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I would like to know why Yandex though that opening data centers in western counties would be a good idea. Surely they knew that, as a Russian company, if thei

I would like to know why Yandex though that opening data centers in western counties would be a good idea. Surely they knew that, as a Russian company, if their government ever becomes aggressive, they'll also be targeted by sanctions.

CamperBob2 5y ago
I don't think anyone expected them to go quite as berserk as Putin has. It's easy to forget that for several years, Putin was actually a halfway-decent steward of the Russian economy. That's what makes this whole thing so weird... he could have gone down in history as one of Russia's more respected leaders. All he had to do was not rock the boat. Instead, he literally sank it. Putin simply had no reason -- certainly no reason that Yandex management could anticipate -- to tank his country's reputation along with his own. I feel incredibly bad for anyone who was trying to play by the rules and run a legitimate business in Russia. (Whether that describes Yandex, of course, is an entirely different point of debate.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- megous 5y ago
  Which years?
  - ivan_gammel 5y ago
    In his first term he delivered a number of useful economic reforms with a team of liberal economists. Taxes, land ownership, banking, bankruptcy etc. The economic block in the government remains very professional and impartial even now. The only thing Russia really needed to become a normal state was to reform judicial branch, police and security services.
    - watwut 5y ago
      That would be 20 years ago? And then he created up own Oligarchs groups. > Taxes, land ownership, banking, bankruptcy etc. The economic block in the government remains very professional and impartial even now. Russia has one of highest inequalities and quite poor population. It is also heavily corrupt. The macroeconomics works, but lower levels don't. > The only thing Russia really needed to become a normal state was to reform judicial branch, police and security services. That is kind of problem, given that Putin is former KGB agent, surrounded himself by alike people, became president duet to former KBG agents cooperating on gaining power ... Also, used both judicial branch and police against political opponents including journalists from day 1. They are corrupt basically as a matter of policy. Putin did reformed judicial branch, police and security services. Just not the way we would like.
      - ivan_gammel 5y ago
        While all that you said is true regarding the current situation, 2000s were a different story regarding economics. Putin's pocket oligarchs did not have the same amount of influence and in that period of time plenty of new independent businesses were created, some of which became large companies. Yes, some of those are now being taken over by state, but again, that's not what was happening in 2000s. In 2000s Russia observed significant reduction in poverty and median income has actually increased. Unemployment rate was very low. That decade is called "plentiful 2000s" (сытые нулевые) for that reason. If Putin was not obsessed by Ukrainian Maidan events in 2004 - a turning point for him, we could see very different Russia today.
        obscurette 5y ago
        Plentiful 2000s have nothing to do with Putin. These were plentiful regardless of Putin not because of him. It is normal for every society to take a time to adapt with completely new situation. The fact that it was the beginning of 2000s where things started to become much better after the mess of 1990s is true for almost every ex-USSR and Eastern Europe country. But Putin has always been the man he is now – the war in Chechnya began in 1999.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
Surely? That’s 20/20 hindsight.
- eastbound 5y ago
  It’s obvious that using Cloud services gives unlimited power to the provider, too. It’s not hindsight, it’s basic laws of human power.
coffeeblack 5y ago
How should they have known? Russia attacked both Georgia and Ukraine before, and the West never reacted in any meaningful way.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Yandex bought the land in 2013, so it was before the invasion of Crimea.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    But after Georgian invasion of 2008, and Chechen wars of 90s.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      The west didn't really care about the invasion of Georgia or Chechnya. All they did was "condemn it" to save face, then moved one. Same with the occupation of Crimea in 2014, except that now they condemned it harder. Same how the west also didn't care, that after WW2, the USSR occupied all of Eastern Europe, or that before that, Hitler occupied Austria and Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Seems like there's a historically repeating pattern here where the amount of warmongering and territorial occupation you can get away with is directly proportional to to your military force and inversely proportional to the willingness of other states to go to war with you as the occupier. Just like how the US and its coalition got away scot free after bombing the shit out of Vietnam, the middle east and destabilizing North Africa. All we could do is "condemn it" and take in refugees.
