Zelensky: For Russia, ‘all ordinary life is simply a target’
Russia’s defence ministry said in two statements that it had hit data centres in Kyiv working for Ukraine’s armed forces.
Russia is widening its attacks to take in American and other businesses, data centres and internet providers, and “for Russia, all ordinary life is simply a target”, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.
Zelensky wrote in a Telegram post in Ukrainian on 25 September 2026 that the strikes hit people’s ability “to stay connected, to study, to work”.
The post put the toll from a Russian drone strike on an office building in Kyiv at four dead and seven injured, among them a child.
Drones also hit a warehouse used by McDonald’s, though the post did not say where. “A strike drone against ordinary groceries,” the president wrote.
By the evening, seven people had been killed and 59 injured in Russian attacks on Kyiv, the city’s mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, said. Earlier in the day, Klitschko had reported the death of a 14-year-old boy.
Russia’s defence ministry said on 25 September that it had struck the Datagroup data centre in Kyiv, which it said processed and passed on intelligence data for Ukraine’s armed forces.
Zelensky did not say whether the office building hit that day housed a data centre.
In a further statement on 26 September, the ministry said its drones had struck a second site in the city overnight, the Kosmonova data processing centre.
That centre, the statement said, kept mobile internet running and supported Starlink satellite communications for Ukraine’s military. It gave no word on casualties.
Two days before Zelensky’s post, on 23 September, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation said about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region had internet problems because of a Russian attack. Specialists were assessing the damage and repairing the network.
“It is important that the world responds to all of this and that Russia feels the responses to its terror,” Zelensky wrote.
The president added that Ukraine’s long-range strikes and the world’s sanctions must work together “for concrete consequences for Russia”.
Hours earlier, Zelensky had written that two oil refineries in Russia, in Perm and Novoshakhtinsk, had been hit overnight thanks to Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions”.
Later on 25 September, Zelensky said in a second post that additional decisions had been taken to protect data centres and other facilities critical to communications, and to keep them working without interruption.
“These decisions need to be implemented in full at all levels, and this is the personal responsibility of government officials and the heads of the special services,” the post said.