Today, the wealthy cofounder of Russia's largest internet company, Arkady Volozh, was taken off the EU sanctions list, allowing him to rejoin the global tech community.
A representative for the European Council verified to WIRED on Tuesday that the co-founder of Yandex was one of the three individuals whose sanctions were removed this week.
Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation,” the bloc said last year to justify its decision. “As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation.” In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions “misguided.”
Three months later, Volozh—who has been residing in Israel since 2014—became one of the few prominent Russian businesspeople to denounce the war in Ukraine as “barbaric” and to speak out against the conduct of the Kremlin. In an August statement, he said, "I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine—many of them my personal friends and relatives—whose houses are being bombed every day."
Yandex, which was first established in 1997 as a search engine, earned the moniker "Russia's Google" due to its widespread presence in the daily lives of millions of Russians. Yandex Music is available for streaming.
Over the past 18 months, Yandex NV has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech.
Last month, Yandex NV announced it had reached a “binding agreement” with Russia to sell its operations in the country to a local consortium for 475 billion rubles ($5.2 billion) in a cash and shares deal. Yandex NV, once worth $30 billion at its peak, said that the price included a “mandatory discount of at least 50 percent” under Russian government rules that apply to the sale of Russian assets by companies based in countries considered to be “unfriendly” by the Kremlin, including the Netherlands.
The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech’s most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. “They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land.”
