therealduckofdeath :
No matter if the document was containing suspect code, Kaspersky is in no right to just yank files for testing in Russia without asking permission. A permission they'd never been granted in this case. That is the reason the US doesn't trust them. They have admittedly taken US government documents to servers based in Russia.
By installing and using Kaspersky, the operator of the computer is bound by the licensing terms, which can include automatic sample submission. Are there reputable antivirus offerings that don't have some sort of sample submission? The permission is also often tacitly expressed by the use of default settings. In this case, we don't even know if the user was ever presented the opportunity to enable or disable such a feature, so we can only assume whether Kaspersky had been explicitly granted permission. Furthermore, if users are ignorant of what the software they are installing is going to do, is it really the fault of the software developer? In some cases I would say, sure, when the behavior can't be known by the user, but there are far more cases of plain laziness or ignorance on the part of the user.
The user in this case, Reality Winner, took documents from her work facility, which she wasn't supposed to do. This doesn't exactly strike me as the behavior of the most stellar computer user or employee. It isn't as though Kaspersky breached any sort of high security measures to acquire the documents. The initial breach seems to have been via sneaker net.
Finally, cloud based software solutions have to be expected to be hosted and operate, in the cloud, which means it can be anywhere in the world. Since Kaspersky Lab is headquartered in Moscow, it doesn't strike me as a far fetched idea that perhaps their cloud based servers are somewhere in say, Russia.
If you want cloud based antivirus software, but don't want it based in Russia, don't use Kaspersky. If however you choose to use Kaspersky, you don't exactly have a lot of room to complain when a document that triggers automatic sample submission ends up in Russia. I think ultimately it boils down to the poor decisions made by the NSA agent.