Comment by bobuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobuk | Hacker News Reader

Disclosure: I've worked for Yandex as deputy CTO till 2015, and one of the reasons i've left the company was increased pressure from Russian government. Since then I have lived in Ukraine, now in Kyiv.

We're nervously joking about "ID of Good Russian" inside the Russian community. It's like "somebody from Russia who proves he/she is against Putin's regime." At least a third of them are now in Israel, trying to do something to stop this war. Arkady, who was the founder and CEO of Yandex since the beginning for me, is one of these "good Russians." He's helping to run from Russia for many people who's against the war now, trying to build a startup-asylium for russians with jewish roots in Tel-Aviv. I do not believe that Russia as a country will change soon, so one of the best ways to accelerate the process is to help intelligent people to leave the country, as Arkady does.

Honestly, I think everybody at Yandex, including me is guilty because, indirectly, we helped to build this regime. It is not fair to penalty for Volozh this hard. We all have to be penalized somehow, but give us a chance to fix at least something.

> We all have to be penalized somehow, but give us a chance to fix at least something.

I concur with the rest of your argument, but I think excessive penalization should be upheld as long as Russian forces are in Ukraine. The more penalization, the faster that war will end. After war - yeah, some sanctions should be lifted.

It looks like similar problem as with Germany after WW I. They got held down too much "so that they pose threat no more" and it backfired. Western world tried to appease Russia with economic integration and flow of capital, but it still didn't work. Germany somehow departed from their war-oriented path, how would you do that with Russia?

I understand the idea of sanctions but didn't get how it works in this case. He is not in Russia. He lived and pay taxes in Israel for last 3 years. He is even not a Russian citizen (changed his passport to Malta and Israel 4 years ago).

I have nothing to say about sanctions against Tigran Khudaverdyan (who is COO and really in charge of Yandex actually), it's pretty logical.

I always assumed that WWII was facilitated by heavy sanctions imposed on Germany. See [1] for a romanticized description of economic disarray that thrusted Hitler into power.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Comrades_(novel)

Yeah, that's what I meant with my comment.

I wouldn’t feel too guilty. It’s hard to leave friends and family and culture and work and stability behind. I’ve kept my head down and continued to work in the US despite some terrible presidents and plenty of wars and other governmental actions that I completely disagreed with. Do I feel guilty for that? No. I didn’t support it. I didn’t start it. I couldn’t stop it. Leaving would have only destabilized my family and robbed my children of knowing their grandparents.

This isn’t whataboutism. I’m not trying to say Russia is equivalent to the US, etc, etc.

But I think it’s unjust how much guilt and responsibility we put on the shoulders of the average citizen who is just trying to live.

I think the point was exactly that the author of the parent comment is not just an average citizen. As you grow, you tend to (IMHO, rightly) feel more and more responsibility for people around you.

It’s not about feelings of guilt, it’s about choosing complicity.

Sometimes that’s a perfectly rational choice, but when you are knowingly complicit with an abuser, there is always some kind of cosmic price to pay.

It’s not a threat of arbitrary moral punishment, it’s a warning about real long-term consequences.

> I do not believe that Russia as a country will change soon, so one of the best ways to accelerate the process is to help intelligent people to leave the country, as Arkady does.

At a personal lever, I feel it's very good and I wish these Russian all the best trying to do something meaningful in exile. On a more global level, though, it's clear that if all anti-war folks leave, the country becomes even more pro-war, and there is nobody left to save it.

That's the difference between us: you're believe in possibility to save the country, I believe that "Carthage must be destroyed" before people can build the new country on top of that. 20 years of dictatorship for Russia, even more for Belarus - it's not something that can be easily fixed.

A coup or just a sudden death of Putin can change Russia in a matter of weeks.

The big question is what happens next. Call me biased, but after seeing how my fellow Russian colleagues are transpiring the official propaganda, I think it may end up just like when they kill a dictator in the Middle East (i.e. suffering for everybody), not like in, say, Romania where basically the whole country was against Ceaușescu.

Its crazy to me the absolute double standard between Ukraine and Palestine.

So a new invasion is bad, but an illegal apartheid on going occupation is fine ?

Yes, it appears so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com