It is a bit funny to see people trying to guess the meaning of something which is a common knowledge elsewhere. Puts a perspective on all the talk about “modern, global, connected, automatically translated world”.

For a decade and a half, Yandex has had a codename for each big revision of search ranking algorithms and release of new search features. Most were city names, and Magadan was one of them. So “distance” is probably a distance to some rating introduced in that release. Whether it is a positive or negative factor (cutting obvious over-optimized sites), I have no idea.