> Russia can't sustain waging wars if they don't have an economy and disgruntled population.Russia can wage wars on natural resource selling alone, it only needs to keep the gas and oil flowing through the infrastructure. All those private companies' activities the government sees mostly as a distraction, it doesn't give a damn about them (until they get in the way). They don't matter much.
It's very much unlike the Western economies where the private companies drive the economy. Russia is more like a giant oil and gas pipe with military industrial complex around that.
> exception of VK, there isn't really any step-in competition to Yandex
If we talk about city services (taxi, delivery, online shopping) there are lots of other players. Search/mail/social — then yeah, apart from VK not many. And VK is in fact state-owned. Yandex is not. So if Yandex leaves the scene, the only game in town would be state-owned. This only reinforces the evil regime.
> That's why part of my suggestion is to burn the equipment/infrastructure and delete the code.
It's pretty unrealistic. You can do it in small company, easy. In a huge decentralized company I don't know how one could even pull that off. There simply isn't a way to "delete all the code", nor a single place you could burn all the servers. It just doesn't have a kill switch. And the moment you try that, the government swoops in and goodbye the company.
> And the only thing stopping them now from doing that is that Yandex is not nationalized. Yeah, sure.
If Yandex gets nationalized, the government will replace the management and the uncooperative employees. Most of them would just leave the day it happens. It won't be Yandex anymore of course. That is essentially the same as killing the company, but worse, as the remnants could still be used for evil.