‘Grandpa’ Putin Humiliated as Raging Rebellion Exposes Weakness

Kyiv’s attacks on technological infrastructure are doing more than hampering Putin’s war effort.

A photo illustration of Vladimir Putin.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters

Vladimir Putin is facing a growing rebellion after Russian data centers and financial services were wiped out by Ukrainian drone strikes.

Tech giant Yandex, dubbed ‘Russia’s Google,’ closed down one of its major data centers in the city of Vladimir earlier this month after the site—which houses the Galushkin supercomputer—was left ablaze.

Hundreds of miles away, young Russian businessmen were still struggling to access AI days later.

Smoke billows from Yandex's Sasovo hub

Smoke billows from Yandex’s Sasovo hub, one of the company’s five large data centers, after a fire following a drone strike forced the suspension of operations at the site.

SOCIAL MEDIA/SOCIAL MEDIA via REUTERS

Some couldn’t access their online wallets, and others were even left in the dark inside their own apartments, as Yandex Home—which connects devices like smart light switches and robotic vacuum cleaners to the internet—was down too. Many complained about losing money.

Kyiv’s attacks on technological infrastructure are doing more than hampering Putin’s war effort. They are also turning young Russian workers against Putin.

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Alexander S., a 23-year-old IT entrepreneur, told the Daily Beast: “If the largest internet company fails and AI Alisa [Yandex’s version of Alexa] is having a nervous breakdown, what can we do? There is nothing good we can expect from Ded,” he said. “Ded,” meaning grandpa, is one of Putin’s nicknames among Russian youth.

“Every day feels like hell. I want to quit, since nobody knows what to do, as if it’s a total anarchy. If this mess goes on, the entire country will be out of balance,” Alexander said.

vladimir putin

Putin is facing crises at home and abroad.

Young Russian professionals realized this month just how many services and programs depend on Yandex’s crippled servers. Svetlana, a 21-year-old private math tutor, said she lost access to her platform for teaching online lessons.

Messaging systems were down, Alexander said, so was his Yandex Maps. YouTube, Roblox, and other online games were all offline. Russians were struggling to play one of their favorite video games, The World of Tanks, which had up to 1.5 million users playing simultaneously at its peak.

Even young pro-Kremlin bloggers were angry with the government after the attacks on Yandex. “As far as we can see, none of the strike planners have considered that if they attack targets on enemy territory, the enemy might have the resources to respond with strikes on the same targets on Russian territory,” the pro-Putin Military Informant Telegram channel wrote on Sunday. “No, two plus two still don’t add up for us.”

Russian AI analyst Ivan Kopylov warned Russians they could lose access to ChatGPT and Claude entirely. “Anthropic and OpenAI going public will lead to attempts to cut costs by restricting access for residents of Russia and China. Currently, the rules of these companies already limit the use of their models in Russia.”

Meanwhile, as frustration with Putin grows among Russia’s youth, more teenagers are actively turning against him. Juvenile crime is rising for the first time in a decade.

The same week as the Yandex attack, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report that found a fifth of Russians aged 18 to 35 “think negatively of the country’s achievements.” When Putin launched his war in Ukraine in 2022, 35 percent of Russians younger than 24 stopped making plans for the future, as the situation in the country was “unstable.” About 27 million young Russians disapprove of his leadership entirely.

“Putin’s problem is that he is extremely detached from the reality of the young generation, while young Russians, as any youth, feel a sharp sense of unfairness,” Sergey Davidis, a prominent Russian human rights lawyer, told the Daily Beast.

As many as 2,000 people joined a march against Putin earlier this month.

“Out of 5,000 political prisoners, we recorded 149 teenagers behind bars on political cases, mostly for ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’. Their numbers are growing,” Davidis, head of the Political Prisoners Support program, said. “Putin destroyed the feedback channels, normalized violence, so some teenagers look for open sources to find answers, others act radically, often out of a strong sense of injustice, participate in street protests against Putin, or burn the railroad or commuter trains. Some are recruited online for small payments from Ukrainian intelligence, others out of sincere support for Ukraine.”

A state medical report released last week showed a 22 percent increase in anxiety and depression among Russian teenagers. It’s not surprising. This fall, Russian high schools doubled the number of hours for military training for teenage students, while universities and colleges launched a recruitment campaign for drone forces.

Dozens of young Russians joined an anti-Putin protest organized by the Communist Party on October 4 in central Moscow. Young activists were seen chanting: “Down with the Tsar!” and “Down with the Gray Moth!” Back during his KGB service in Dresden, Putin’s nickname was reportedly Moth.

Around 60 demonstrators were arrested, according to the party, with posts circulating on Telegram channels showing officers entering the crowd and grabbing people amid chaotic scenes.

Some 2,000 people are thought to have joined the march, including members of the opposition Yabloko party, which opposes Putin, and the United Russia party, which supports him. Yabloko is the only party officially against the war in Ukraine.

Public protests against Putin are extremely rare and are often met with immediate crackdowns from the police.

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