In case people aren't aware, that day Russia made a major escalation of the Ukrainian invasion that began back in 2014, starting with the announcement from Putin about a "special military operation" beginning in Ukraine by Russian forces.

Unlikely that was the day of download, it's common practice to mask last-modified/last-accessed/created-at timestamps in dumps, by setting it to some significant date or just initial unix timestamp.

not a coincidence yandex has its own VCS (called arkadia). But not all services used it, some used github public and private. After war started, they had to migrate everything to internal vcs for obvious reasons.

So it makes sense they stopped committing to other repos somewhat around that date.

I don't have any inside knowledge now, but my guess would be that the leak is from 'on-prem' github.

It's not coincidence :)