I would consider reading Vlad's response to this which is extremely measured and not at all "throwing his hands up" at the issue.
Two quotes from his response: "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics." "We set out to fix search, not the world."
All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy. But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.