But is Yandex government owned? What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families, and a percentage of that ends up going via taxes to Putin? Are we boycotting all Russians everywhere globally?
But is Yandex government owned? What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families, and a percentage of that ends up going via taxes to Putin? Are we boycotting all Russians everywhere globally?
All businesses based in Russia should be boycotted, also second-hand (so businesses that deal with other businesses based in Russia).
If I knew someone was sending money to Russia, I would of course avoid any contact (let alone financial ties) with them.
> But is Yandex government owned?
In fact, yes. Yandex is totally controlled by Putin's presidential administration.
> What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families
It doesn't seem like a significant factor. The main flow of money into Russia are payments for fossil fuel and trade balance with China.
Yes, we boycott anyone who supports Putin’s regime.
Hate to break it to you, but not all Russians support Putin.
I think the OP’s point still stands, but it is a fairly weak argument.
I am Russian and I do oppose Putin’s regime. My family is in Russia, though. If I send them money (which), and they pay for, say, groceries, which are taxed, some tiny part of my money will be used to fund the regime and the war. I am very disappointed but there is no way for me to just yank all my family and friends and relocate them to a less fucked-up jurisdiction.
Doing business with Yandex is a whole other beast. Kagi can choose to use a worse search engine API which doesn’t involve paying money to a Russian company. Are there some market forces at hand here? Maybe a lot of Russian expats pay for Kagi because it has good Russian-language results? I don’t know.
Edit:
> But is Yandex government owned?
It isn’t, but I really doubt it has no ties with it. It would be interesting to trace and see if Yandex Cloud’s international branch money gets back to its Russian counterpart, or if they are two separate things.
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That is unfortunately just plain racism.
(For the record, I despise what Putin is doing.)
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No, interacting with Russian people does not mean supporting genocide. Please raise the quality of your comments here :)
With those in russia and majority of those outside it does.
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Your stance seems to be that interacting with any Russian means supporting genocide, regardless of if they support Putin. Which is so absurd as to be likely ragebait. So yes, it’s a quality issue :)
And if you’re discriminating against all Russians based on their government, even though not all Russians support Putin, then that is unfortunately just racism.
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Americans too, or just Russians?
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I see. To summarize, you believe all Russians are bad because a Russian person killed your friend and all Americans are good because no American people killed any of your friends?
Is it really that hard to believe people don't want to support a state that has brutally occupied half of Europe for 50 years and is right now murdering Ukrainians every day?
Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe (and the West in general), there's no way I'd give one of their biggest tech companies even a cent.
States consist of people. Russians are shareholders of Russia.
It would be true if Russia was democracy. It is not.
It's not a democracy because they neglect their shareholder duties. In other words, they are responsible for not making it a democracy.
This is a naive point of view. I can't blame you though, you probably live in a better part of the world.
The world also consists of people. Are you saying that people around me are better than the Russians? Sure, nice to have finally agree about something.
But that just proves the point you were trying to argue with.
No, you misread. I didn't say people around you are better; I said you probably live in a country with working government institutions and fair elections.
I don't feel you approach this discussion in good faith. I see no point in continuing.
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It is silly to grant agency and moral responsibility exclusively to people living within democracies.
The Putin regime made an informal deal with the population "You stay out of politics and we're gonna stay out of your life". The people outsource political power to the regime.
This passive majority represents the bulk of the population, but not the whole of the population. There are two smaller groups. Ultra-patriots who criticize Putin for not doing more war, more suffering etc. And those who criticize the Putin for the war, although this group is not very vocal, but here I do agree with you that's it's difficult to publicly protest in an authoritarian regime.
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> 0 killed friends (first one dating back to 2009, ironically in the US)
I'm unable to parse this bit, which you say is important. The first of your zero friends was killed in 2009?
You can hate ALL Russians all you want but it's not whataboutism to call you out on the hypocritical and hateful position you take. Saying you have issue with not only a country but all it's people and their offerings because of the countries effects on friends and families just means in the case of the US, that you have no friends that are: Black Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, pretty much all of South Americans, large portions Africans, the Balkans, Vietnamise, Most of the Arab countries etc?
Surely the rational position to take is to hate the countries policies not all their citizens. I also dislike Russia policies but boycutting or hating the creator of 7 Zip because he is Russian seems weird.