Definitely not just US. I'm from Lithuania and these were the pencils we all used [0]. That was around 1992 and later, so could have been a relic from Soviets.
Only in later years green ones appeared and yellow with black stripes.
I spent a year in the baltics, got homeschooled while there. The pencils were a tealish green and tasted much worse than your garden variety Dixon, but wrote much better.
It was probably an H grade rather than HB. Pencils in the US stores often come out smudgy to me ever since then...
Looking it up, apparently this has something to do with pencils being manufactured in early (1920s) USSR by an American entrepreneur:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_Hammer#Career
https://i.imgur.com/vpObXqU.jpg
Eventually the Soviet government bought the entire operation from him, and thenceforth it became this:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE...
And they probably just continued to use yellow, because why not?