Criminal gangs from Russia and Ukraine continue to collaborate regardless of today's politics - love knows no borders. Plus there are around 2 million Ukrainians living in Russia.

Since Ukraine has a large Russian-speaking, pro-Russian minority, it's complicated. But the Russian government might still see intervention in Ukraine as sensitive, since there's a war on, and might want tighter control over any attacks used there.

I would’t call it a minority. In reality, Ukrainians that speak Ukrainian as their main language is a minority in Ukraine, but they got in power after just another coup in 2014 and now repressing Russian speaking population.

Just go to google trends and type the same word in Russian and Ukrainian to see what parts of the country really using Ukrainian and what percent of population lives there.

Weird that he included Romania too, Romania is part of NATO , has pretty cold relations with Russia and we use a latin based keyboard.

There must be a different reason.

Nope, that's Moldova. Reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_Moldova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria

That makes sense, but the article is using the wrong reason , it placed Romania and Ukraine in a list of "Kremlin friends", I just wanted to append to the parent comment to clarify for people that don't know all the eastern European countries and the relations.

They didn't, they included Romania (Moldova), which must be what they use in Moldova.

It's "Romanian (Moldova)", i.e. "Language (Country)". East Moldova stopped calling it Moldavian a while ago and "mo" and "mol" have been deprecated.

My point stands, they did not include Romania, the country -- you would not have the Romanian (Moldova) keyboard installed in Romania.

Yeah, Georgia being on there was odd too, but lots of bizniz going on with the industries and infrastructure of both.

That said, I've never been a fan of the all-too-frequent approach of armchair Kremlinology as a first and last line of investigation. I'd say it's likely just as much about targetting the attack in a direction where you're unlikely to get blow-back. I would not want to find myself negotiating with a representative of an angry Ukrainian vodka plant.

Georgia is a popular tourist destination for Russians, they might fear getting nabbed on vacation if they committed crimes there.

Hmm, maybe, but the point I was making was that if you piss the wrong company off in Tbilisi, they can find you in Petersburg.

Donetsk and Luhansk are in the Ukraine, if only geographically.

> in ~the~ Ukraine[1]

They are essentially dead cities and I hardly think that they allow using Ukrainian layout.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20080725060956/http://www.ukrwee...

Funny. Did they also convince Germans to stop using the article when referring to that territory?

I also say the Sudan and the Congo.