Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses | Hacker News Reader

Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

ir.yandex

233 pointslaplab322 comments

This is likely related to the US imposing secondary sanctions early this year.

Yandex would lose access to their US/EU bank accounts if they were still operating in Russia.

Not just that. Russia is going to confiscate all Western assets in Russia as a counter measure. Valued roughly at 200B USD, mainly owned by EU countries.

Yandex would lose their Russian business in any case.

Yandex is keeping their Russian business.

This is Yandex's European arm divesting itself from the Search+Mail business they have in Russia.

In the press release, this was even mentioned - that Yandex's Russian management (aka most of it's management) would be buying out their Russian operations.

Slight edit to this. I didn't realize the core founding team was pushed out and largely committed Aliyah for Israel after the 2022 War began.

Not surprised either, as the core team was fairly progressive and anti-war, as a lot of Russian techies are. Also, it was the core team that was working on forward facing bets - sort of like a more functional version of Larry Page and Sergey Brin - and they're keeping those forward facing bets.

Middle management appears to still be operating in Russia though.

Edit:

To people commenting below,

IT Professionals and most other white collar jobs are draft exempted in Russia [0]

To make up for the unfairness, mobilized Russian soldiers are being paid Russian/Eastern European white collar level salaries ($2,500/mo) [1]

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-excludes-some-it...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/russia-ukraine-wa...

By "anti-war" do you mean in general or in regard to a particular war?

Ex-CEO of Russian Yandex made a post in an internal network explaining she moved to Israel, and, among other things, saying "I don't want to live in a country waging wars with its neighbours (sic)". I wonder if she understood her own hypocrisy.

“Neighbours” isn’t misspelt there, that’s the British spelling.

That was in March 2022, before the recent stuff kicked off.

"Recent stuff" has little to do with the hypocrisy of this statement.

The statement was present tense. I don't think there were wars being waged at the time. Also when coalition of dictators A say they want to wipe small democratic country B off the map and attack it then I'm not sure A and B are equivalent and moving from an A to a B is hypocrisy.

making up facts, denying one’s behavior and measuring on the greater evil scale, is not the behavior of the good

The Ukraine War.

Most of the founding leadership's net worth was tied to Yandex's NYSE stock (YNDX) which was delisted due to the sanctions regime.

Back in the day, Russian companies (just like Chinese companies pre-COVID) would cross list stock in both the Russian Market and the NYSE for an IPO.

Basically, this is them cashing out and concentrating on their European operations, but the actual stuff Yandex is known for (search, mail, AI/ML) is still based in Russia and operated by Russian managers.

Given the move from Russia to Israel and the timing of when most Russian techies left, I suspect it is more out of fear of the draft than out of principle.

Not that I blame them - I doubt I would leave the US even during an unjust war… but a draft?

> most Russian techies left

This was about them getting paid fat paychecks from western clients/employers not out of draft fears.

Not a new phenom, whereas the draft is.

IT Professionals and most other white collar jobs are draft exempted in Russia [0]

To make up for the unfairness, mobilized Russian soldiers are being paid Russian/Eastern European white collar level salaries ($2,500/mo) [1]

The issue is if you're a Russian contractor working for a western company, how is the western company supposed to pay you? Russia's banking system has been decoupled from the west, and even Asian banks in China and India (major trading partners of Russia) are hesitant to fill the gap out of fears of secondary sanctions.

If you want to earn dollars, best to move to a Russian speaking country that isn't sanctioned like Kazakhstan, Georgia, or Bulgaria or to an easy to move country for Russians like Turkiye, Serbia, UAE, etc.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-excludes-some-it...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/russia-ukraine-wa...

> To make up for the unfairness, mobilized Russian soldiers are being paid Russian/Eastern European white collar level salaries ($2,500/mo) [1]

$2500/mo is way higher than I would have thought they were paying these soldiers.

They're only paying the surviving ones. Also they're conveniently delaying payments and benefits to the families of the deceased.

https://youtu.be/t-VUAeRMGQU?si=0wNOnWtIiTBYh2XR&t=287

Interesting - although I think this is clearly intended as somewhat of a propaganda video.

Yes, sadly for many of their families, whole companies are left in the lurch for extended periods of time, often stuck on the front and meant to stay there. There are some heartbreaking pleas from companies like that, who know they are screwed. I've seen russian POWs claim they are more afraid of their superiors than the AFU. Huge numbers of foreign fighters are there for the $2500 too. So much tragedy.

The journalist seems honest and tries to show negative sides as well - even calls it a war. I’ve had a few chats with him on Patreon. His economic and refugee ones in particular were interesting.

Not all IT professionals are exempt, you have to have an university degree. Most do, but a sizeable minority doesn't.

>>> most Russian techies left

>> This was about them getting paid fat paychecks from western clients/employers not out of draft fears.

> Not a new phenom, whereas the draft is.

Russian techies started to leave immediately following the invasion that started in Feb 2022, because Western firms put in policies forbidding anyone in Russia from having access to their systems due to security concerns. If they were working for or contracting with those firms and stayed in Russia, they'd lose their jobs.

It looks like Putin first announced the draft in Sept. 21, 2022, but by then the techies working for or contracting with Western firms had already left or quit.

> Given the move from Russia to Israel and the timing of when most Russian techies left, I suspect it is more out of fear of the draft than out of principle.

Techies bring in $$$, so they are exempted from the mobilization.

100%. It's much easier than naturalizing in Germany, the UK, or US.

I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.

All wars have something in common: they end. That thought in your head about lack of hope of normalizing relations is just the current propaganda working.

Edit: it's amazing just how short-sighted people can be. Look, we still bring up the Nazis as an unassailable argument for how something is bad. And yet the war with Germany ended and they are now a US ally fighting Russia. I'm sure in the midst of WW2 the common folk also believed that there can be no peace with Germany, after all the man on the radio said so.

Besides, during WW2 the situation was the opposite: Russia was an ally. And hey, if you study European history at all you'll note that it's a series of wars with shifting alliances.

So do countries, if we're looking at a long enough time scale. There is no end in sight for the war in Ukraine and when the end comes it's likely to be messy. It might be more of a pause than a true end, and one or both sides will likely be pretty unhappy with the outcome. It could be many years before Russia and the west go back to a comfortable economic relationship.

Well, could go many ways. Depends who is going to "succeed" to Putin (which isn't getting any younger) and especially how.

Maybe the problem is the shortness of sight rather than the lack of an end?

Rest assured, if the powers that be decide that "Russia is good now" they will convince you of the same within 6 months.

My grandparents carried some anti-German sentiments 70 years after the war ended. Maybe you are able to switch your opinions that quickly, most people can't.

War didn't technically "end" between North and South Korea, North Korea is still a pariah state even if we were to accept the Korean war ended many decades ago.

Relationship between Russia and the west will probably be restored at some point but not without a lot of Russians and to a lesser extent Ukrainian getting killed, their economy and infrastructure gutted.

Well, at the current point of time Russia's economy and infrastructure are mostly intact. I'm not sure why is that for a dramatic change.

If you look at Iran, it also has its infrastructure in quite OK conditions - perhaps in better shape than all of their neighbours, and now that may even include Turkey. Russia is larger and has not self-inflicted being a theocracy.

As for the losses of both sides, I'd suggest leaving that to military experts.

As the war drags on we can expect to see escalation in Ukrainian strikes against Russian infrastructure targets such as refineries. Russia is already short of air defense systems and isn't able to provide much coverage for civilian targets. Whether this works will depend on the level of sustained foreign aid for Ukraine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/01/25/ukrain...

Depends on if Trump takes the Whitehouse in the fall and how European elections go :-(

In either case, even a Ukrainian defeat means Russia will be a pariah state to countries with reasonable governance. Trade will be difficult and diminished, same as it is with Iran.

Putin&Lavrov have clearly made this calculation and decided this is in their own interests. Whether it's in the interest of the Russian people I think is questionable.

It's interesting that you bring up Iran. They are actually doing pretty well considering that the US stole all their foreign currency reserves (and also precipitated the original conflict in the first place).

Not to mention having their neighbours destabilized into the most insane civil wars, over the past two decades (with gems like ISIS/Daesh having their year or two in the sun).

If anyone's wondering why Iran has its fingers into Syria and Iraq militias, note they've been invaded (with US support) by one, and are allied with the other.