      - FpUser 5y ago
        >"the amount of warmongering and territorial occupation you can get away with is directly proportional to to your military force and inversely proportional to the willingness of other states to go to war with you as the occupier" I would also add economic power and ability to inflict painful sanctions to the equation. But were you really expecting anything else? This is how it always worked and the only thing that prevents hot global scale conflicts now I think is the threat of MAD.
shantara 5y ago
On paper they are a Dutch company.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  Western governments have suddenly awoken and are now willing to follow trails of paper if necessary. This one isn’t too hard to follow since even you and I know it’s a Russian company.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fulafel 5y ago
Russia and Europe spent a lot of time and invested a lot of faith to building commerce, in both Europe and Russia the prevailing idea was that the interdependency is a force for peace and stability and it seemed to be mostly working for a while. (Also Russia is also a very risky business environment, so hedging...) (Also^2 Yandex is not under sanctions, the current outage doesn't seem to be about sanctions according to the news)
- riffraff 5y ago
  it's worth noting that the whole EU starting from the earlier european communities was built on such an idea that tighter and tighter integration would make war unlikely (and in some cases, unthinkable). While this didn't work out for the Russian relationship, it wasn't a totally stupid plan.
  - fosk 5y ago
    This war has proven that as long as national interests are strong enough, those economical ties most likely won't last..which is a scary precedent for Europe in general.
    - skissane 5y ago
      Russia has a lot of special characteristics which most other European states lack: (1) huge population and area; (2) permanent member of UN Security Council; (3) accepted nuclear weapons state with one of world’s largest nuclear arsenals; (4) superpower with a massive multi-decade empire only 3-4 decades ago. Few other European states have any or all of these characteristics; UK and France probably come the closest, yet the idea of either of them emulating Russia seems rather implausible. In short, just because the strategy failed for Russia, doesn’t really disprove the strategy in general, given Russia is such a special case.
      - lnsru 5y ago
        Huge population!? Not even twice bigger than Germany. Area is huge. As natural resources lying all over the place. They all could live like princes in Dubai, but made a different choice. They have nuclear weapons for sure, but I wouldn’t like to speculate about their maintenance and availability.
grapeskin 5y ago
Should Google be preparing for sanctions against the US the next time they invade somewhere? Companies usually don't plan for unprecedented actions.
- watwut 5y ago
  Which part you find unprecendented?
  - grapeskin 5y ago
    Nobody expected Russia to suddenly try to seize all of Ukraine. It went from nothing to suddenly surrounding the country in weeks, and even then people called the Biden admin nuts for saying Russia was going to do it. Then they did it. Nobody expected sanctions that cut Russia off from the world to an extent comparable only to North Korea. It's just something that people didn't imagine could happen to modern economies. People said cutting Russia off from SWIFT was absolutely unreasonable, impossible, and nobody would seriously consider it. Heads of state said they'd never do it despite the circumstances. Then they flipped and approved of it. It's easy to look back and say "lol it's obvious" since it's in the news everyday and we're densensitized to it by now. But it was really a mindblowing series of events.
    - watwut 5y ago
      There was war in Ukraine since 2014 - ever since they refused to become another Belarus. I agree that many people underestimated Russian threat, but them expanding is not really unprecedented. I think that one reason why it flopped that quickly is that Russia was creating precedents of what it is going to do around for years. So it became impossible to ignore.
      - grapeskin 5y ago
        And the ongoing precedent was that Russia could snip off chunks of any country they like and at worst they'd face very limited sanctions. Taking a whole country at once in mainland Europe and having its economy completely isolated within a span of weeks was about as predictable as a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Nobody was prepared, and no preparation would've been sufficient no matter what.
gopher_space 5y ago
You could also look at it as having one foot out the door.
jpalomaki 5y ago
