And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:

> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:

> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.

> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.

> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.

> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...

Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?

The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.

If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.

Not just for datacenters either - warehouses, refineries, power stations, you could sell to anybody with a building full of expensive stuff.

I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.

If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).

https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.

So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.

  The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...

So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.

That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?

As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.

It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.

But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea

It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.

As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?

In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?

Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.

Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.

It's probably one of the safest places on the planet.