I enjoy when I get foreign language players of a language I know some of, it's a good way to practice IMO - wish one could choose a preferred language.

I guess they don't do that because of the impact on matchmaking (mm), the mm seems crazily sub-optimal I'd love to know that logic behind it : like when you have a game of 9 people, why you abandon it rather than finding a person from the pool of 100k waiting that will play. It could be a setting "allow game requests from mm" and they could give a little xp for it - beats searching and waiting another 10mins to start a game.

Western Russia connects to Sweden or Poland. Northern European and Eastern European countries connect through the same nodes.

Connections within Valve network are handled internally (since they can tune it for better latency, etc.) and you don't even know where the actual game server is hosted. So there is always a big mix of players no matter where you are in Europe.

Fun thought: it depends on how much throughput can be handled by Starlink, but Valve could waste some money on it to bring players closer from further away. They already have the dynamic, latency based entry node selection set up. If they hooked up some of the internal network through Starlink, it could be amazing low latency cross-continent gaming. And games like CS:GO and Dota 2 doesn't require too much bandwidth.

Assuming it is not, I wonder why? Lots of russian players, why wouldn't Valve put servers in Russia?

Also most of the dannish kingdom's land is not in Europe either.

Is the US more of a European country or an Amerind country? What would its geographic location suggest?