They have at least the Yango ride sharing service [1] that operates outside Russia (for example in Finland). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yango_(ride_sharing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yango_(ride_sharing)
paganel 5y ago
Because the US government had been aggressive in the past and it had no problems opening and maintaining data-centers in countries which had openly been against that aggression (I'm thinking mainly about France&Germany vs the US invasion of Iraq in 2003). Where Yandex mis-calculated is that Russia (the country) is not a hegemonic power like the US is (militarily, economically and culturally) and as such it doesn't have the same influencing power.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  That's not really comparable, is it? The US as a lot of leverage over Germany, France and most of the EU, so seeing them power off US datacenters would result in some serious sanctions and retaliation from the US that could hurt the EU. Whereas western EU countries have more leverage over Russian companies without fearing much retaliation. So it's not really the same scenario here.
  - paganel 5y ago
    > The US as a lot of leverage over Germany, France and most of the EU, Yes, that's exactly what I meant when talking about US's hegemonic power. > Whereas western EU countries have more leverage over Russian companies without fearing much retaliation. Some parts of the Russian political elites really believed (maybe they still do) that Europe's industrial heartland (or what's left of it, anyways) depended on cheap Russian energy. That was of course correct, Germany's industry greatly depends on access to cheap Russian energy. Where the Russians mis-calculated here was in thinking that the Europeans (meaning mostly the Germans) would relinquish their industrial advantage at the behest of the US (and partly the UK, even though is debatable how much of a geo-strategic role the UK still plays on the continent). As the German chancellor said a couple of days ago the upcoming total embargo on Russian energy will have economic consequences (there were talks of a 3-5% hit on the economy), imo this is a very risky play in the middle- to long-term, you don't want a united Germany hit by des-industrialisation in the middle of Europe. Later edit: This recent editorial from FT's Martin Wolf is pure propaganda, it puts the onus 100% on the Germans and asks them to economically suck it up for the benefit of Europe and of "democracy" (apparently whenever the US gets involved in a war is always for protecting "democracy"). > A brutal conflict has come to Europe of a kind not seen since the second world war, and even where some of its worst atrocities occurred. For Germany in particular, it is a moment of challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to defend Europe’s liberal civilisation. The opportunity is for historic redemption. Russia must not prevail. This is what matters most. There will indeed be pain. But it must be borne for a far greater cause. Again, it is my belief that this won't hold in the middle- to long-term, the current US leaders are playing with fire, an united Germany strategically allied with Russia in 10-15 years' time would be the end of many things on this continent, first of all of "democracy". [1] https://archive.ph/qVVi2#selection-2031.117-2038.0 https://archive.ph/qVVi2#selection-2031.117-2038.0
toast0 5y ago
As a Russian company having assets outside of Russia is probably good for business continuity in case they need to leave Russia on short notice.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I don't think you can say that; I mean the US has been aggressive on numerous occasions over the decades, but did that affect their internationally operating businesses? Should it?
jollybean 5y ago
It's not the sanctions, it's the government influence we should be worried about. Russia 1 state TV has gone beserk recently, it's as bad as you could possibly imagine.
medo-bear 5y ago
i guess there always exists a hypothesis that war was never planned. i mean russia once belived that nato would never move to the east. maybe they now regret ever pulling out of poland
AussieWog93 5y ago
You could say the same about manufacturing in China. Nobody expected Putin to go this far.
trenchgun 5y ago
Yandex is not targeted with sanctions. Article is misleading.
obsrvatlarge 5y ago
I'd guess that at Yandex they did not believe Russian leaders to make a mistake this bad. They were as surprised by the open attack as the western companies that lost their investments in Russia. Finland was always intended to be the weak member of EU when it comes to dealing with RU. There was the historical evidence of Finlandizierung to support this belief. Somehow Putin managed the impossible and united people from extreme right to far left in supporting Finland to join the NATO. Very recently Finland (actually private company Fennovoima) cancelled the joint Fennovoima & Rosatom project to build a new nuclear power plant in Finland. This decision to cut Rosatom off the project was on a much larger economical scale and was widely greeted with welcome.