Kremlin will just use those attacks as an excuse to occupy larger parts of Ukraine. Bombing of Belgorod is now used as an excuse to create "demilitarized zone" that includes Kharkiv (second largest city in Ukraine). I guess another "demilitarized zone" will follow in Odessa, after some attack on Crimea.

Russia has been trying to occupy a larger part of Ukraine for almost 2 years now without success. They don't need excuses.

The only reason Russia doesn't occupy Kharkiv, Odesa and Kyiv is that they can't. They don't need any excuse.

With the current rate of attacks Ukraine is not able to cause any noticeable infrastructural issues, and anything beyond approximately the Volga river is not reachable by any weapon systems.

It's sort of a moving target like "How long would it take for Freddy Krueger to kill all Chinese teenagers"

Ending wars and normalising relations can take a hell of a lot of time, though. Just ask people who lived in the Balkans, central or Eastern Europe, Korea, or in Palestine at some point in the 20th century, to name but a few examples. Or those who lived in a constant background of warfare basically anywhere in the world at any point in time. The pax romana and the stability brought by well-managed empires are remarquable for a reason.

I agree that animosity is deep rooted between neighbors. But I suspect it is less deep between distant countries that have had working relationships in the past.

I think there's deep animosity between Russia and much of the West.

It's very easy for Americans to shrug their shoulders and say "we don't care it's a long way away", regardless of whether or not that would be a historic surrender for the global hegemon, but we Europeans cannot. It's on our doorstep. Russia has not just attacked Ukraine, but all of Europe. There will never be normalised relations with Russia whilst he is in power, just as there never could be normalised relations with Adolf Hitler once he had crossed the Rubicon and started WW2.

I wonder when you will arrive at the understanding that if Russia is not going to have more revolutions, then you are going to have to live alongside Russia on the tiniest of continents and it would be best for both sides to learn how.

Is's not like you're going in with a military action and capturing Volgograd, after all. Adolf Hitler could be neutralized by capturing Berlin. Good luck dealing with Russia that way.

Learning to live is arming the eastern NATO border to the teeth. Russia has never stopped trying to expand westward, is still very far from giving up on its imperialism and strength is the only language it understands.

Not sure how much (more) arming to the teeth of NATO is needed when France / UK / USA have thermonuclear ICBMs.

The problem is what to do with the likes of Georgia and Ukraine (which has been deeply regretting giving up nukes against Russian/US/UK "protection" for some years now).

Then you will have a permanent war in Europe, get used to it and make yourself comfortable.

Can you explain? European (NATO) countries will "provoke" Russia into invading by securing their internationally recognized borders?

So far, we have seen the opposite pattern of Russia messing with countries which didn't make it into NATO in time.

There is no good way out of the situation where both sides are armed to the teeth. The best bet is a political failure of one of the sides.

If that does not happen, these sabers will be rattling from time to time. If Russia's (and China's) immediate borders are packed with countries armed to their teeth, there would be wars.

Buffer states happen for a reason.

I believe USA kind of understands this (see how they reacted to Cuba) and EU surely understands this too (see how Sweden reacts to any signs of Russian militarization), but they have trouble projecting it on other countries or still believing they can coerce these countries into "dealing with it".

> If Russia's (and China's) immediate borders are packed with countries armed to their teeth, there would be wars.

I like this Putin's style of passive threats like "there would be wars". Just say the threat explicitly, Russia would invade their western neighbors.

> Buffer states happen for a reason.

Ukraine was a buffer state, yet it was invaded by Russia three times in the last 10 years. People have now justified doubts about this model.

If these countries are "armed to the teeth", Russia will invade some of these countries. Both sides will point fingers at each other while some Eastern European homes burn. Eventually the prospect of horrible death while grasping the Western-provided arms will dissuade these countries from being armed to the teeth. I sincerely believe the preferred lifestyle of Eastern Europeans is sitting on a porch of their nice tiny house, not dying from a mortal wound in a ditch.

Arms do not win wars without people holding them, and even then, fighting off an agressor does not mean your country isn't ruined.

Ukraine was in the process of ditching its buffer state status by choosing a side. They bragged for a decade how they are going to do that. Needless to say it didn't go so well for them, and only them so far. Other countries in thir position turned out to be smarter as not to win the first Russian invasion target prize.

Please note that I'm not asking for a moral judgement because everybody else who may pass it has worse skeletons in their own closet than Russian Ukraine affair.

There is no scenario where Eastern European countries, who had been living under Russian tyranny for several centuries, only recently to secure their independence and security as part of the EU or NATO, are going to unilaterally disarm just to please Russia.

Other countries just managed to join NATO fast enough before Putin lost his mind. Ukraine's mistake was joining too slowly. Now Russia and Ukraine both suffer for basically no reason other than the fantasies of a senile 71 year old man.

>Please note that I'm not asking for a moral judgement because everybody else who may pass it has worse skeletons in their own closet than Russian Ukraine affair.

I don't know if that is true, the Ukraine War stands out as particularly evil. Russia is guilty of particularly evil crimes against humanity in this war that they chose to start.

> who had been living under Russian tyranny for several centuries

Most of these countries Russia never touched, or fought off of Turks and then let them be. They never lived under Russia's anything. Were it Czechs live under several centuries of Russian tyranny? Because these ones are particularly obnoxious now, despite many years of feeding off of Russian statesmen in Karlovy Vary.

I don't think you even remotely understand what you are talking about, and people are going to die in great numbers before they start reading history books instead of NYT columns on the subject.

> stands out as particularly evil

I guess they just don't hand out history textbooks in the child care...

> Most of these countries Russia never touched, or fought off of Turks and then let them be.

Does the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact ring any bell? Do you know what the Baltic states went through? Did you hear about the Prague spring or that glorious sister republic in eastern Germany? Fuck, do you know about the Holodomor?

It’s a bit rich to say these countries never knew Russian oppression. It may not have lasted very long, but it was particularly brutal. The first thing they did is get away at the first occasion and all of them are traumatised to this day. Ukraine and Belarus tried to play nice. Belarus is now subservient and annexed in all but name, and Ukraine is being torn apart. So tell me why those Eastern European countries would not do anything they can to stay out of Russia’s reach?

I'm not sure what's wrong with socialist Czech or DDR. They've got the Communism lite try before you buy inoculated package and now they squeal like a pig being butchered. Russians saw many orders of magnitude worse things than any of the stuff DDR or Soviet Czech was up to. The way Eastern Europeans are trying to show how they require special treatment is a disgrace to any Russian. They literally complain how Soviets curbed their access to white privilege they were entitled to.

XX century was a disaster, you had to grind your teeth and survive through it. Holodomor is a pathetic Ukrainian attempt to privatize a much greater Communist hunger and frame it on its victims. They do so because they believe that they should get a specific, better treatment than everybody east of them. Rings any bells?

Needless to say Russians did not invent Communism and you can find a huge number of fans for it in any HN thread. Russians sincerely believed they have a traumatic experience of struggle to share with the rest of "socialist camp" only to discover that the whole 500 million strong camp frames it on their small ethnic fraction.

Belarus is a paradise now compared to Ukraine (and to extent Russia). You can do whatever you like and there is no fear of draft. There are also jobs and industry intact. You can cross the border if you are male but is not economically obliged to do so.

Czechs were only part of the Russian Empire for about 45 years, and only in the 20th century. Could have been worse.

I think you just struggle to understand how fundamentally your country is hated by Eastern Europeans. Russia is like Germany, if Germany still was proud of its Nazi heritage. You just don't get it, it's sad, you're so hated but you have no idea why, you're just so blinded by ultranationalism. Russia could have chosen to enter the 21st century but instead decided to enter the 18th. Meanwhile most of your people outside of Moscow and St Petersburg don't even have indoor toilets. It's honestly tragic what a gigantic shithole your country is, and yet you're so proud of it being such a gigantic shithole. Just tragic.

I think I don't struggle to imagine how Eastern Europeans loved Russia, Soviet Union and Communism just 40 years back. 80 years back, Eastern Europeans just loved Germany and Hitler. Now they are huge fans of the USA. This time it's for real. Genuine Eastern European feeling and honest hatred for everybody who came before.

The problem with most Eastern Europeans is that they'll sing and dance on anybody's 5 cents. You can buy and sell them and they will always be eager to serve.

That is frankly revolting to Russians who are able to maintain long term loyalties, and will be heartbroken to betray long term commitments. Russians do not hate Eastern Europeans, neither do they want to invade and occupy their countries, but Russians do despise Eastern Europeans now. Every stupid thing you say gets laid on these scales.

