The Ukrainian government is getting ready to move its data and servers abroad.

The country is preparing to make the move as Russian forces continue to push into Ukraine.

Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, told Reuters that the preparations were just contingency plans and moving data out of the country would require regulatory changes to be approved by Ukrainian lawmakers.

After Russia and Russian-backed separatists seized control of Crimea and the Donbas region, Ukraine began to centralize its government data at a Kyiv data center to stop it being taken over in similar seizures or cyberattacks.

But now, that means that the data represents a lucrative target for Russian troops.

The government has already shifted equipment and backups out of Kyiv westwards to safer sections of Ukraine.

“We can move to new locations, we can save data and we can delete data and prevent capturing all this data,” Zhora told Politico.

Government data could be used by Russia to track down state employees and other citizens critical to running a state. In February, the US said that Russian forces compiled a list of Ukrainian citizens to be killed or sent to detention camps should they occupy the country.

Estonia and Monaco have previously established 'e-embassies' within data centers in Luxembourg to act as extra-territorial backup locations for government data and applications in the wake of any potential natural disasters or attacks that might knock the governments' in-country data centers offline.