‘Russia’s Google’ ordered to hide maps of oil refineries after Ukrainian attacks

A Moscow court has ordered a Russian internet giant to hide maps and images of oil refineries from its search engine results after a spate of Ukrainian drone attacks on the country’s fuel infrastructure.

Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google”, has been ordered to scrub satellite and map images of an oil plant that has been targeted in UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) strikes by Ukraine’s armed forces, according to the state-owned TASS news agency.

The demand comes after a lawsuit was filed by Russian regulators who found detailed images of the country’s oil plants were easily accessible from Yandex on a service similar to Google Maps.

The technology company must begin “removing or retouching images of the facility’s components, including workshops, compressor stations, tank storage areas and other elements, from the Yandex Maps platform”, a ruling said.

The court said Yandex’s technology “makes the facility extremely vulnerable to enemy weapons”.

The block is the first time the Russian government has ordered Yandex to remove information from public maps to support its war effort, TASS reported. Yandex declined to comment.

A court filing said the facility had been attacked by Ukraine four times, although it did not name the plant. It said the refinery operates “uninterruptedly to support the Russian army and navy” and that public access to the images “undermines national defence capabilities”.

The Telegraph was able to identify several major oil and gas plants within Russia that have been reportedly targeted by Ukraine’s forces using Yandex’s mapping tools. The satellite images provide detailed pictures of multiple major facilities, while panoramic pictures taken by drone and street view images were also accessible.

Russia unleashed waves of air and drone strikes against Kyiv’s energy systems after its invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago. Moscow’s forces have destroyed roughly half of Ukraine’s domestic power infrastructure since the war began and caused rolling blackouts.

Last year, Ukrainian forces started escalating their own attacks against the Kremlin’s oil and gas production facilities, with unmanned drones targeting plants deep inside Russia, some of them hundreds of miles from the border.

Kyiv’s forces have also bombed munitions plants using kamikaze drones, fired missiles and sabotaged Russian railways that carry fuel supplies.

On Dec 22, dozens of Ukrainian drones targeted an oil depot in Russia’s Oryol Oblast, its second major strike on the facility that month. While Russia claimed to have downed 20 drones, footage on social media showed the “Steel Horse” storage plant ablaze.

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