Every website is safe or not safe on its own merits. Their location makes little difference as far as you’re concerned despite the people here replying that Russia can redirect you (news flash: every government on the planet can; it’s how DNS works). Russia is far easier of a country to pirate from. And that’s the most important part to you: how a government treats piracy. The US is a far less safe place because they favour corporate greed above all else. Russia, not so much.

I’m sure there are some here who could debate this endlessly but you need to treat every website as its own sovereign space. Failing that, you also need to take the area it’s in into consideration should you have any legal disputes. For example, let’s say a website is hosted in a country that has a lax view of cyber law enforcement and this site is selling images you took as photographer. You send endless DMCA notices but because they don’t really have a governing body to handle this crime, your photos are never taken down. Contrast this to the US, which actually does enforce such laws and will actively penalize and even shutdown hosting providers, your DMCA notices are taken much more seriously.

None of this impacts piracy. And if you give out your CC number to any pirate site, US, RU, CA, you run the risk of it being compromised. The rest really doesn’t concern you.

Some have claimed that Russia redirects websites, etc. but again, that has nothing to do with piracy. And they certainly don’t steal every website and send you to their own versions via DNS redirects. That’s insane. Now if you want to say that disproportionately, Russia has more scam websites, I can believe that. Or that their country doesn’t really use the advanced encryption and security measures to protect your private details (CC, name, phone number etc.), I can believe that too. But to claim that Russia itself is doing a ton of shady shit to trap you seeding a torrent and then sending the KGB to assassinate your family… that’s some real tinfoil hat stuff.

Just use the standard protective measures you would use anywhere else (VPN, never give out CC or real name, etc.) and you’ll be fine.

I prefer yandex for piracy. If you search “Furiosa x265 torrent download” you get pages and pages of hits. Run the same search on DDG (Bing) or Google and there won’t be a single torrent hit because their search engines have long removed any pirate related content and monitor for it to protect their investors.