Jason Judge - ❎💙🇺🇦🇮🇪🇪🇺 ❤

You might not know much about the history of the internet in Russia. I don't blame you. But there was a time when it was free, in the fullest sense of the word. In the mid-90s, when dial-up started reaching ordinary people, a country that had been completely cut off from the world could suddenly read news from anywhere and talk to anyone. My first experience of it was in our family's tiny flat in Moscow, in one of those post-Soviet apartment blocks where the mailboxes on the ground floor stank of stale urine. There I was on America Online, of all things, opening Netscape and Eudora for the first time. The Russian internet grew astonishingly fast. By 2013 the services available to Russians, both government and private, were well ahead of what I could get in Britain, where I'd long since moved. And the company that innovated hardest was @yandexcom - the same company whose data centres are now being hit by Ukrainian missiles. You may not have heard of it. The name is a play on "index", with the "i" swapped for the Russian first-person pronoun "ya". It never tried to be global. It solved search for Russian speakers by building proper morphological algorithms for the language, and it took @Google years to catch up. In the late 90s, when I was building my own computers from components, Yandex already had a price search that aggregated live listings, so I could find the cheapest Soundblastet card in Moscow. It probably saved my family a fair bit of money. Later it bought @Uber's Russian business, and Yandex Taxi and food delivery didn't just copy Western ideas, they improved on them. It became a near-monopoly - when Yandex launched a feature, a thousand startups died, much like OpenAI today. But Yandex was also global in a quieter way. It modelled itself on Google, hated nepotism in a country run on it, and hired on merit. Its engineers ended up across the world's tech companies - in the peace years by choice, and after February 2022 not by choice. Which brings me to now. Russia is a deeply stratified society. The majority lead insular lives, don't speak English, don't follow the world, and their lives barely changed with the war or the sanctions. Tech workers were the opposite cohort: English-speaking, reading news in two languages, friends and colleagues across Europe and America. They built the Russian internet first as an escape from the criminal chaos of the 90s, and then, as Putin tightened the screws, it became the last place with genuine freedom. It's no accident that Navalny emerged as an internet blogger and built his entire opposition online while banned from state TV. Those same engineers understood exactly what the propaganda was. They knew the Russian invasion was a neo-imperial war of conquest by a dictator who thinks Ukrainians don't get to choose their own future. Then Putin came for Yandex. Censorship was rammed down its throat: no anti-regime results in search, only state-approved outlets in news aggregation, user data handed to the FSB. A company that helped build freedom in Russia joined the ranks of its executioners. About a quarter of staff fled. The rest stayed, and they've run the information blackout ever since. So I'll repeat what I've said about the people still working at Yandex, VK and the other backbone holdings. There's a special place in hell for you. Unlike the majority of Russians, whose education and curiosity never stretched far, you know exactly what's happening. You speak English. You read the news in both languages. You fork repositories on GitHub. You know who you're serving and why your country is slaughtering civilians, and you serve the dictator anyway. You're vandalising the legacy of the people who built Yandex - one of your co-founders, Ilya Segalovich, is dead, and you're trampling on his grave. I don't wish you physical harm, and I hope the staff in those data centres stay safe. But if Yandex burns - the IP, the data centres, the whole thing - given what you're doing for that man, I won't shed a single tear.