@Big-Succ-87 thanks, that was helpful. I thought the issue may be related to the connection between EU and US being routed through a RU server but if you had the same issue with location set to Optimal then it can't be. Turns out that it has been reported on Google Search Help as early as last January. The root cause is that Google is more and more focused on showing you local results and they switched to IP to determine location, but for some reason this can lead to the wrong country being detected. When this happens, you can still go into each app settings and set your region to the country matching your IP address, which kinda worked the first time I tried it (I got unknown location) but now it did (I get a SoCal location, not exactly Ashburn, VA but at least in the same country). Same thing in YouTube, so with all Google services it's no longer enough to set your VPN in Opera, you need to go an extra step and set the region in the settings of every app you use to match the IP address of your region. Hopefully this solution will hold.