Oh, loyalties? Do you know Russia is committed to defend Armenia thru the CSTO, but apparently just said meh and now Armenia is on their own?

Armenia is run by a US-backed stooge, so Russia expected the US to defend Armenia. But whoops, the US chose to win a favor with Turkey by backing Azerbaijan instead :)

Armenia has suffered a national tragedy which they then turned into circus by their accusations against Russia. They neither recognized Karabakh as their own nor did they put up a serious fight. But they can's shut up telling everybody how they expected somebody else to fight instead of them.

Still, Russians did not write Armenia off completely even after all this.

That "writing them off completely" is even on the table shows that this "ability to loyalty" is BS. It's like if you have a boyfriend that say "well, at least I won't leave you over this" every day. Don't make you feel very secure do it?

I won't call the bearded Pashinyan "a girlfriend", but it is the other way around:

Armenia basically tell Russia they break up with them to join another relationship. However, the other side does not look like they want Armenia. No breakup exchange of personal effects happens. In the end, Russia lingers there to see what happens and is not closing the door yet. Again, it is a bad analogy because even the closest country to country relations are not monogamous.

The reason of why the breakup is discussed: your bearded girlfriend taunted another girl (with a mustache) and got serious bruises in return. Now she thinks you should've fought with that another girl instead of her doing so. Your girlfriend was the cause of the fight but you do think the mustached one has overreacted.

Lol. Like I said, you just don't get it. The Russian slave mentality is as strong as ever.

Good that we established who was, is, and will be the aggressor. I'm looking forward to the mental gymnastics about those who invade being actually the ones who defend themselves. As is the tradition in the Russian propaganda, invasion of Finland, Baltics, Poland etc. were all just defensive wars.

But I'm more optimistic about that and don't believe your empty threats. If the NATO strengthens its eastern border, Russia's military has simply no chance there. It's a suicide, it doesn't make sense to bang your head against the wall. Russia has many other weaker neighbors it can abuse instead.

> Ukraine was in the process of ditching its buffer state status by choosing a side.

Ukraine was invaded because it wanted to get closer to EU in the form of the association agreement.

Interestingly, the roughly analogous CIS was never a problem in this concept of "buffer state". Or does "buffer state" actually mean "Russia-aligned"?

And that's the crux of the issue. You can stay as a buffer state only as long as you're a Russian puppet.

All small countries are someone's puppets. The US tried to take a puppet state away from Russia and somewhat succeeded so far.

The first move was at the end of the Cold War. The drunken President Yeltsin took the existing administrative map of the USSR and created a new state that had artificially attached Russian regions. This set up the time delay fuse. Second was the US-backed coup in 2014. And third - what we have today. The US is good at playing the long game. Only China is better.

Downvote away, it seems to make you happy. But maybe before you write this off as "Russian propaganda" go read what Solzhenitsyn had to say on the subject. Yes, that Solzhenitsyn, the dissident who wrote "Ivan Denisovich".

> There is no good way out of the situation where both sides are armed to the teeth. The best bet is a political failure of one of the sides.

Look, we tried normalising relations. In the end, Russia just takes what it can. It’s lunacy to believe that everything would be better if European countries just rolled over, accepted being bullied, and just gave Putin what he wants. It’s insane.

I just don't remember any of those attempts. Which year was that? I remember the disastrous Obama's great reset which caused these relations to deteriorate at greatly accelerated rate.

I also remember how bad they were during COVID time, etc.

We'll have another cold war, carefully watching each other like Koreans on both sides of the DMZ do. Russia likes frozen conflicts so that what they'll get, until it collapses again like the USSR did and like all empires do. The trouble with that is a bunch of unstable dictators with nukes instead of one czar with nukes.

The comparison between Putin and Hitler is ridiculous.

Europe’s economy is in shambles, they do not have the power to push back if Russia and the US were to push for détente never mind that the country with the most EU influence (Germany) is a major dove on this issue.

It's not ridiculous at all. Not all leaders can be negotiated with, that is simply my point. Maybe as an American you do not understand the depth of feeling, it does not affect you because you don't live here and subsequently you don't care. You can regress into the isolationism that the US likes to embrace every now and then. But we still have to live with an imperialist Russia on our door step.

> (Germany) is a major dove on this issue.

No, they're not dovish, they're just not leaders and not willing to take initiative and require others to move first. That stems from their history. They've sent huge amounts of aid already to Ukraine (~1% of GDP versus 0.2% of GDP for the USA).

> Europe’s economy is in shambles

I mean, it's not as good as the USA's, but it's not in shambles. It's relatively OK. I live here. I'd rather live here than in Russia. Russia is a glorified petrol station with nukes and a military. Europe's economy still absolutely dwarfs Russia's. When I speak to my (many) Russian colleagues, it's clear they'd rather be here in Germany than in Russia.

> US were to push for détente

It's not realistic. The only person who is going to do that is Trump. There's no scenario where we Europeans just give up our security and let imperial war conquests become acceptable on our continent (not yours, yank) for the sake of Trump's ego. Why? Because we think he's completely retarded. Only Americans like him. And how would we benefit exactly from trading away our security? How can the US force us? All it would do is seal the USA's historic break from its European allies (And I know it's not popular at the moment in the USA, but any one with a basic understanding of geopolitics knows that the USA's strongest asset its just how many rich and powerful allies it has). Good luck standing up to China alone, in that case. Then the West is truly fucked!

> Not all leaders can be negotiated with, that is simply my point.

Putin isn't Hitler. People are way too quick to write off negotiation when it is people's real lives at play.

> They've sent huge amounts of aid already to Ukraine (~1% of GDP versus 0.2% of GDP for the USA).

False? not sure where you are getting your numbers from but USA has sent both considerably more in magnitude and as a percentage of the GDP through the end of 2023.

Germany doesn't even spend 2% of GDP on all military expenses (they recently pledged to as it is a new NATO requirement), they are not spending half of that on Ukraine allocation.

> It's not realistic. The only person who is going to do that is Trump.

Wavering support for the Ukraine war is not just a Trump-ism phenomenon. I am not sure how the media reports this in the UK but support is collapsing across both parties in the polls.

A majority of Americans think Trump is stupid too and you are very unlikely to meet a supporter on HN.

> Good luck standing up to China alone, in that case

US policymakers already perceive no will to stand up to China among EU lawmakers.

> And how would we benefit exactly from trading away our security? How can the US force us?

EU+UK citizens will not be willing to pay the full brunt of this conflict for an extended period of time.

The fact of the matter is that most Europeans are much more ambivalent about this conflict than you are implying [0] which is obvious from the polling. Ratchet up the spending and energy price impact to considerable portions of GDP and what will happen?

[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/files/be-hear...

>Putin isn't Hitler. People are way too quick to write off negotiation when it is people's real lives at play.

No he's not Hitler, he's Putin. Putin cannot be negotiated with, that is the point.

>False? not sure where you are getting your numbers from but USA has sent both considerably more in magnitude and as a percentage of the GDP through the end of 2023.

No it is not. My numbers are from the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/ca7fa865-97a1-4013-bde6-b69731b03...

Where are yours from? If you have better numbers, share them.

>Wavering support for the Ukraine war is not just a Trump-ism phenomenon. I am not sure how the media reports this in the UK but support is collapsing across both parties in the polls.

Wavering or collapsing? The majority still support aid for Ukraine. That much is a fact. I am not in the UK anyway, I live in Germany.

Your source for polling is sadly incoherent, just quoting random countries, but judging by this poll, it looks clear that Europeans support Ukraine:

https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/european...

But to some extent it does not matter, there is no choice, because Europe is being attacked. It's not as if we have choice but to support them. Arguably more importantly, our establishment supports Ukraine.

>US policymakers already perceive no will to stand up to China among EU lawmakers.

US policymakers firmly believe that the best way to counterbalance China is through strengthening alliances around the world.

>EU+UK citizens will not be willing to pay the full brunt of this conflict for an extended period of time.

We already are. I think a lot of you yanks like to get high on the idea of Europe being seconds from collapse, but actually things here are OK. The worst is over, that first winter after the invasion? Yeah that was tricky, but it's already past now. The way you talk it's like we're rationing supplies to make ends meet to raise money for another missile. Yes the USA is richer than Europe, but Europe is the richest place in the world after the USA, so it's OK, there's no shame in being second place. Everything's OK. Europe will ultimately do whatever it takes to see out Russia's invasion. There's no way a country with an economy the size of Spain can outlast the entirety of Europe. Russia is a paper tiger, as evidenced by how shit its military has performed ever since it invaded.

