Please don't portray Yandex as a victim of strict martial laws (although oficially there is no war, only a "special operation". Calling it a war is an offence).
Let’s go beyond that. Let’s say that Yandex has been spreading propaganda on purpose for multiple years. That’s every other search engine too. Especially Google! If Russia or China wins a conflict, or begins one economically, do the employees of Google deserve to be punished for their work during this time? When you use logic and apply the same logic to the situation in reverse, it’s quite apparent that you have a bias, and that bias isn’t serving you well.
Please leave your "look at the West" whataboutism out of it. In the end it's your problem how you solve it.
We in Russia had our media crushed, filtered by Yandex and most journalists fled the country or were murdered.
Your whataboutism is just trying to diminish our struggle.
Nothing you have said in your post is unique to the geography, at all. If that makes you feel less special, good; there is nothing special about being from one geographical location or another, and nothing special about a murder in Africa vs. a murder in South America.
Murder is murder, you don’t have a worse kind. If there is something to discuss, it’s not from an angle of ideological context-macht.