Ru-speaking audience is ~2 times bigger than Russia, why would they cut this? Only because of SJWs like you?
I'd much prefer one search engine that searches well on two languages, instead of using different engines for each language. Ru-net has huge amount of usefulness in it, cutting it out is like cutting a finger. Fun fact, before the RU-UKR war, most Ukranians contributed to the Runet, so that would cut their heritage too.
Yandex isn't just a "Russian language search engine", it's a Russian company with quite close ties to the Kremlin. See: https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
I'm frankly a bit surprised that it's even legal for a US company like Kagi to do business with Yandex, considering it's sanctioned: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=18711. Though in fairness, I don't know enough about how exactly sanction laws work so it might be legally okay even if I find it morally questionable.
Yes, Yandex was effectively seized by Ru govt "friends" and turned into propaganda tool. And that's very unfortunate. But I'm not talking about getting the propaganda, only about search index.
About money - don't think this income is even remotely comparable with oil/gas incomes, which EU passes to RU.
Please don't start political debate. I do not like censorship of any kind, hence my initial response. I want to have available information in full.
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Yandex has quite a few international entities, which are probably not direct subsidiaries, which in turn probably helps with sanctions. Yandex Cloud seems to be sold by a UAE company internationally: https://yandex.cloud/en/about#impressum