> The comparison between Putin and Hitler is ridiculous.

And yet, here we are with another ultranationalist dictator hell bent on getting back that vital space and dreaming of fallen empires. Hitler had Charlemagne, and Putin has Catherine and Peter the Great. Putin did not gas anybody that I know of, but the gulags remained the whole time. It’s true that he is closer to Stalin than Hitler in many respects, but I am not sure it’s much better.

> Europe’s economy is in shambles, they do not have the power to push back if Russia and the US were to push for détente never mind that the country with the most EU influence (Germany) is a major dove on this issue.

That is a terrible misreading of how the EU functions. By design it cannot be dominated by a single country and Germany is basically following others. It’s not a major dove in any way, it’s just in the middle of the pack and they started from a fundamentally pacifist political background. The fact that they are merely talking about rearming is a demonstration of the seismic shift in domestic politics there.

Détente won’t happen in the current situation, regardless of what the US push for. They simply have no power to force that outcome. What would happen is another Korea, Georgia or Moldova: a country split in two, with one half living under yet another brutal dictatorship.

> All wars have something in common: they end. That thought in your head about lack of hope of normalizing relations is just the current propaganda working.

I don't think your comment is grounded on reality, and it's ironic how it parrots one of Russia's anti-ukraine propaganda tropes: the collective west should just stop backing Ukraine because the faster they cave in, the faster all relationships normalize.

Even if you believe fairy tales about forgetting Russia's perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation and Russia's "our empire will extend to Lisbon" threats, all you need to do is look at the Soviet Union's rejection of peace and a free world up to it's collapse to understand that any talk of normalization is at best thoroughly unsupported and at worst more Russian propaganda.

> All wars have something in common: they end.

Not really? Many conflicts routinely simmer on for decades, and peace treaties that officially end a war rarely resolve conflicts. Israel is fighting I believe it's 4th war against Hamas this century, for example; its broader conflict against its neighbors has been going on arguably at least a full century. The Balkans are somewhat infamous for the depth of history of its conflicts: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was chosen to occur on the 500-somethingth anniversary of another conflict, for example.

Germany was utterly defeated, that's why there could be a reconciliation. Neither Russia nor the West will be defeated like that, Russian regime will likely survive. That means a chance of some meaningful reconciliation is slim during next couple of decades.

It's true that all wars end eventually. But this happening seems to me a sign that relations might not normalize quite so easily after. Why else would businesses with operations in both Russia and EU be seeking to split themselves apart neatly in advance of sanctions that would make such operations extremely difficult?

Everything has something in common: it ends. Whether it's Peace, Countries, Humans, Planets or, yes ... Wars. It's just a question of timescale.

> All wars have something in common: they end.

The Korean peninsula would like a word with you.

Hundred Years' War between the Kingdom of England and France.

Putin will need to put a gun to his head in a bunker before anything "normal" happens. Russia is a Third Reich level regime at the moment. Hence 300k killed and wounded causes zero reaction from the Russian public.

The Soviet-Afgan war was ended due to public discontent with 100k killed and wounded

Russian independent media have only confirmed 43k Russian casualties, not 300k. (Yes, Russian independent media exist; they are forced to operate in exile.)

https://www.bbc.com/russian/articles/c2xj7yny4zgo

Nice try, but that link says 41,731 deceased in the first paragraph, and 43,014 deceased under the the visualisation with the Soviet stars (bit weird). I admit this is based on a machine translation, but I expect that Google and DeepL can get the meaning of "killed" correct.

You seriously think there are only 43k killed and wounded in total?

No Russian attracting enough attention is outside the reach of the Kremlin anyway, unless you avoid tea and underwear your whole life. So i put only marginally more trust in this report than the official figures of 7000 or whatever it is from Puntin himself.

> I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia

After 9/11, the US maintained productive relations with the Saudis. They're actively supporting Israel through the Gaza business. They have a long history of propping up dictators and thrashing countries for hard-to-articulate reasons (I still don't get exactly what the point of Afghanistan or Iraq was, even accepting the blunt "oil" that is sometimes given out).

I don't see why relations with Russia aren't normalised now. As can be seen in this very announcement (suddenly international deals are being handled in Yuan), the US appears hell-bent on taking Russia and China then welding them together. That seems wildly stupid to me and personally I think it is a serious foreign policy blunder. The US should have sought a quick peace in Ukraine and normalised relations immediately.

The US sought a quick peace in Ukraine, they even asked Russia to not invade even before Russia started their invasion. You can't get much quicker than before the events have taken place. It didn't work because Russia isn't interested in peace, but that's not the US' fault.

Is there a source to this statement?

We were all there, the US and UK were warning about the invasion for a long time before it happened. The Russians and their useful idiots in the West laughed, of course they would never invade! Then the invasion actually did happen and now magically history has been rewritten and it was the US that somehow caused it in the first place.

Only problem: I do have a memory and I can remember 2 years ago. So yes very clearly Russia started this war all by themselves despite the US trying to dissuade them from doing so.

Are you saying Ukraine has not been lobbing bombs into Donbass for the better part of 10 years?

Are you saying that Russia didn't invade Ukraine?

I'm saying they defended Russian people that would rather be living in Russian territory. Warmongers be damned!

Lol, you completely forgot about the little green men affair when Russia absolutely denied they were invading the Donbas and all was just local militias fighting for independence, right?

You've been played by Russian propaganda, and seems to be liking it.

In the 1991 independence vote, all Ukrainian regions voted for independence. In Donbas, the approval was 84%!

In the last census (2001), about 58% of Donetsk/Luhansk inhabitants indicated Ukrainian ethnicity, in comparison to 38% for Russian ethnicity.

What if Donbass took a tour of independent Ukraine and changed their mind, especially as Kiev crowds have ousted the president that they all voted for?

Granted, he wasn't any good, but he was likely the best one Ukraine will ever have, and now has no chance of it ever catching up with 2013.

I'm genuinely not sure why you think people can't change their mind. After all, they also voted "Yes" on Gorbachev's "reform and keep the USSR" referendum a year before that.

Yeah no different to Hitler taking the Sudetenland really. Pity to see such flagrant ethnofascism here.

That's called a civil war because the Donbass is Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine was not attacking Russia.

Can you remind us what happened roughly 10 years ago?

Maidan revolution

What exactly does seeking a "quick peace" solution look like in an aggressor without casus belli invading a sovereign nation?

Giving in to all their demands, of course. And then giving in to all their new demands five to ten years later when they try it again, and again, and again.

"Anti-war" people always seem to have a curious blind spot when it comes to the countries that actually start wars.

> Giving in to all their demands, of course.

That can't be my position, I don't know what all Russia's demands were. But offering to draw NATO's sphere of influence back out of Ukraine seems like an obvious carrot that should have been offered. Maybe some guarantees to reign in any US interference in Ukraine's politics. Not supplying endless arms and materiel. That would have dramatically reduced all killing and destruction we've seen since 2023.

The comparisons I'm going to draw are Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Russia was probably going to be a lot more careful as occupiers given that this is happening on their border. Eg, not supporting the drug trade so much and hopefully being a bit more serious about rebuilding.

> "Anti-war" people always seem to have a curious blind spot when it comes to the countries that actually start wars.

Who are you talking about there? The US? UK? NATO? Iran? African Nations? That is a wide net.

I'll answer for them - forcing Ukraine to capitulate.

>(I still don't get exactly what the point of Afghanistan or Iraq was, even accepting the blunt "oil" that is sometimes given out).

Are you serious? At least on the Afghanistan one? The war in Afghanistan began because the Taliban refused to extradite Osama Bin Laden (and several other terrorist, but Osama was the biggest one), it's pretty straightforward.

What country was Osama bin Laden found in?

What does where Osama was killed a decade later have to do with where he was operating out of in 2001?

Odd. I do not remember US meting out the same type of punishment to Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden hadn't lived in Saudi Arabia since 1991?

If you're referring to the fact that the relatively newly declassified parts of the 9/11 commission report suggest that several powerful members of the Saudi government and royal family were involved in the attacks, then I agree with you that we should have (and still should) insist that the Saudis extradite those involved and take strong military action against the Saudis if they don't. But I don't see how this makes our attack on Afghanistan for refusing to extradite Bin Laden unjustified, it just makes us inconsistent.

