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Russia Internet Giant Risks Running Out of Vital Tech in a Year (bloomberg.com) 77

Posted by msmash from the collateral-damage dept.
Russia's omnipresent tech company, which created products ranging from the country's dominant search engine to its biggest ride-hail service, is facing a looming shortage of hardware as U.S. sanctions punish President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. From a report: Yandex NV may run short of the semiconductors needed for the servers it uses to power its business within a year to 18 months because of import restrictions, two people with direct knowledge of the issue said, asking not to be identified in order to speak candidly. Sanctions on dual-use technology, which have both military and commercial uses, have hit its self-driving vehicle unit particularly hard, they said. Yandex has plunged into crisis since Putin began the war Feb. 24, caught between the Kremlin's increasingly harsh internet censorship and a backlash in its key foreign markets. The company's international partnerships are crumbling, two board members resigned, and its number two executive, Tigran Khudaverdyan, was forced to step down after being sanctioned by the European Union. The company's market value has slumped from a record $31 billion in November to $6.8 billion after the invasion began.
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Russia Internet Giant Risks Running Out of Vital Tech in a Year More

Russia Internet Giant Risks Running Out of Vital Tech in a Year

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  • It is good to see a non-military military response showing a degree of effectiveness. As much as I would like to Russia (Putin) pay for the horrific actions they are responsible for, being a nuclear power, a military response is a really dangerous response.

    Being the Russian government is so tied to the oligarchs, sanctions affecting their money is more potent against Russia, than say North Korea who government is tied to its military.

    • What fucking country IS NOT tied to their military? Biden just increased defense spending more than Trump, the largest spending since the cold war.

      FYI you do realize sanctions are meant to hurt ordinary citizens and force them to over throw their government.

      You can fuck off now.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by spun ( 1352 )

        Yes. Please hurt "ordinary Russians" more. Russians are racist, nationalist, uneducated, authoritarian bootlicking rapist pieces of shit. All of them. Unless they are out protesting and have been for years, every Russian deserves all the terrible shit that is going to happen to them. I want to see the pain on your face as you watch your kids starve, okay? We clear on our fucking relationship now?

        Not posting anonymously, I want Russians to know how much I hate you. I'm not alone. But you are.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

          ... are racist, nationalist, uneducated, authoritarian bootlicking rapist pieces of shit.

          But enough about Americans, we're talking about Russians.

          • ... are racist, nationalist, uneducated, authoritarian bootlicking rapist pieces of shit.

            But enough about Americans, we're talking about Russians.

            Sure. That's why he started his statement with "Russians are racist, nationalist, uneducated, authoritarian bootlicking rapist pieces of shit." before you took the quote out of context.

            (Note: Repeating entire sentence to increase SEO).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by spun ( 1352 )

            Sorry, but no. America is no angel, but we're orders of magnitude better than Russia in regards to war crimes. Still, zero war crimes would be better. Which is why I vote for people who want to reduce our military spending. We could spend 1/10th of what we do and still kick half the world's ass at the same time.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
              To paraphrase Abraham Simpson:
              "My America is not a war criminal. It may be racist, nationalist, uneducated, authoritarian, a war criminal...but it is NOT Russia."

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by spun ( 1352 )

                Pretty much. Wish we were perfect, or even just not so evil. But we're still not bombing cities flat, raping kids, and poisoning peace negotiators. There's no comparison. And your average Russian fully supports Putin and will defend their rapist soldiers without even thinking.

            • its been proven countries with higher mil budgets have better tech sectors and better economies, (minus North Korea/Cuba)

              Spending more is still cheap, and up to 30% is spent on HR btw.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by spun ( 1352 )

                Proven by who?!? You can't just say something like that and expect ANYONE to have any chance of believing you unless you back it up. And even if you oculd prove it, you would not prove causation. FFS, the cause is almost certainly in the opposite direction! Bigger economies and higher tech sectors are the cause of a bigger military budget, not vice versa. Certainly a bigger economy is.

                You are in the military, or work for a defense contractor. It's the only explanation for this silliness.

      • What fucking country IS NOT tied to their military?

        Many countries have no military.

