Just a few months ago, Yandex stood out as a rare Russian business success story, having mushroomed from a small startup into a tech colossus that not only dominated search and ride-hailing across Russia, but boasted a growing global reach.
Thousands of employees - nearly a sixth of the total - fled the country. Its founder, Arkady Volozh, and his top deputy stepped aside after the European Union sanctioned both, accusing them of abetting Kremlin disinformation. Executives at Yandex, and its users, had come to accept the Kremlin's curation of news sources, but considered it a limited slice of a sprawling, groundbreaking tech empire. With the invasion and the Kremlin's crackdown on any public discussion of the war, however, Yandex quickly became the butt of jokes.
"They need to find a way between these two, and it is kind of impossible," said Ilia Krasilshchik, who resigned from running Yandex Lavka, its speedy grocery delivery service, after facing criminal charges for posting pictures of the Bucha massacre by Russian troops."In any other situation, it would be a perfect company, like Google, like any tech company. But Yandex has a problem since it is a Russian company.
"The pressure has been ramping up on us since 2014, and we have done everything we can to preserve a neutral role," John W. Boynton, an American entrepreneur and the chairman of its board of directors, said in a June interview."We do not get involved in politics, we have never wanted to." There she found a bland story from a state-run agency about"deterrent" forces. Alarmed, she texted several Yandex executives to suggest that it present news that would rally opposition to the war; that elicited a firm"No," she said.
The company responded to the accusations that it spread disinformation by saying that Russian law tied its hands, and that it wanted to preserve the livelihoods of its employees and the interests of its investors.
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