<< it just makes us inconsistent.

It is the kind of inconsistency that makes some people die and some live. One would hope it is avoided to avoid confusion and miscalculations on all sides.

<< Bin Laden hadn't lived in Saudi Arabia since 1991?

Was Pakistan bombed in 2011 then?

I understand what you are saying, but it does not make it look any better.

<< If you're referring to the fact

I was not. I am merely connecting some obvious dots.

<< But I don't see how this makes our attack on Afghanistan for refusing to extradite Bin Laden unjustified,

Hmm. Even the word extradite is obfuscating what happened, but that is beside the point.

Lets adjust this conversation a little as 'justified' is a little loaded. Everyone thinks they are justified in doing whatever they are doing. edit: In fact, there are a few wars happening right now, where people feel very justified.

Lets have a more fun conversation.

Do you think it ( attacking Afghanistan ) over 9/11 ( whether the cause was just or not ) was a good idea for long-term US survival? This is not a bait. I am really curious about your thought process.

>Do you think it ( attacking Afghanistan ) over 9/11 ( whether the cause was just or not ) was a good idea for long-term US survival? This is not a bait. I am really curious about your thought process.

Attacking? Yes. Long-term occupation? No. I think we should have targeted strikes directly at Taliban officials until they relented to our demands.

It's amazing that some people think this is a valid retort when Abbottabad, Pakistan is a 5 hour drive from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and of course it's safer to hide in the country that US doesn't have access to compared to the 10 year search they've been doing in Afghanistan.

I'm sure you're saying that from a place of honesty, but you clearly aren't speking for the people who actually make these decisions:

1. When the US actually wanted to get Bin Laden in a country that wouldn't extradite him, they sent a special ops team to Pakistan. They violated Pakistan's sovereignty a little bit and then everyone moved on. So the idea that they needed to launch a full invasion of Afghanistan is just silly and the people who sent the army knew that. They had to have had ulterior motives, or sending the military was so incompetent there would have been a very public purge of the US military leadership.

2. If we're saying the US military is a magic button to override the legal system in another country (which, fair enough, it is) then what is the issue with what Russia is doing? Their interests in Ukraine are more legitimate than the US not feeling like negotiating or due process for Bin Laden & friends. Of course if the US had spent a bit more time doing things legally, the planners would have had time to point out that a full scale invasion was counterproductive, and I think it is less obvious that Russia would have found something similar; I don't see how they could have dealt with what the US state department seems to be doing without an army. But hey, I'm not a diplomatic corps, maybe they could have come up with something.

And if I look at the wiki article [0], we see "The Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the US would provide evidence of bin Laden's complicity in the attacks". Maybe 2-5 years of negotiating and some actual evidence would have been justified? The US must have had evidence against al-Q, because otherwise they couldn't have known who was responsible. if they'd negotiated to send him to Pakistan where the SEAL team is comfortable operating then they could have short circuited a lot of death, wasted time and wasted money.

I know you didn't say anything about the Russian invasion, but this is sort of my angle here - the actions in Afghanistan show that this sort of thing is a bit of a non-event as far as international politics goes. It is only a big deal because the US is making it one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#War_on_terror

No, the taliban did not refuse to do that - Bush refused to take him

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...

* https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1

In those links, the Taliban wasn't offering to hand Bin Laden over to the US, they were offering to hand him over to a third country that would never hand him over to the US. We can argue about whether Bush should have agreed to that offer, but it's a far cry from "refusing to take him":

> Afghanistan's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.

> "If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved" and the bombing campaign stopped, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country", Mr Kabir added.

> But it would have to be a state that would never "come under pressure from the United States", he said.

From the first link:

> In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime - told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country".

> The offer came a day after the Taliban's supreme leader rebuffed Bush's "second chance" for the Islamic militia to surrender Bin Laden to the US.

> Mullah Mohammed Omar said there was no move to "hand anyone over".

That was a highly-conditional offer, that I suspect the U.S. administration felt was designed to give the Taliban and bin Laden breathing room to escape/hide/whatever their next move would have been.

Well thankfully we put a stop to that and immediately brought an end to the conflict and captured Osama without billions of dollars and a potential war!

Yeah if only the Taliban had handed over Bin Laden to North Korea, then I'm sure justice would have been served.

We have nothing to gain by normalizing relations with Russia. They have nothing that we want and they can't be trusted to negotiate in good faith anyway. So it's back to containment: Cold War 2. As such we should take every opportunity short of direct conflict to disrupt, undermine, disrespect, and humiliate the Putin regime. In a few decades the Russian empire will undergo another internal collapse or civil war, and then more of their outer territories can be stripped away.

> They have nothing that we want

Sure they do - a big border with the US's main geopolitical rival, China. The US anti-China strategy relies on making it difficult for China to secure resources in the event of a war - blocking sea routes, destabilising western paths that could be used, southern countries being a bit leery of China's military.

They're majorly screwing themselves over by encouraging cooperation through the northern border and giving Russia every incentive to establish what overland trade routes it can. The NATO response to Ukraine seems a bit panicked - they're acting like they suddenly realised they aren't as competitive and secure as they thought. Building up a Russia-China-Iran axis under those conditions is an unforced error that is not clever. If the US had been more reasonable about Ukraine, we could be talking about how China is hemmed in from all angles. Instead the north and west look like they might be opening up to them.

Combine that with the US getting literally nothing out of the Ukraine war except an opportunity to blow up resources that they really needed at home (and reopening old wounds with people who didn't need to be enemies I suppose), and the situation is a bit of a baffler. I can explain it with corruption, I can explain it with stupidity, but I'm struggling to find a "here is how the US comes out ahead" perspective.

I can only guess at what Iran and the Houthi are thinking, but it is interesting that after watching NATO's performance in Ukraine the Middle East immediately starts to flare up. Might be a coincidence but that isn't saying great things about NATO's reputation. I dunno, it might be fine. We'll see.

This is a genuinely interesting take despite me disagreeing with the analysis.

<< I don't see why relations with Russia aren't normalised now.

At the end of the day, people like when the day follows is the same as the previous one. This allows people to plan ahead, live life and so on. It allows business to run uninterrupted. Russia was upending existing post-ww2 order. It was initially doing it slowly. Slowly enough that no one in the west cared to do anything. Obama famously sought a 'reset' with Russia at the time.

Even in Ukraine, it was not until after Crimea that there was even an appetite and realization that it won't magically stop.

<< the US appears hell-bent on taking Russia and China then welding them together.

This is probably one of the few spots where we are kinda close, but US already made BRICS a reality with current sanctions regime making it even more relevant. The decisions being made now are a big gamble and I would like to hope that those are made consciously with some forethought. That said, remembering 9/11 Afghanistan, it is merely a hope.

<< I think it is a serious foreign policy blunder.

That, sadly, we won't know until it all plays out. Who knows what life will look life 50 years from now?

That is a threat if the West confiscates Russian assets that have been frozen, Russia will retaliate in kind. https://www.rt.com/russia/591905-russia-asset-seizure-warnin...

Yeah GP comment is missing context for many readers that Western leaders are contemplating stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of Russia’s money.

With that is goodbye to any chance of wider Europe investing in Russia for the next century.

I hope India takes notice because so far they seemed to have cared little about the blood on their hands.

I was also not very happy about India buying from Russia in the first place, but I've come around and see it as okay for two reasons:

- Russia still gets far less than they got from the European countries, because no one else is willing to take it, and Europe still gets part of the resources we need

- The money Russia gets is basically useless, cause so much Rupees are not freely convertible. They sit on a big stash of money that they cannot use to buy the things they need (cause they'd need Dollars or Euros for that)

I don't think the second part was intentional on Indias part (I believe them when they say they don't care about Europe - which is something we should remember in all future interactions. Fair trade? Yes. Favors for 'friends'? Not one), but it seems to work out well.

> I hope India takes notice because so far they seemed to have cared little about the blood on their hands.

If there's a buyer, there's a seller [0]. EU member states need oil, so they buy it via India.

There's no alternative to Russian crude for the European market.

Anyhow, the last time Indian listened to Western oil sanctions over Iran in the 2008-10 period [1], the Indian economy ground to a halt and had a lost decade [2] while China grew with double digits in the same period, powered by Iranian crude.