        List of countries without armed forces [wikipedia.org]

        Biden just increased defense spending more than Trump, the largest spending since the cold war.

        That makes no sense to me. We are seeing that Russia's military is incompetent and ineffective, so we should be able to reduce what we spend to defend Europe.

        We are also seeing that the age of the main battle tank is over. When a million-dollar tank can be destroyed by a six-thousand-dollar drone, then tanks no longer make sense.

      • The cost needs to be adjusted for inflation as well. Because so many things are records because of inflation even if they're relatively modest. After all, one coast guard cutter probably costs more than George Washington's first military budget...

      • Well, certainly not Russia, since Russia spends even higher percentage of their GDP on the military than the US. Only Israel and Saudi Arabia are spending more than Russia.

      • Amazing how stupid you are: Inflation is running at more than 7-8%, and the budget for mil went up only 4%, so the spending is really flat or below inflation.

        Busted your logic dude.

    • It is good to see a non-military military response showing a degree of effectiveness. As much as I would like to Russia (Putin) pay for the horrific actions they are responsible for, being a nuclear power, a military response is a really dangerous response.

      Being the Russian government is so tied to the oligarchs, sanctions affecting their money is more potent against Russia, than say North Korea who government is tied to its military.

      No one knows if sanctions work in general.

      In previous instances, a case could be made that "the sanctions were working" to counter the succeeding US military intervention, or "the sanctions were not working" to justify the succeeding US military intervention, and a similar case could be made for more sanctions or earlier intervention. There was no clear-cut measure of effectiveness

      The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be interesting because it's about the clearest example of sanctions that you're likely to h

      • It's already halted, for example, tank production in Russia. Every panzerfaust Europe provides Ukraine is a permanent loss of war materiel for Russia until sanctions go away. Every manpad, bayraktar and javelin hit shows that Russian arms are easily defeated by comparatively inexpensive equipment. So, while it may not be changing their behavior yet, it is impacting their ability to threaten Europe any further and to continue things like arms sales. Long term, if it keeps up, Russia will be a vassal stat

        • It's already halted, for example, tank production in Russia. Every panzerfaust Europe provides Ukraine is a permanent loss of war materiel for Russia until sanctions go away. Every manpad, bayraktar and javelin hit shows that Russian arms are easily defeated by comparatively inexpensive equipment. So, while it may not be changing their behavior yet, it is impacting their ability to threaten Europe any further and to continue things like arms sales. Long term, if it keeps up, Russia will be a vassal state of China who will secure Russian mineral deposits for themselves.

          The same goes for US weapons being expended; we are almost completely reliant on China for various resources and manufacturing, and arguably it's even worse than Europe's energy dependence on Russia. If energy and resource policy aren't fixed soon, the US too will become a vassal state of China in the (not so) long term.

          Russia's supply of cheap gas and funding "environmental" NGOs to oppose fracking, has encouraged the west to pursue the mirage of green energy. China has also been subsidizing wind and solar

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Klaxton ( 609696 )

        But actually there are examples where sanctions have been at least moderately effective. Sanctions sent Iran, for example, to the bargaining table for an agreement on their nuke development. Same with Libya back in 2003. Venezuela, an arguably aggressive dictatorship, has been crippled. North Korea also.

        "The consensus reached in the academic literature on the subject is that conventional trade and financial sanctions result in some meaningful behavioral change in the targeted country about 40 percent of the

      • Russia has nothing to trade that the West can do without. Sure, they foolishly tied themselves to Russian gas but that can be undone. Otherwise, what have they got? Absolutely nothing.

        So in a scenario where you (in the medium term, at least) don't have to trade with the offending party, why woud you?

        Sanctions are only partially something so transactional as regime change. Nobody in their right mind thinks sanctions = immediately the end of Putin. It is about sending a message that we don't want anything to

      • The sanctions will go on for some years, perhaps 5

        The sanctions on Iran have been in place for 43 years.

      • Sanctions outside of wartime have worked. Pretty clear that sanctions and boycotts and disinvestment did get rid of apartheid. But in wars I don't think they've been effective. However, you can also think of them as not sanctions, but instead just failing to reward the aggressor in the conflict by continuing to have trade as usual.

