Can't you threaten them with a frivolous lawsuit?

My best *educated* guess is yes, it does have some affect on SEO.

Imho, you're better off hosting in the US if you're looking to rank in the US.

Site speed affects SEO.
Site speed from USA to Russia isn't great.

[DELETED]

Moving a site to a different host has in the past. I had my brother move his websites from some obscure host to Hostgator and all the listings jumped up a few slots in Google in a few days.

As to whether it will now, or not I can't say. You are planning on doing the opposite and Google just keeps changing.

Lol, Snowden will steal everything you have & show it to the world. He might even be the kingpin behind SAPE (j/k).

Go for it!

if you installed WMT you can see targeted country option.

You didn't know the NSA snoops all over the world?

Funny thing, Russian sites are the biggest, baddest spammers, scammers,
and malware sites on the planet. I assume google has taken notice.
Get a server in Russia at your own peril.

Paul

They say it does.

What impact does server location have on rankings? - YouTube
My only personal experience of this, if it helps: I had a .co.uk domain for a "UK-only niche" (well, nearly - I wanted it to rank on google.co.uk and didn't care much about google.com, anyway) originally hosted in the US - knowing no better - and when I switched the hosting to a UK host, that suddenly made a big difference to my google.co.uk rankings but was bad for my google.com rankings. I've seen other people (here) say exactly the same, but I've also seen some people saying they did that and thought it made no significant difference to their rankings at all. Not helpful, very subjective and partly second-hand, but there it is.