Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.

Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

It would not be a surprise if similar deals have been reached with Yandex.

But this is a nice demonstration by Ukraine that all our internet problems are caused by large data centers, wherever they may be located.