Yandex co-founder condemns ‘barbaric’ war in Ukraine

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The co-founder of Russian tech giant Yandex has spoken out against the “barbaric” war in Ukraine, an unusual public criticism from one of the country’s leading businessmen.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it,” Arkady Volozh said in a statement published on Thursday. “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.”

Vladimir Putin’s war has rocked Yandex, Russia’s answer to Google, since the full-scale invasion was launched in February last year. The company has sought to negotiate a complex restructuring with the Kremlin while Volozh and other top executives grappled with the consequences of the war.

Thousands of Yandex’s staff have fled the country, while the company last year hired former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of Putin’s, to negotiate a restructuring that would spin off some of its international businesses.

“I have to take my share of responsibility for the country’s actions,” Volozh said. “There were reasons to stay silent during this long process. While there will anyway be questions about the timing of my statement today, there should be no questions about its essence. I am against the war.”

The statement makes Volozh, who has lived in Israel since 2014, one of the few prominent Russian businesspeople to have condemned the invasion of Ukraine.

Most of his fellow billionaires have only bemoaned the war in guarded terms or said nothing, fearful of potential reprisal from the Kremlin and upset about western sanctions against them.

Volozh’s silence had made him a target for criticism from the war’s opponents and supporters alike, most recently over a biography on his website that described him as a “Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur” and played down his links to Russia.

“What the hell?” Vladimir Soloviev, a leading commentator on state television, said this week. “What country did you make all your cash in?” he added. “This is a disgrace!”

Yandex declined to comment on Volozh’s statement. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Volozh said the war had made him realise “my role in the Yandex story had come to an end”, and switch his focus to trying to support the “talented Russian engineers who took a decision to leave the country”.

“It has been an extraordinarily complex process, helping these engineers to start a new life. It has required focus, care and discretion,” Volozh said.

“These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation,” he added. “They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land.”

Yandex had attempted to keep an awkward neutrality in the hope that doing so would protect its Russian employees from Kremlin reprisal while preserving hopes for Putin to approve the spin-off.

Volozh had been against the war “from the very beginning [but] kept quiet because he thought his silence would save Yandex’s international projects”, Alexei Venediktov, the former editor of liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, wrote on social media app Telegram.

“His hopes were in vain. Crocodiles don’t let anything out of their teeth.”

The talks are the culmination of a decades-long tightrope walk for Yandex, which sought to balance its ambitions to become a global tech player while appeasing a Kremlin suspicious of tech companies and foreign investors.

“It was increasingly clear that the hope to build a globally integrated Russia was becoming harder to achieve,” Volozh said.

He added: “In hindsight, I understand some things could have been done differently”, without going into detail.

The EU sanctioned Volozh last year for what it described as Yandex’s complicity in the war, prompting him to resign as chief executive and transfer voting rights from his controlling stake to the board.

Yandex then sold its news aggregator, blogging platform and homepage — which had been the main targets of criticism over the company’s role in the war — to state-controlled social media company VK.

Yandex, which is based in the Netherlands and listed on Nasdaq, said in July that it planned to present a restructuring plan for shareholder approval by the end of this year.

Negotiations led by Kudrin and Putin’s domestic policy chief Sergei Kirienko — whose son is chief executive of VK — have stalled in recent months, however, amid disagreements over finding potential buyers amenable both to western authorities and the Kremlin.

Some senior figures at Yandex are worried the Kremlin could choose to nationalise the company rather than allow the expected $7bn sale, according to people familiar with the matter.

The head of state-run VTB bank, which holds a minority stake in Yandex, said in June that the prospective deal overvalued the company and said Russia was better off seizing it “because they took everything away from us” under western sanctions on Russian assets.