The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool
In February 2024, after political and legal pressure, the Russian search and technology company Yandex sold its business in Russia to an investment fund with close ties to the Kremlin. For the time being, this seems to be the final step in Yandex’s gradual political appropriation by Russia’s ruling elites.
When the Russian military withdrew from the Ukrainian city of Bucha on 31 March 2022, the world learned about the atrocities committed by Russia’s troops against Ukrainian civilians during the occupation. In the following days, Western media outlets published images of dead bodies on the streets of Bucha and mass graves. Bucha became a symbol of war crimes committed by Russia’s troops during its war against Ukraine.
However, in early April 2022, searching for images of ‘Bucha’ on Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, produced no results related to the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians – in stark contrast to the results on Google. Instead, Yandex exclusively retrieved images portraying Bucha as a picturesque tourist destination (figure 1). This lack of political neutrality in Yandex’s coverage of the invasion triggered public outrage. Many of Yandex’s employees resigned in protest, accusing the company of serving as a tool of Kremlin propaganda and actively concealing information about the war.
Figure 1: Results of image searches for ‘Bucha’ on Yandex and Google
The Kremlin’s gradual appropriation of Yandex’s algorithms
Founded in 1997 as an independent company by two school friends, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, Yandex – short for ‘Yet Another iNDEX’ – quickly became the leading search engine in Russia, surpassing even Google. As of May 2024, Yandex handled approximately 70 per cent of all search queries in Russia.
But Yandex is much more than just a search engine: it is virtually the gateway to the Russian internet, offering news, weather, a marketplace, videos, email, blogs, food delivery, and more. Although Yandex has been officially registered in the Netherlands since 2007 – a strategy often used by Russian companies to reduce their vulnerability to Russia’s regulatory changes – its founders have consistently insisted that Yandex is, fundamentally, a Russian entity.
Despite Yandex’s initial resistance, the political appropriation of the company’s algorithms by Russia’s ruling elites has progressed over the years. Reportedly, Yandex began receiving regular visits from Kremlin representatives shortly after Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia. Already at that time, Russian authorities demanded that Yandex display only articles from Kremlin-approved sources in its search and news results. In 2009, then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev declared Yandex an asset of national importance. Subsequently, Yandex’s so-called golden share, which gives its owner significant control over the company’s strategic decisions, was sold to the state-owned bank Sberbank for €1.
From then on, Yandex faced mounting legal and regulatory measures that dictated which websites to exclude from its services and what information to share with the authorities. The measures culminated in a 2016 law that forced Yandex to remove from its news services all news websites not registered with Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state communications watchdog, colloquially known as ‘the ministry of censorship’.
In 2019, under renewed pressure from a Russian law aimed at limiting foreign ownership of Russian internet companies, the golden share was transferred to a newly formed and vaguely defined Public Interest Foundation. Through the foundation, the Russian government gained the authority to intervene in Yandex’s transactions and temporarily replace Yandex’s management if the government deemed it in the national interest.
As for indirect influence, it is generally believed that Yandex, preoccupied with its rivalry with Google, tended to avoid conflicts with the Russian authorities to protect its economic interests. By contrast, Google allegedly had more leeway to resist compliance, given its global financial independence from the Russian market. In return, the Russian authorities helped Yandex in its competition with Google. For example, after a complaint from Yandex, the authorities initiated an anti-trust lawsuit against Google for favouring its own services on the Android operating system, forcing Google in Russia to offer Android users the choice of a default search engine, including Yandex.
The Kremlin has made several successful endeavours to appropriate Yandex’s algorithms: In February 2017, shortly after the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny launched his presidential campaign, Yandex disabled Navalny’s electronic wallet, which was fundraising through the site. In 2019, Yandex confirmed that it had shared encryption keys for user data with Russia’s intelligence service. In 2020, reports indicated that Yandex was prioritising predominantly negative information in search results for the query ‘Navalny’. And in 2021, Yandex complied with authorities’ demands to remove from its search results the website of the ‘Smart Voting’ campaign – Navalny’s initiative aimed at uniting voters to support candidates likely to defeat those of President Vladimir Putin’s party.
Yandex after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU imposed sanctions on Yandex’s co-founder and chief executive, Volozh, for helping promote pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukraine propaganda. Facing pressure from new Russian laws that penalised the dissemination of ‘false information’ about the Russian army, with penalties of up to 15 years in prison, Yandex sold one of its core services after search, the news service Yandex.News, along with an infotainment service, Yandex.Dzen, to the state-controlled company VK.
These so-called toxic assets attracted significant scrutiny from the Russian authorities, and by selling them, Yandex hoped to safeguard its other businesses, including search. Along with these assets, Yandex also sold its main domain, yandex.ru. As of May 2024, users who typed ‘yandex.ru’ into their browsers were automatically redirected to VK’s dzen.ru, a platform that strongly resembles the original Yandex homepage. Yandex itself moved to a new domain, ya.ru.
Volozh resigned as Yandex’s chief executive in June 2022 and left Russia; in August 2023, he publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After lengthy negotiations and in the face of mounting political and legal pressure, in February 2024 Yandex announced the sale of its business in Russia to an investment fund consisting of investors with close ties to the Kremlin.
Most of Yandex’s politically relevant services, such as search, e-mail, and voice assistant, will remain in Russia under the Kremlin’s control. They will be merged into a new company of the same name, registered in Russia. Volozh and the Dutch part of Yandex will retain some of its assets outside Russia, consisting mostly of startups that focus on autonomous driving, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, but they will seek to rebrand their company by August 2024. The deal was sealed for $5.2 billion, about one-sixth of what Yandex’s shares were worth before the invasion.
The fate of Yandex illustrates how Russia’s ruling elites have been able to politically appropriate the company’s algorithms, particularly through legislative and regulatory measures, to turn Yandex into a Kremlin propaganda tool. In this way, Yandex follows other digital service platforms in Russia that emerged in the relatively liberal early years of the internet in Russia, such as the social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, the news outlets gazeta.ru and lenta.ru, and search engine and news aggregator Rambler. After largely failing to create its own digital service platforms, the Kremlin instead capitalized on the success of existing, market-proven tools, appropriating them as its own mouthpieces.
Daria Kravets-Meinke is a researcher and a PhD candidate at the University of Passau.
Acknowledgment
This contribution has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 819025). It is part of the ERC consolidator project ‘The Consequences of the Internet for Russia’s Informational Influence abroad’.