Oh, and Iran still exists in 2024 and can project even more power than it ever could in 2014.

Given this context, India ain't dropping this competitive advantage.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fuels-russian-oil-ge...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/world/asia/31india.html

[2] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/...

From Reuters article:

>Europe typically imported an average of 154,000 barrels per day (bpd) of diesel and jet fuel from India before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

>That increased to 200,000 bpd after the European Union banned Russian oil products imports from Feb. 5, Kpler data showed.

An increase of 50,000 bpd across the whole of Europe is nothing in the grand scheme of things. India imported on average 1.76m bpd last year[0].

>Anyhow, the last time Indian listened to Western oil sanctions over Iran in the 2008-10 period [1], the Indian economy ground to a halt and had a lost decade

That sounds like a them problem? Maybe they should invest more in renewables?

>Given this context, India ain't dropping this competitive advantage.

The world will remember those who profiteer from war.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/india/russia-makes-up-40-india...

> That sounds like a them problem? Maybe they should invest more in renewables?

They are [0][1][2].

Hard to build renewables when majority of energy costs in 2010-2020 were spent using Dollars buying Oil and NatGas from the Gulf instead of using Rupees with Iran.

> The world will remember those who profiteer from war

But they don't.

The failure of sanctions on Iran showed that you can ignore Western sanctions and the Western relationship will continue just like before.

India's largest FDI sources are in Asia - Singapore and Japan [3] dwarf the US and EU, and both are Western countries as well.

The reality is countries compartmentalize relations and issues - India only cares about the China threat. The US mostly only really cares about the China threat with a bit of passive support against Russia (which btw has been fairly successful - Ukraine has been able to maintain a stalemate against a much larger adversary). European countries only really care about the Russia threat and are indifferent to China. Japan and SK don't care about Russia but care about NK and China.

To keep alliances, you need to compromise. The lack of compromising by American administrations in the 2010s caused us to lose Turkiye, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia as close allies.

The US can't afford to alienate Russia, China, AND India and ASEAN (most of whom lean pro-China now after getting ticked off for being called out for being anti-democratic).

And this is why Western countries are indifferent to the purchasing of Russian oil.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/asia/india-coal-gre...

[1] - https://www.newyorker.com/news/dept-of-energy/indias-quest-t...

[2] - https://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/graphics/2023/08/ind...

[3] - https://santandertrade.com/en/portal/establish-overseas/indi...

Yandex will survive, it is a company that was founded and to this day consists of good values and good people, much has been written about this by independent journalists [1] [2] and by the people at the company [3]

[1] Book https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс_Воложа

[2] Book https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс.Книга

[3] https://yandex.ru/company/values

Given that almost all Yandex business is in Russia, an appropriate headline would be "Yandex gets rid of its European shareholders".

The only time I ever saw a car without a driver was on a visit to Israel.

On the highway to Tel Aviv (intercity - not a side road), there was a car with Yandex Auto Drive (in Hebrew) plastered all over it, driving in the lane next to ours. We had plenty of time to look - there was no driver at all, or they were sitting so low they would not have been able to see the road.

Made me realize that some companies fly under the radar and then seem to show up out of nowhere. I never thought of Yandex as anything but search till that moment.

They also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years.

Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right.

However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.

Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state - even if the relationship is informal. Particularly, if the company is related to mass media and surveillance. Yandex is a state-controlled company even if the legal structure doesn't indicate this.

I would interpret this divestment as Russian intention to use Yandex as a tool for doing foreign influence, similar to RT or their social networks manipulation. It should be sanctioned.

> Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state

Not unlike other countries... Particularly the ones that boast freedom.

> > Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state

Meanwhile US congress is 100% captured by corporate interests, especially the arms industry.

Yeah I can't imagine the Russian police state passing up on eavesdropping on all search and activity there, it's simply too valuable as an intelligence asset and there is nothing that any yandex employees residing in Russia could do about it without risking being imprisoned/disappeared

We set a good example with our NSA data center in Utah siphoning off the data of all Americans.

50% discount for Russian oil oligarchs. I guess they really think Russia will continue to cut ties with the rest of the world for a very long time and are cutting their losses now.

50% discount is just the official rule. If they tried to acquire it on a real market, they would likely have to pay much more.

or there are penalties that they are about to start running into

Wonder what happened to Jetbrains. They have a CZ entity but the largest part of the workforce was in Russia.

All their Russian offices were closed, including sales and R&D activities.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...

"We managed to move out the majority of our people from Russia."

Much respect to these guys for their principled stand.

Ok, I had let my CLion subscription lapse because I didn't like where they were going with the RustRover/CLion split (I do both C++ and Rust work, and would prefer one tool).

But this may make me reconsider.

The 'canon' way to do multi-language development is via IntelliJ Ultimate. I have no idea how well it works for rust at the moment, since RustRover is still in pre-release.

Update: I gave it a quick go, and it seem to have feature parity with RustRover. Give it a shot if you haven't.

The question is what is happening with the Rust plugin generally. The talk was that it wasn't going to be maintained in the future, and instead all the work folded into RustRover itself, and nobody seemed to be clear if Rust had a future in IntelliJ Ultimate but I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" since C++ isn't in there either.

I'm 100% sure I'm not on the only team that does both Rust and C++. Rust in CLion was perfect for me.

I could get my employer to pay for both, potentially, but I like to have my own licenses for things for the purpose of doing my own open source work independent of my employer, without any ambiguity about IP or potential for conflict.

For myself ... the way they handled this (bad communication of roadmap) irritated me enough that I dusted off emacs and got myself set up with a nice configuration with lsp, company, projectile, and treemacs and made myself productive in it.

Also much more respect to the employees. They left their home because of geopolitics and work.

This perfectly shows that we need to be remote. They did not wanna all move to Czechia or any other single location.

More like Alphabet selling off its Google and downscaling two orders of magnitude.

Don't think it will get the cash, it probably has obligations for almost every cent, so this would be a virtual deal mostly.

It has nothing to do with google and alphabet. Apart from being a good search engine and a competitor within the same space.

OP is describing it as an analogy of what the equivalent action by Alphabet would be and it’s pretty accurate - Yandex search remains in Moscow while the rest of Yandex operations (eg cloud) remains in the EU.

95% of what Yandex N.V. owns is ООО Яндекс business in Russia. I don't even believe they are keeping Yandex assets in Belarus and Kazakhstan. So that becomes a box that is mostly empty.

I don't believe anybody is going to pay for actual Yandex Cloud in Europe where they have AWS and Hetzner.

So even Russia-based Yandex Cloud with actual racks and users remains in Moscow. What they may keep is vague "cloud technologies" and Clickhouse. Still, these are not a large business. Think VMWare and MongoDB combined. Please correct me if you know more.

Their self-driving stuff, was also mostly used in Moscow. Genuinely hope they would find customers, such as Hyundai.

ClickHouse is a separate company now as far as I know.

Oh I see, after rereading, your explanation matches better.

I feel sorry for Volozh, he managed to keep his business for longer than many others.

It is interesting that a part of the deal is paid in yuan, probably to avoid Western sanctions. This is the new reality in which Russian businesses do exist now and may be a sign of the fragmentation of the global financial system.

Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE recently with taxi, food and groceries delivery services. I doubt that anything will change because of the massacre in Gaza.

> Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE

UAE is on friendly terms with Israel (at least for now). They have also been aggressively targeting US tech refugees (ie: telegram, binance).

That's not the reason.

Around 20% of Israelis immigrated from the Soviet Union 20-30 years ago, and Russia and Ukraine still have fairly large Jewish communities.

Volozh is himself Russian Jewish, so it makes sense he decided to take up Israeli citizenship instead of keeping his Russian one. A lot of Ukrainian and Russian Jews did that right after 2022.

Dubai has a fairly large CIS diaspora (around 1.5-2% of the entire population) so it's unsurprising that Yandex is fairly popular there.

Russian services are decently popular in Israel for similar reasons as well.

I was answering on the assumption that the previous poster was surprised about the UAE/Israel relation. Maybe I misread him.

No, I was not surprised. It’s like a flavor of complicated Middle Eastern politics that is interesting to observe.

If we look at the tech giants, almost none of them has retained the original founders at the helm, and I guess for the same reason that leading a huge corporation requires a very specific life style and compromises, than tech founders are used to.

