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Comment by mseepgood | Hacker News Reader

While Kotlin is a Russian island the Kotlin programming language was created by JetBrains which is a Czech company founded by Russians with headquarters in Prague. You will find Kotlin on the map in the Prague circle.

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They shut down their St. Petersburg office and their Russian entity after the war started. At this point many of their people are outside Russia; all over Eastern Europe mostly. Lots of their Russian employees emigrated.

Notably, Roman Elizarov who was leading the Kotlin team and who is based in St. Petersburg actually left Jetbrains. It's not clear why; at the time he cited personal reasons. But reading between the lines, it could be because he was not able or willing to leave Russia.

The Czech office is a flag of convenience. Until the full-scale invasion all development of this Russian named product founded by Russians was happening in Russian Federation. But formally you have a point.

And Yandex is a Netherlands company, right. Russians have a reasonable tradition to register things outside of “their” country.

As far as companies with a Russian origin go JetBrains and Yandex are at complete odds with each other. JetBrains condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and suspended sales and R&D there shortly after the war broke out then left the country entirely as soon as they relocated the employees. Whereas Yandex stayed and as a result their home page today is chock-full of Russian propaganda. JetBrains may have originated in Russia but they have nothing to do with that country anymore so counting them in with Yandex is wrong.

Yandex has no way out of Russia. Most of its businesses are russian-targeted and going “full outside” makes zero sense for them, because to continue they’d have to bow before authorities anyway. As a media company, to condemn the war for them meant being instantly raided and re-owned, which sure isn’t far from truth, just was less dramatic.

Agreed that exiting the country was much easier for JetBrains who are more internationally focused. But my belief is that Yandex leadership made a strategic mistake in not spinning off their core businesses to Europe. They had a chance at establishing themselves as an EU-first search engine, mail provider and cloud that can compete at the equal footing with Google. Yet they blew it and now they are FSB owned in everything but name.

That would be cool indeed!

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