Yandex is not russian. It is developed by a company in switzerland and primarily targets the russian market.
>Yandex is a Russian Dutch-domiciled multinational corporation providing Internet-related products and services, including transportation, search and information services, eCommerce, navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising.
>The firm is registered in Schiphol, the Netherlands as a naamloze vennootschap (Dutch public limited company), but the company founders and most of the team members are located in Russia.
So yes, technically the company is registered outside of Russia (Netherlands, not Switzerland like you claimed), but their HQ and heavy majority of their workforce and the founders are located in Moscow. I would definitely count it as a Russian company.
It is one thing to censor something due to a hypothetical possibility of a threat or due to some "dangerous ideas". But it is another thing to censor a tech giant from an authoritarian country (with the government of which that said tech giant is almost definitely collaborating) that is literally physically invading your borders by force and taking your territory using shady tactics and excuses ("these are not our soldiers, they are just some unmarked militia that has access to our top tier weaponry... oh wait, jk, we lied, it was our troops all along").
Especially given the fact that tech giants in Russia are all, pretty much, under a thumb of the government. Just check up on what happened to Pavel Durov (the Telegram guy, previously known for creating another russian tech giant VK.com aka russian version of FB), he ended up having to give up his company and flee the country, because he didn't collaborate with the regime readily.
And no, I am not a russophobe, I grew up in Russia myself, and I am not the kind to fall for the "every hack is now attributed to russian government-funded hackers" hysteria that seems to have polluted mass media in the west recently. Which is why, imo, it is important to emphasize when the real threats happen and address them, just like Ukraine did with the Yandex ban.
It means they can literally run their mandatory board meetings in the transit lounge at the airport.
Ferrari has a similar structure at Schiphol, but I think it’s also because Italy has a “speculator tax” on stock transactions, so they just register elsewhere.
Like saying Google is Irish because they have some center there for the EU business. Google is surely a US-based company.