The court ordered Yandex to remove the image of the oil refinery from its maps

This is the first such decision in Russia

The Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow ordered Yandex to remove images of the Ryazan oil refinery from Yandex Maps due to attacks by Ukrainian UAVs. The court decision dated December 24, 2024 was published on the website of the Moscow courts. The TASS agency was the first to write about the case, but did not specify which refinery it was about.

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Photos of refineries in Yandex “undermine the defense capability” of Russia

The prosecutor's office appealed to the court, which in May 2024 already demanded that Yandex remove from the maps information about the plant, which belongs to Rosneft and is located in Ryazan at the address Southern Industrial Hub, 8.

The company ignored the department’s demand, after which the prosecutor’s office went to court and pointed out that the satellite map now “directly shows the main workshops, sites with tanks, and other components” of the Ryazan Oil Refining Company (RNPC).

The Khamovnichesky court noted in its decision that the plant “operates uninterruptedly, meeting the needs of the Russian army and navy during a special military operation” and was attacked four times in 2024 by Ukrainian UAVs. As a result of the attacks, the enterprise’s infrastructure was damaged, and “employees were injured,” the document says.

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Images of the plant on Yandex.Maps “make the facility maximally vulnerable to weapons of destruction by enemy forces,” the court believes. Moreover, their existence in the public domain “undermines the defense capability of the state and has a negative impact on the timely supply of materials to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” the court’s decision noted.

Based on this, the court ordered Yandex to remove or retouch images of the plant and its parts (workshops, compressor stations, sites with tanks) from Yandex.Maps within a month. In addition, the company was ordered to pay a state duty, but its amount was erased from the court decision.

16 refineries vulnerable to UAV attacks

Previously, “Verstka” calculated that there are 16 large Russian oil refineries in a potentially vulnerable area for attacks by Ukrainian UAVs . They account for 52% of the total oil refining of the largest enterprises in the industry.

In total, in 2024, as Vorstka wrote, more than 7,300 Ukrainian drones were launched into Russian regions, if we count according to data from the Russian Ministry of Defense reports, which do not take into account all attacks. This is 71% of all UAVs shot down by Russian air defense over the previous two years.

Most often, drones attacked the Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk regions. In total, at least 32 Russian regions, the annexed territories of Crimea, as well as the waters of the Black and Azov Seas were under attack. The targets of attacks in most cases were airfields, factories of the military-industrial complex, gas storage facilities and refineries.

Photo: Yandex logo, Russia, December 9, 2022. Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters

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