I believe Arkady Volozh could continue to lead Yandex but he would have to turn into Herman Gref, in terms of loyalties, how he spends his time and the people who he will have to interact with. He choose not to, and that was perhaps a decade ago.

Other than a billboard for a gps routing service I haven’t seen anything resembling Yandex here in Dubai.

They use different branding outside of Russia: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ride-hailing-app-yango-se...

The massacre was in Israel, when Hamas mass raped and murdered Israelis.

What happens in Gaza is a justified war to prevent such attacks from occuring again.

What happens in Gaza is both justified war and a massacre, because Israel does not fulfill its obligations under international law to protect Palestinian civilians.

More specifically Israel did not:

1. offer a refuge to Palestinian civilians with necessary infrastructure on the territory secured and controlled by its own military (i.e. on its own territory);

2. organize evacuation of people from war zone;

3. ensure safe passage for humanitarian aid in a sufficient volume;

4. start planning reconstruction and aid to help Palestinians building independent democratic state under the two-state solution.

I don’t want to start a long discussion on why this didn’t happen, just to state the fact that it did not and as a result numerous war crimes were committed, which could have altered the relationship with Arab states, but they didn’t. And that is a notable fact to me with regards to the specific person and company.

Israeli invasion killed alread > 1% of total population of Gaza, further 2-3% have been iniured.

According to you, did Israel get a blank check? Are they justified to do literally anything? Whst if the killed percentage will go to 5, 10 %. Still fine?

Out of curiosity I looked for a relevant reference, apparently in WWII, civilian casualties to allied air raids were 0.6% of the total population and twice that for wounded, so around half the numbers you cite for Gaza (though IIUC you are including both civilian and militant deaths in your counts so not perfectly comparable). Given that Hamas seeks to maximize their civilian deaths I'm not sure how to take that comparison.

Looking at WWI is a bit more confusing, similar numbers of dead Germans due to malnutrition and disease (excluding the pandemic), but overall 1.1% civilian deaths due to military action for the Central Powers.

While personally I feel that the ideal number of civilian deaths is obviously 0 (on both sides), I do feel like counting the dead is not a particularly convincing metric when considering who (if any) is doing right since the relevant information is in the rightness of concrete actions taken rather than the results. Bombing a hospital is bad even if there are almost no civilian casualties. Bombing a military HQ is right even if it unintentionally involved civilian casualties (assuming you did act to minimize them). Bombing a military HQ that is directly under a hospital - ask me later please, but I don't think I'd judge solely on who is dead at the end.

I'm obviously a bit biased here, but just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violen... I can't see how Israel can stop the war as long as Hamas has any form of influence in the area. For now, except for Netanyahu which should be rotting in a jail cell, I'm reserving my judgement until we can see the final results.

What do you expect them to do? Throw up their arms and let Hamas continue to lob bombs into Israel for the next 500 years? I think they are trying to balance casualty minimization vs the troops dying on the ground. I know which one that any country will likely do. The Gazans could speed up the demise of Hamas by helping the Israel troops root out the terrorists but at least 75% still continue to support Hamas being Hamas.

What is your suggestion? Terrorists get a rape and murder free-pass because they hide behind civilians?

War is shit. It's even shittier when you fight terrorists with no regards to human lives.

My first suggestion would be to not sponsor those terrorists by the Israeli government currently in power. [1] That would be a good start.

I have some other ideas, like stopping the apartheid regime in West Bank and blockade of Gaza. Maybe even acknowledging that Palestinians want, and deserve, their own state.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

so, stopping the "apartheid regime" would stop the rocket fire from Gaza you believe? was there also "apartheid" in gaza before October 7?

like, literally, now, while hostages are in the tunnels and they launched 10k rockets into Israel, they should be stopping the apartheid regime? AND blockade of Gaza, so Iran, Turkey, Russia etc. can bring in weapons unchecked, right? That’s what’s gonna make everyone safe, and bring in the democratic process the that the world believes will resolve the conflict?

You believe that?

Actual content: https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024

How do we access the Russian based search engine, and will it still serve English language results?

The European business will fall under the Digital Services Act and EU directed content moderation. I sometimes want to see results of independent and foreign sources which Yandex was previously good for providing.

Good, I use yandex mail and search and I would mind if it died.

Mail is a no nonsense mail provider, and works everywhere my own tld address is rejected by stupid forms.

And yandex censorship is different than google censorship, so the venn diagam of what you can find with both is pretty good.

> yandex censorship is different than google censorship

That's exactly it

We shouldn't have so few search providers in any case

Mail.ru will be owned by the Russian consortium as well. This divestment is to split their startups and a couple EU based assets from their Russian ones.

I wonder how will Yandex Mail work after this (or maybe currently?) in regards to data protection. I know there exists mail.yandex.com and mail.yandex.ru... is the former, or will it be, based in the Netherlands, meaning that access from western countries with a court order would be granted?

Yandex Mail is part of the Russian business that is getting divested based on the press release.

Yandex is basically splitting it's Russian assets (Search, Mail) from it's EU assets (a couple moonshots and a DC).

It looks more like a Russian company divesting from the EU than the other way around tbh.

"The Purchaser consortium, led by members of the senior management team of our Russian businesses"

"YNV will retain a portfolio of international businesses and other non-Russian assets, including four early-stage technology businesses and other assets:

- Nebius AI, an AI cloud platform that is one of the largest providers of GPU capacity in Europe;

- Toloka AI, a data solutions partner for GenAI and Large Language Model development;

- Avride, one of the leading developers of self-driving technologies;

- TripleTen, an EdTech service that equips people with in-demand tech skills;

- our data center located in Finland;

and minority investments in other technology businesses."

[0]

[0] - https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024

I wonder how the Finnish data center is doing. At the start of the invasion, their electricity provider ended their contract and they were running the data centre on diesel alone.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/yandex_datacenter_in_...

>(Russian Google)

Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.

This community's favorite thing is to complain about something that's ill defined. A post about BGP without saying it's the border gateway protocol will have its comments go off on a stupid tangent of if an HN reader should be expected to know what BGP is. (seriously people, go Google the term and don't demand everyone spoon-feed your intellectual midgetry!) Thus, an explanation that Yandex is Russian Google is to try and head off that derail. Of course, now we're having this discussion instead, so it seems like we can't win.

Even if I've heard the name Yandex before, it's a good reminder of what it is.

I don't think it's a good explanation. If I had no idea what Yandex is, the title would make me think it is a Google subsidiary to evade sanctions or something.

“#1 search engine in Russia”. Done and done.

but what is 'search engine'? /scnr

Yeah, Yandex do a lot of similar stuff to Google: Maps, Images, Mail, File Storage etc., and referring to them as 'just a search engine' is actually less useful than making the 'Google' comparison.

Nevermind. I was wrong. Asking someone to write out an acronym is too much.

HN as a community still expects itself to have a niche audience and isn't ready to deal with how large it actually is yet. Knowing acronyms like that in this context is thought to be table stakes for participation from most people.

What you're asking from them is still a bit much right now.

Nevermind. I was wrong :)

From lazy software types who pride themselves on terse communication?

We literally hold contests for having the most wacky code in the least characters and you want someone to go from typing "BGP" to "Border Gateway Protocol"?

Nobody goes around ELI5ing every term in existence to speak to the least educated audience. It's painful in communication and annoying. There's a base level of understanding expected from the audience you're writing for. I agree that BGP might be on the fringes of that but still in the target. Would you expect someone to do that for you with HTTP? TCP?

It's cool to be nice but at some point the ask is ridiculous.

I don't think Yandex is an acronym...

Yes, the context of my comment was lost when I edited it. For clarity, I wasn't claiming that Yandex was an acroynm.

It’s the same as saying Naver (SK Google), or Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and so on. They’re primarily used by their local residents, and have little traction outside, despite having millions of active users. Giving a clarification makes it a bit more clear.

The Yandex brand is only directly used in the Russian market, I think? The company does also have popular products abroad like the discount taxi app Yango, but you need to connect the dots there. (I suppose they intentionally try to brand these products away from Yandex to reduce the impact of the Russian connection.)

Regional sites and apps in general aren’t that well known. How many people on HN are familiar with Kaspi, the “WeChat of Kazakhstan”? Apparently it’s immensely popular there and completely unknown elsewhere. Like Kazakhstan, Russia isn’t a significant market globally.

"Yandex" is used everywhere AFAIK. I (in NZ) have used their search-by-image, which sometimes finds things no other image search seems to be able to.

