Comment by csomar
2 years ago
> Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE
UAE is on friendly terms with Israel (at least for now). They have also been aggressively targeting US tech refugees (ie: telegram, binance).
That's not the reason.
Around 20% of Israelis immigrated from the Soviet Union 20-30 years ago, and Russia and Ukraine still have fairly large Jewish communities.
Volozh is himself Russian Jewish, so it makes sense he decided to take up Israeli citizenship instead of keeping his Russian one. A lot of Ukrainian and Russian Jews did that right after 2022.
Dubai has a fairly large CIS diaspora (around 1.5-2% of the entire population) so it's unsurprising that Yandex is fairly popular there.
Russian services are decently popular in Israel for similar reasons as well.
I was answering on the assumption that the previous poster was surprised about the UAE/Israel relation. Maybe I misread him.
No, I was not surprised. It’s like a flavor of complicated Middle Eastern politics that is interesting to observe.