Ombudsman: Russian search engine Yandex removes destroyed buildings in occupied Mariupol from its maps
The observation was made by Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights. "Mariupol is a city where Russia violated every possible norm of humanitarian law. And erasing the houses from the maps will not help those guilty of that to avoid punishment for their crimes,” he said.
Russian tech giant Yandex, which faces wartime censorship, announced on Nov. 25 that it is reorganizing its operations, moving to cut its physical ties with Russia, according to RFE/RL.
Lubinets noted that the destroyed buildings are still visible on Google maps. Mariupol, the second-largest city in the eastern Donetsk Oblast with a pre-war population of over 425,000 people, endured a brutal siege from Russian forces in the first months of the war. Tens of thousands of Mariupol residents are estimated to have been killed before the city fell to Moscow in mid-May. Though much of the city is destroyed, an estimated 100,000 people are still living in Mariupol.