        For example, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, did countries all say "but we we still want to trade with them!"

    • Being the Russian government is so tied to the oligarchs, sanctions affecting their money is more potent against Russia, than say North Korea who government is tied to its military.

      I'm not sure this is the case anymore.

      The oligarchs aren't so much feudal lords but state appointed managers for sectors of the economy. If you fall out of favour your company fails, you go to jail, and a different oligarch takes over [wikipedia.org].

      Putin's basically designed the government to be as coup-proof as possible [vox.com] by doing things like dividing power between different agencies and giving each of them a significant security force.

      I even wonder if some of the military dysfunction in Ukraine is due to him deliberately

      • I even wonder if some of the military dysfunction in Ukraine is due to him deliberately avoiding a strong unitary command that could turn on him.

        I'm not an expert on foreign policy, but there's a good article that argues Russia's military dysfunction is because command is too centralized [theatlantic.com]. Combine that with advisors who are scared to tell the Putin the truth [nytimes.com], and you have an army being commanded to execute a strategy against imaginary circumstances, while also totally unequipped to adapt to the battlefield'

        • I even wonder if some of the military dysfunction in Ukraine is due to him deliberately avoiding a strong unitary command that could turn on him.

          I'm not an expert on foreign policy, but there's a good article that argues Russia's military dysfunction is because command is too centralized [theatlantic.com]. Combine that with advisors who are scared to tell the Putin the truth [nytimes.com], and you have an army being commanded to execute a strategy against imaginary circumstances, while also totally unequipped to adapt to the battlefield's reality.

          That's a good article though I think both might be true.

          At the level of individual soldiers, units, and even battalions it sounds like they're given very little decision making capacity, and that's one of the things causing them a lot of problems.

          But when you start looking at the scale of armies and different branches of the armed forces I suspect they're fairly independent. The armies trying to take Kyiv and the armies trying to take Mariupol don't really have a combined strategy. And the Russian Navy seem

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by DVLNSD ( 9457327 )
        People in russia are still fed constant stream of propaganda about their victories. So they will not change their minds unless they hear an explosion somewhere near the Red Square.
        It is a result of 300 years of conditioning - times are tough for your tzar/gensec/president so you will have to rough it... but we will prevail and times will be good (for aforementioned tzar/gensec/president). Hurray we won. Here's parade and some vodka. Those belts you tightened, keep them as they are. They are used to be sla

    • Being the Russian government is so tied to the oligarchs, sanctions affecting their money is more potent against Russia, than say North Korea who government is tied to its military.

      People in the US and Europe think of money as a surrogate for power, but in Russia, the government is power. Since Russian oligarchs are basically granted their empires by the government, and turning on the government can result in your empire being taken away [wikipedia.org] and you personally being sent to jail or possibly even poisoned [nytimes.com], I'm s

  • Most if not all of their equipment needs can be met by China or other countries
    • Chinese will gladly resell to the bloodthirsty Russians.. but they'll charge a major premium. Conversely they will pay pennies for Russian oil once they are the only buyer left.

      • Don't forget bugged from hell and back.

      • So India doesn't count. Most of the world is not sanctioning Russia. Just U.S. and Europe. When the two most populous countries are not joining the sanctions regime, you have some serious problems.

        • With no other metric do we ever use the population of countries to gauge economic sanctions. Sure, India and China are not involved but we are talking about around 20% of global GDP between the two of them but over 50% of global GDP with the US, EU, Japan, etc. Would definitely prefer to have those countries also on board but it's hardly "serious problems"

        • As the guy below said, population doesn't matter to sanctions. Russia's trade with India is mostly defense related items, not much else. The Purchasing Power of the average Indian isn't great, making them not much of an export market, and in the end Russia's GDP is mostly from mineral extraction anyways by which India only has a modest manufacturing sector.

          But you're also wrong. While China is reticent to go too far with sanctions, they are imposing them. Sinopec, China's largest energy supplier, pu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      No, they can't. Do you think China's fabs that make Intel/AMD processors are just sitting around idle waiting for new orders to spin up?

