200ms is very slow. I wouldn't put my business on anything slower than 100ms, I manage servers at three different US data centers and ping is within 50..70ms range for all of them, including cheap slicehost.
according to the article, building a data center in russia seems to make sense when optimizing for 1) flops per dollar of watt-hour 2) high absolute value of flops. for example, google may be interested in shifting their compute/flops intensive tasks (e.g. building search index) to the servers in russia and then replicating the index globally.