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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so. Yandex is very neutral company in that regard. They have Ukrainian office with developers. For Ukrainian users they show Crimea belonging to the Ukraine when browsing from maps.yandex.ua. You can check it yourself, compare maps.yandex.ua and maps.yandex.ru.

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No big company in Russia is "neutral." They don't have those business freedoms. Kaspersky is a good example of how deeply tied Russian companies are to its security and political apparatus:

http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

>maps.yandex.ua

Most/all map vendors follow local politics in regards to territory disputes. I'm not sure why you think that's unusually generous of them. If anything, the Russians know that keeping UA under their thumb and using their services instead of western services is to their advantage. A more apolitical move would be having it listed as disputed on both maps.

Yandex may be neutral but Russian regulators probably aren't so it's a good moment to have a complaint about an American company.

If they had balls, they'd show it as belonging to Ukraine -- or at least as disputed -- on both maps.

Google does exactly the same thing.

Currently I'm in a country that didn't recognize Kosovo independence and Google shows it as disputed territory, otherwise part of Serbia. Exactly the same way for Crimea and Ukraine.

It is neither of these companies job to take sides. The simplest way is to show to each party what they want to see.

Google apparently shows Kosovo as a disputed region in the U.S., as well (demarcated by a dashed, rather than by a solid line). Ditto for the Crimea.

Maybe if they had balls they'd show it as belonging to Russia on both maps. Why assume they'd be on your side?

Silently legitimizing the gains made in a war of naked territorial aggression (in order to maintain market share, most likely) doesn't require a lot of balls, in my book.

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