      Wait, Intel no longer has a facility [wikipedia.org] in China. TSMC has one in Shanghai and one in Nanjing, but I doubt they're running slow. Taiwan may not be boycotting Russia, but they aren't going to make anything covered by US IP available to them.

      Maybe Yandex will be satisfied with Longson [wikipedia.org] MIPS processors.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The big problem is CPUs. All the good ones are made by US companies. China has some of its own, but they aren't quite there yet for high end network gear.

      • How hard is it to evade sanctions on shit any random jackass can go order on Newegg? You might have some luck restricting the megabuck carrier grade equipment, but CPUs and other common server parts? I'm sure it wouldn't be too much trouble to arrange straw purchases then drive them into Russia.

        • For a few hundred a month maybe? Not too bad but we are talking thousands or tens of thousands per month? Now you are talking about working through distribution, supply chains that are much easier to control who gets what.

          Not to mention that in your scenario someone is paying retail cost for those chips and has to cover their risk in terms of getting into Russia and sell it on essentially a black market and make a profit so that cost is going to be much higher.

          Nevermind that would only be easy for desktop s

          • Not to mention that in your scenario someone is paying retail cost for those chips and has to cover their risk in terms of getting into Russia and sell it on essentially a black market and make a profit so that cost is going to be much higher.

            And it's doubtful they'll accept rubles in payment.

    • How much equipment do you need to just run the russian internet? Surely Yandex won't be indexing the outside world any longer?

    • Most if not all of their equipment needs can be met by China or other countries

      China and Russia couldn't even team up during the cold war. They've been enemies forever. China will eat Russia's lunch, and own them. While that may be allowed as a last resort, Russians are going to resent them something fierce.

  • Russia will either take Ukraine and the West will allow it or they'll be some kind of peace deal.
    • Russia will either take Ukraine and the West will allow it or they'll be some kind of peace deal.

      At the current rate Russia is losing equipment and troops, Ukraine might be in Moscow in the not too distant future. A military can't sustain having 50% troop losses for its units over and over. At some point you literally don't have enough people to keep going.

      And this doesn't take into consideration the number of officers being killed. Saw a story this morning of a colonel of the 200th separate mo

    • Russia will either take Ukraine and the West will allow it or they'll be some kind of peace deal.

      Or Ukraine will win the war.

      The Ukrinform [ukrinform.net] web site is the official news feed of Ukraine. It's definitely one-sided and maybe a little optimistic, but it supplies a continuous feed of news reports from the country. So far as I can tell it's been lock-step with the critical threats [criticalthreats.org] site, which is a think-tank that advises the US government and gets its info from satellite images.

      It looks like Ukrinform is accurate in base-level facts.

      The first 4 weeks of the war were all about Russian actions, but starting la

  • In Soviet Russia, Internet connects you! ?

  • Yandex is to big to evade sanctions and getting contraband equipment.

    Having said that, a company as big as Yandex will be ableto pay top ruble for brand name second hand equipment to other compannies. Either western companies going out of russia, or smaller russian companies more willing to explore using systems with chips from china (both X86 like Thatic, or some of their homegrown desings), or to take the gamble of contraband systems because, being smaller, they can fly under the radar.

  • Fortunes like those represented by Yandex are being reduced by factors of 4, 5, or more. The yachts of the Russian super-rich are being denied fuel, replenishment of supplies, and places to dock. I'm sure invading Ukraine seemed like a good idea back when it looked to be a cake-walk instead of the bare-feet-on-broken-glass affair it has become.

    But now everything has gone pear-shaped, the army looks like a banana republic police force, and Russia's fucked for the next few decades. The oligarchs must have had

  • In all likelihood, some kind of peace settlement is made and Russia makes off with bigger chunks of Ukraine with more concessions about neutrality setting Ukraine up for another better planned invasion in the future.

    As long as Russia gets away with invading neighbors and destabilizing governments, including the US with its election meddling, the world will be constantly dealing with this murdering menace and there will be no peace.

    The world can do without trade with Russia. Until it stops its aggressive

  • "Yandex N.V. is a Dutch public company with limited liability"

    So why are giant Russian companies still allowed to remain incorporated in Europe, 5 weeks after Russians turned Europe into a battleground? WTF is wrong with the EU/NATO

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