s day

Glavcom counts the eighth air-raid alert at 2:27 p.m. Eight since midnight.

Eight times, the phones. Eight times, the same question between the desk and the stairwell.

The city lived that Friday to the rhythm of the messages. At 11:41 a.m., the air force reports a jet drone heading for Kyiv. At 11:58 a.m., another, from the south. At 12:24 p.m., a third south of the city, toward Chabany and Vyshneve.

The city counts the alerts. The city counts the injured. The city counts the minutes between two messages. The city counts, and it works anyway.

The 4:09 p.m. tally

At 4:09 p.m., the mayor publishes the day’s tally. 31 injured in Kyiv. 15 hospitalized, including two children. Five residents dead, one of them a child.

The child died that morning, in another neighborhood. That story has its own telling. Here, the child remains a number in a sum that should not exist.

The phone buzzing on the desk. The stairwell door slamming. Glass crunching underfoot, wherever a window gave way.

A capital that still counts is a capital that holds.

Bi-mobile, MiroHost, Datagroup

The 20th, the 23rd, the 25th

On the 20th, a data center claimed by Moscow. On the 23rd, half a dozen operators hit. On the 25th, Datagroup.

First, you hit the cables. First, you hit the cold rooms where the servers hum. First, you hit the nodes that carry the alerts, the payments, the calls.

And then?

Not everyone has a backup site

On the 23rd, according to The Record, UTELS restored service within two hours. The same day, Pavutyna saw nearly half its network affected.

Datagroup had its duplicate. MiroHost, on the 24th, did not know when it would resume service in Ukraine. If the series continues, the next target could be less well protected.

An alert that no longer reaches a phone, on a weekday afternoon, 13 minutes from impact…

Every operator that duplicates its servers pays twice. Once for the network. Once for the copy. That is the price of an internet at war, and the bill is never sent to Moscow.

And yet a city’s defense against this threat is hard to see. It leaves no crater. It leaves duplicated racks, backup sites, engineers who barely sleep.

First the cables. Then the alerts go quiet.

Nobody backed up the parking lot

Friday evening in Shuliavka

The fire in the parking lot has been out since 3:34 p.m. Datagroup is assessing its damage. The services are running elsewhere.

The city did what it knows how to do. Duplicate the cables. Duplicate the centers. Duplicate the backup sites. It does not know how to duplicate a parking lot.

Here, network resilience is a phrase from an annual report. In Kyiv, it is a Friday afternoon, a parking lot, a copy starting up somewhere else.

This is no reproach to the engineers. It is the limit of resilience: it protects systems. Bodies are protected by the sky, and the sky does not reboot from a backup site.

An allied city, and its passersby

What do we choose to protect first, when an allied capital already knows how to save its data, and not yet its passersby?

The network switched over. The toll stays at four.

Tomorrow, someone will park in Shuliavka.

The internet hub has its backup. The parking lot never will.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Vitali Klitschko, mayor of Kyiv — four dead and seven injured in Solomianskyi, September 25, 2026
• Vitali Klitschko, mayor of Kyiv — the day’s toll, 31 injured and five dead, September 25, 2026
• Ukrainian Air Force — jet drone alert over Kyiv, September 25, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Interfax-Ukraine — Datagroup data center damaged, September 25, 2026
• Informator — the Compass FM business center, formerly Inkom, in Shuliavka, September 25, 2026
• Ukrainska Pravda — MiroHost destroyed, 100,000 homes without internet on the 23rd, September 24, 2026