https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-partnership-between-Yande... https://duck.co/forum/thread/2725/yandex-partnership
IIRC, DDG is a privacy-preserving metasearch engine. That means it farms your query out to other search engines and then combines the results.
I think it started by proxying Google searches to hide your metadata from Google.
> This means that your request's metadata is already reported to Russian government services.
This sound like FUD. Why would a metasearch engine send anything out to the search engines it proxies besides the query? It might not even have to make that query for your request if someone else made it recently.
1. Yandex search results very closely match DDG's in Ukrainian (or did) as opposed to Google/Bing
2. When Yandex could no longer operate in Ukraine, DDG's region for Ukraine disappeared
I am reminded of Hanlon's Razor in this situation, that perhaps in Ukraine they simply did not fix their search after their top index provider was blocked.