CamperBob2 5y ago

I don't think anyone expected them to go quite as berserk as Putin has. It's easy to forget that for several years, Putin was actually a halfway-decent steward of the Russian economy. That's what makes this whole thing so weird... he could have gone down in history as one of Russia's more respected leaders. All he had to do was not rock the boat. Instead, he literally sank it. Putin simply had no reason -- certainly no reason that Yandex management could anticipate -- to tank his country's reputation along with his own. I feel incredibly bad for anyone who was trying to play by the rules and run a legitimate business in Russia. (Whether that describes Yandex, of course, is an entirely different point of debate.)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
megous 5y ago
Which years?
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  In his first term he delivered a number of useful economic reforms with a team of liberal economists. Taxes, land ownership, banking, bankruptcy etc. The economic block in the government remains very professional and impartial even now. The only thing Russia really needed to become a normal state was to reform judicial branch, police and security services.
  - watwut 5y ago
    That would be 20 years ago? And then he created up own Oligarchs groups. > Taxes, land ownership, banking, bankruptcy etc. The economic block in the government remains very professional and impartial even now. Russia has one of highest inequalities and quite poor population. It is also heavily corrupt. The macroeconomics works, but lower levels don't. > The only thing Russia really needed to become a normal state was to reform judicial branch, police and security services. That is kind of problem, given that Putin is former KGB agent, surrounded himself by alike people, became president duet to former KBG agents cooperating on gaining power ... Also, used both judicial branch and police against political opponents including journalists from day 1. They are corrupt basically as a matter of policy. Putin did reformed judicial branch, police and security services. Just not the way we would like.
    - ivan_gammel 5y ago
      While all that you said is true regarding the current situation, 2000s were a different story regarding economics. Putin's pocket oligarchs did not have the same amount of influence and in that period of time plenty of new independent businesses were created, some of which became large companies. Yes, some of those are now being taken over by state, but again, that's not what was happening in 2000s. In 2000s Russia observed significant reduction in poverty and median income has actually increased. Unemployment rate was very low. That decade is called "plentiful 2000s" (сытые нулевые) for that reason. If Putin was not obsessed by Ukrainian Maidan events in 2004 - a turning point for him, we could see very different Russia today.
      - obscurette 5y ago
        Plentiful 2000s have nothing to do with Putin. These were plentiful regardless of Putin not because of him. It is normal for every society to take a time to adapt with completely new situation. The fact that it was the beginning of 2000s where things started to become much better after the mess of 1990s is true for almost every ex-USSR and Eastern Europe country. But Putin has always been the man he is now – the war in Chechnya began in 1999.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

Surely? That’s 20/20 hindsight.

eastbound 5y ago
It’s obvious that using Cloud services gives unlimited power to the provider, too. It’s not hindsight, it’s basic laws of human power.

coffeeblack 5y ago

How should they have known? Russia attacked both Georgia and Ukraine before, and the West never reacted in any meaningful way.

Hamuko 5y ago
Yandex bought the land in 2013, so it was before the invasion of Crimea.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  But after Georgian invasion of 2008, and Chechen wars of 90s.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    The west didn't really care about the invasion of Georgia or Chechnya. All they did was "condemn it" to save face, then moved one. Same with the occupation of Crimea in 2014, except that now they condemned it harder. Same how the west also didn't care, that after WW2, the USSR occupied all of Eastern Europe, or that before that, Hitler occupied Austria and Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Seems like there's a historically repeating pattern here where the amount of warmongering and territorial occupation you can get away with is directly proportional to to your military force and inversely proportional to the willingness of other states to go to war with you as the occupier. Just like how the US and its coalition got away scot free after bombing the shit out of Vietnam, the middle east and destabilizing North Africa. All we could do is "condemn it" and take in refugees.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      >"the amount of warmongering and territorial occupation you can get away with is directly proportional to to your military force and inversely proportional to the willingness of other states to go to war with you as the occupier" I would also add economic power and ability to inflict painful sanctions to the equation. But were you really expecting anything else? This is how it always worked and the only thing that prevents hot global scale conflicts now I think is the threat of MAD.

