I think the OP’s point still stands, but it is a fairly weak argument.

I am Russian and I do oppose Putin’s regime. My family is in Russia, though. If I send them money (which), and they pay for, say, groceries, which are taxed, some tiny part of my money will be used to fund the regime and the war. I am very disappointed but there is no way for me to just yank all my family and friends and relocate them to a less fucked-up jurisdiction.

Doing business with Yandex is a whole other beast. Kagi can choose to use a worse search engine API which doesn’t involve paying money to a Russian company. Are there some market forces at hand here? Maybe a lot of Russian expats pay for Kagi because it has good Russian-language results? I don’t know.

Edit:

> But is Yandex government owned?

It isn’t, but I really doubt it has no ties with it. It would be interesting to trace and see if Yandex Cloud’s international branch money gets back to its Russian counterpart, or if they are two separate things.