But also can find by image likeness which allows you to find where an image is coming from. Google images used to do that but now they merely analyse the image and search for what they think is the textual description of the image.

Exactly. Tineye is my go-to for searching by image, Yandex and Bing are backups, and Google can often still be convinced to by using "search by image" extensions or the "Find image source" button in Google Lens, but it's more friction so I don't usually bother any more.

I use Yandex on a weekly basis because its reverse image search is much better Google and Bing.

You're over-estimating how many people actually "surf" the net. I'd wager most of HN knows Yandex, but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex (aside from streaming, even then they probably aren't explicitly going to the yandex url). You would see the same case for a Chinese search engine.

People in general spend a remarkable amount of time visiting the same 3-4 websites over and over and some apps.

>but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex

They have the most popular reverse image search tool now that Google got rid of theirs

Yep, and surprisingly good too (I use it daily).

What are those searches? I am curious because I've used reverse image search 3-4 times in my life. It's just not something I think of..

The most normal use case is finding the original, higher resolution version of an image.

this is 90% of what I use it for as well. Sometimes I'll use it to track down a meme image as well

reverse image searching memes

I don't think it's inappropriate to provide context to people that might not be across Yandex. HN is read by a large volume of people from diverse backgrounds -- not always CS and/or startups.

I would not be surprised if some subset of those people hadn't heard of Yandex.

I know it but only because they didn't require phone confirmation for email accounts so it was great for sockpuppets.

I've asked around here to my colleagues and none of them have ever heard of it. One of them asked if it's the same as baidu :)

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. Not blaming the user for explaining, I just didn't understand why an explanation is needed on this site of all places. Like others have pointed out, Yandex isn't only used by Russians but around the world. They clearly have the best freely accessible reverse image search since Google has impaired theirs for whatever reason. But I guess I'm in a bit of a bubble assuming that everyone knows the company.

Requiring phone numbers for things is why I don't sign up.

To me, the name Yandex seemed familiar, but I did not know what it was until now.

I know what it is, but IIRC haven't used it, even a single time.

But I don't think most people around here (Central Europe) heard about it. It's kinda like Baidu in that regard.

Their software counterpart seems nice. I have only had experienced with Yandex browser though, at the time I liked to try out different browser to find what work best.

Yandex was minimal looking on both mobile and desktop and had nice features such as its equivalent of Opera Turbo, automatically use of a separate container for banking apps etc. They also have a Russian dubbing feature for Youtube but I don't know how well it work or any risk of censoring, not speaking the language.

This is an impressive feature, considering that you can even watch videos from Chinese tech bloggers when there are no prepared English subtitles on YouTube. In other cases, it reads the already written subtitles, but analyzes the speech and divides it into different female/male voices. Some words can be translated funny in the wrong context.

I think you're asking the wrong question, at least for me.

If "Yandex" is selling all Russia-based businesses/assets and is itself "Russian Google" - what's left then.

For me this means I now kinda have to dig deeper and grasp wtf is actually going on, because to me Yandex was exactly that, a Russian search engine and nothing more (although I saw some people hint at more in the past, never looked it up).

Yandex is Russian Alphabet, not just Google: they have a successful mail/cloud product, maps, taxi, food and grocery delivery among many other things. Some of those products are successful abroad.

I have heard the name before, but only in topics regarding russia, e.g. news about the Moscow stock market or similar. I couldn't tell you what sort of products they have. I have never used one of their sites/products (at least knowingly). I always assumed it was a Russian tech company having 100% Russian users. Basically like vk(ontakte) is, or what Baidu is in China?

I’m more curious what you’re going to do to anyone who reports to you for the crime of not knowing what Yandex is

I've heard of Yandex but never used it.

Actually I have a question: what are they salvaging this way, considering the comments say all their operations and people are physically in Russia?

I didn't hear about yandex until last year, and it was probably from this website, and only as an option for duckduckgo to use use for image search.

Despite HN guidelines "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" people are generally not curious about what is going on outside their country (+US).

This is 100% incorrect.

Where are they from now? Not that it matters much.

Wiki says they're incorporated in Netherlands.

<ironic> Finally Europe has a European Google! </ironic>

Europe stretch to the Urals.

Yandex was there for many years now. Its just that now this is "european" Yandex and in Russia there is a "Moscow Yandex".

Also - search tech will remain in Moscow. EU Yandex is mainly about cloud solutions, self-driving cars etc.

Probably just to avoid paying taxes (the famous "dutch sandwich" trick)

I personally think it does matter, I use it often to find things that I can't find on Google. I was actually just thinking today how many thing I've been able to find using Yandex that I couldn't find using Google and that in some ways, I almost prefer it as a search engine lately.

https://archive.is/Gghfq

"The consideration will be paid in a combination of: (i) a cash equivalent of at least RUB 230 billion"

This money will go to Russian economy and will indirectly support the war. Instead these money should have been frozen in an escrow account and potentially used to rebuild Ukrainian economy.

All Yandex's money is already in Russia, in Sberbank or smth. Good luck telling Sberbank to freeze it and send to Ukraine. In this deal, they are salvaging some money and taking it out of Russia.

Just don't fuck up the image search. That's the best tool out there, but in the last few months, it got worse :(.

Google image search went from good to dead in the past ~2 years, first they've hidden the features like search on image, or jump to image, then they completely removed them.

Find source now works quite ok with gimg.

Huh? What are their other businesses then? Is this some weird accounting trick?

The article mentions them:

  Following completion of the sale transaction, YNV will retain a portfolio of international businesses and other non-Russian assets, including four early-stage technology businesses and other assets: 
  
  * Nebius AI, an AI cloud platform that is one of the largest providers of GPU capacity in Europe; 
  * Toloka AI, a data solutions partner for GenAI and Large Language Model development; 
  * Avride, one of the leading developers of self-driving technologies;
  * TripleTen, an EdTech service that equips people with in-demand tech skills;
  * our data center located in Finland; and 
  * minority investments in other technology businesses.

From what I understand, this means basically that they are selling search and associated services that are mostly popular in Russia to some Russian consortium. Bringing Yandex under complete Russian control, without influence from western shareholders.

Those western shareholders (YNV) get a bunch of money and the above AI related subsidaries located outside of Russia.

Weird accounting tricks in Russia include "the new nobility" making you offers that you cannot refuse. This is a country in which the FSB (equivalent of the FBI) is running their own protection rackets, even on a small scale of a local shop. Property law works very differently over there, which is to say it doesn't quite exist.

You can refuse, but then your chance of dying by "falling off the balcony" goes up dramatically.

In my circles, the joke is having heart attacks while shooting oneself in the back after falling out of windows.

You forgot the polonium pain meds

Volozh could stay in Moscow and keep Yandex, though he was not acting CEO for some time.

But, he decided he prefers Israel (residing "behind the bump" in general sense). In modern political climate, you have to choose between having your pie and eating it.

It's like Zuckerberg choosing to leave to Singapore and stay there in case a war in Taiwan breaks up, while ideologically aligning with China, of course, I'm not so sure that in that scenario his US-based assets will remain intact.

I think it's like a good survival tactic as well. Known by the old saying Бери деньги и беги

Yeah, it's some complex deal, which is hard to make sense of. Here's a Bloomberg story:

>Yandex Parent Cuts Ties to Russia in $5.2 Billion Unit Sale

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-05/yandex-pa...

And here's FT:

>Search engine Yandex to sell Russian operations for $5bn

https://www.ft.com/content/1f965442-e3f9-46dc-ae4d-ef2e05740...

The FT one (https://archive.ph/YiA3q) says almost nothing. The Bloomberg one (https://archive.ph/AsVYu) says "The Russian unit represented more than 95% of the Yandex Group’s consolidated revenues in the first nine months of 2023, and approximately 95% of its consolidated assets and employees." Not much left!

Dang: please edit the link to the actual press, https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024, not the index page for the year 2024.

That was the submitted URL but our software replaced that with the canonical URL listed by the page (https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024). Reversed now. Thanks!

This does nothing, if you want dang to help, use the email address in the bottom Contact footer.

I'm not 100% sure if behind the scenes he has some sort of @dang webhook alert/filter or if he skims comments regularly

I skim comments regularly but it's still pretty random what I see. The only way to reliably get a message to us is hn@ycombinator.com. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Thanks for pointing that out, my mistake. Unfortunately, I can only edit the title, not the link

Not your mistake! see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267031.

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