shantara 5y ago

On paper they are a Dutch company.

arcturus17 5y ago
Western governments have suddenly awoken and are now willing to follow trails of paper if necessary. This one isn’t too hard to follow since even you and I know it’s a Russian company.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fulafel 5y ago

Russia and Europe spent a lot of time and invested a lot of faith to building commerce, in both Europe and Russia the prevailing idea was that the interdependency is a force for peace and stability and it seemed to be mostly working for a while. (Also Russia is also a very risky business environment, so hedging...) (Also^2 Yandex is not under sanctions, the current outage doesn't seem to be about sanctions according to the news)

riffraff 5y ago
it's worth noting that the whole EU starting from the earlier european communities was built on such an idea that tighter and tighter integration would make war unlikely (and in some cases, unthinkable). While this didn't work out for the Russian relationship, it wasn't a totally stupid plan.
- fosk 5y ago
  This war has proven that as long as national interests are strong enough, those economical ties most likely won't last..which is a scary precedent for Europe in general.
  - skissane 5y ago
    Russia has a lot of special characteristics which most other European states lack: (1) huge population and area; (2) permanent member of UN Security Council; (3) accepted nuclear weapons state with one of world’s largest nuclear arsenals; (4) superpower with a massive multi-decade empire only 3-4 decades ago. Few other European states have any or all of these characteristics; UK and France probably come the closest, yet the idea of either of them emulating Russia seems rather implausible. In short, just because the strategy failed for Russia, doesn’t really disprove the strategy in general, given Russia is such a special case.
    - lnsru 5y ago
      Huge population!? Not even twice bigger than Germany. Area is huge. As natural resources lying all over the place. They all could live like princes in Dubai, but made a different choice. They have nuclear weapons for sure, but I wouldn’t like to speculate about their maintenance and availability.

grapeskin 5y ago

Should Google be preparing for sanctions against the US the next time they invade somewhere? Companies usually don't plan for unprecedented actions.

watwut 5y ago
Which part you find unprecendented?
- grapeskin 5y ago
  Nobody expected Russia to suddenly try to seize all of Ukraine. It went from nothing to suddenly surrounding the country in weeks, and even then people called the Biden admin nuts for saying Russia was going to do it. Then they did it. Nobody expected sanctions that cut Russia off from the world to an extent comparable only to North Korea. It's just something that people didn't imagine could happen to modern economies. People said cutting Russia off from SWIFT was absolutely unreasonable, impossible, and nobody would seriously consider it. Heads of state said they'd never do it despite the circumstances. Then they flipped and approved of it. It's easy to look back and say "lol it's obvious" since it's in the news everyday and we're densensitized to it by now. But it was really a mindblowing series of events.
  - watwut 5y ago
    There was war in Ukraine since 2014 - ever since they refused to become another Belarus. I agree that many people underestimated Russian threat, but them expanding is not really unprecedented. I think that one reason why it flopped that quickly is that Russia was creating precedents of what it is going to do around for years. So it became impossible to ignore.
    - grapeskin 5y ago
      And the ongoing precedent was that Russia could snip off chunks of any country they like and at worst they'd face very limited sanctions. Taking a whole country at once in mainland Europe and having its economy completely isolated within a span of weeks was about as predictable as a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Nobody was prepared, and no preparation would've been sufficient no matter what.

gopher_space 5y ago

You could also look at it as having one foot out the door.

