A government data center operated by Russia’s Ministry of Finance and its tax department has been damaged by Ukrainian drone strikes.

Media outlets Exilenova+ and Astra report that the data center of the Federal Tax Service and the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation in Gorodets, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, was struck overnight.

“The facility is one of two key data processing centers of the Federal Tax Service of Russia operating in a geo-distributed mode,” ExileNova+ said. “The damage to this facility could potentially affect the operation of state information systems of the Russian Federation.”

Gleb Nikitin, governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, reported three injuries after a series of drone strikes that damaged "several residential buildings, one educational facility, and one infrastructure facility."

The Federal Taxation Service (FNS) is the revenue service for the Russian government responsible for overseeing tax compliance.

Gorodets (Городе́ц) is a town and the administrative center of Gorodetsky District in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, some 425km (264 miles) east of Moscow and more than 900km (559 miles) from the country’s border with Ukraine.

In development since 2012, the data center in Gorodets reportedly officially opened in December 2015. The site is where data from state registries is stored and processed, including tax databases.

The finance ministry is said to also operate out of the Federal Data Processing Center in Dubna in Moscow Region and a facility in Yerzovka, Volgograd Region.

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has been ongoing since 2014, with significant escalation in 2022 after Russian forces conducted a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Gorodets facility is the latest in an ongoing campaign by both forces targeting data center facilities in both Ukraine and Russia.

Facilities around Kyiv operated by Parkovyi Data Center, UTELS, MiroHost, Datagroup, Vodafone Ukraine, De Novo, Cosmonova, Omega Telecom, Ukrsibbank, GigaCenter, and Ukrtelecom have been hit by Russian forces in recent weeks. Outside Kyiv, facilities operated by Tenet in Odesa and the RX-Name data center in the Nikolaev/Mykolaiv area of southern Ukraine have also been hit.

Ukraine has struck back with multiple attacks on Russian-owned digital infrastructure, including strikes on several data centers owned by Yandex and Sberbank.

Earlier this year, Ukrainian forces struck a data center in Russian-occupied Ukraine in Prymorsk. Ukraine also recently targeted two telecoms facilities operated by Russian firms in the occupied cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russian officials have been discussing mitigating measures for attacks on its data centers, ranging from building “doomsday” data centers to siting facilities in disused coal mines or friendly neighboring territories.

Further afield, several Starlink ground station sites across Europe, including in Poland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, have been targets of arson attacks in recent weeks, with officials linking the incidents to Russia. This comes as Elon Musk has been accused of reducing Starlink's available satellite communications capacity in Ukraine.