I don't believe that's a fair point. Google takes down requests if the us gov asks them to, or Bing. Baidu can only show Chinese gov approved messages.
They are all at the mercy of the controlling government.
Yes, all of them comply to local laws. But point is Yandex repeatedly denied all accusation of working with government by saying "No, we didn't filter news, it's our algorithms decided this topic from top1 twitter trend is not important at all"
Turns out their "algorithms" was "where source in state_approved_media"
Just for clarification: it's illegal to build news aggregator in Russia if you use any sources that is not certified by Russian government. So technically you're right, "source is state_approved_media", and pretty the same for all Russian news aggregation services.
They are all at the mercy of the controlling government.