jpalomaki 5y ago

They have at least the Yango ride sharing service [1] that operates outside Russia (for example in Finland). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yango_(ride_sharing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yango_(ride_sharing)

paganel 5y ago

Because the US government had been aggressive in the past and it had no problems opening and maintaining data-centers in countries which had openly been against that aggression (I'm thinking mainly about France&Germany vs the US invasion of Iraq in 2003). Where Yandex mis-calculated is that Russia (the country) is not a hegemonic power like the US is (militarily, economically and culturally) and as such it doesn't have the same influencing power.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
That's not really comparable, is it? The US as a lot of leverage over Germany, France and most of the EU, so seeing them power off US datacenters would result in some serious sanctions and retaliation from the US that could hurt the EU. Whereas western EU countries have more leverage over Russian companies without fearing much retaliation. So it's not really the same scenario here.
- paganel 5y ago
  > The US as a lot of leverage over Germany, France and most of the EU, Yes, that's exactly what I meant when talking about US's hegemonic power. > Whereas western EU countries have more leverage over Russian companies without fearing much retaliation. Some parts of the Russian political elites really believed (maybe they still do) that Europe's industrial heartland (or what's left of it, anyways) depended on cheap Russian energy. That was of course correct, Germany's industry greatly depends on access to cheap Russian energy. Where the Russians mis-calculated here was in thinking that the Europeans (meaning mostly the Germans) would relinquish their industrial advantage at the behest of the US (and partly the UK, even though is debatable how much of a geo-strategic role the UK still plays on the continent). As the German chancellor said a couple of days ago the upcoming total embargo on Russian energy will have economic consequences (there were talks of a 3-5% hit on the economy), imo this is a very risky play in the middle- to long-term, you don't want a united Germany hit by des-industrialisation in the middle of Europe. Later edit: This recent editorial from FT's Martin Wolf is pure propaganda, it puts the onus 100% on the Germans and asks them to economically suck it up for the benefit of Europe and of "democracy" (apparently whenever the US gets involved in a war is always for protecting "democracy"). > A brutal conflict has come to Europe of a kind not seen since the second world war, and even where some of its worst atrocities occurred. For Germany in particular, it is a moment of challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to defend Europe’s liberal civilisation. The opportunity is for historic redemption. Russia must not prevail. This is what matters most. There will indeed be pain. But it must be borne for a far greater cause. Again, it is my belief that this won't hold in the middle- to long-term, the current US leaders are playing with fire, an united Germany strategically allied with Russia in 10-15 years' time would be the end of many things on this continent, first of all of "democracy". [1] https://archive.ph/qVVi2#selection-2031.117-2038.0 https://archive.ph/qVVi2#selection-2031.117-2038.0

toast0 5y ago

As a Russian company having assets outside of Russia is probably good for business continuity in case they need to leave Russia on short notice.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I don't think you can say that; I mean the US has been aggressive on numerous occasions over the decades, but did that affect their internationally operating businesses? Should it?

jollybean 5y ago

It's not the sanctions, it's the government influence we should be worried about. Russia 1 state TV has gone beserk recently, it's as bad as you could possibly imagine.

medo-bear 5y ago

i guess there always exists a hypothesis that war was never planned. i mean russia once belived that nato would never move to the east. maybe they now regret ever pulling out of poland

AussieWog93 5y ago

You could say the same about manufacturing in China. Nobody expected Putin to go this far.

trenchgun 5y ago

Yandex is not targeted with sanctions. Article is misleading.

obsrvatlarge 5y ago

I'd guess that at Yandex they did not believe Russian leaders to make a mistake this bad. They were as surprised by the open attack as the western companies that lost their investments in Russia. Finland was always intended to be the weak member of EU when it comes to dealing with RU. There was the historical evidence of Finlandizierung to support this belief. Somehow Putin managed the impossible and united people from extreme right to far left in supporting Finland to join the NATO. Very recently Finland (actually private company Fennovoima) cancelled the joint Fennovoima & Rosatom project to build a new nuclear power plant in Finland. This decision to cut Rosatom off the project was on a much larger economical scale and was widely greeted with welcome.