Russia is going to lose Yandex, which is often called “Russia’s Google.” Yandex doesn’t want to do any more business with Russia because of how aggressively the country is fighting the war in Ukraine. This could be a big setback for President Vladimir V. Putin’s plans to make substitutes for high-tech goods and services from the West that have been hard to get because of sanctions.
The Dutch holding company of Russia’s Google will not build any more infrastructure in the Russian market. Instead, it will move its most promising new technologies to markets outside of Russia and sell its established businesses in the country, such as a popular web browser and apps for ordering food and taxis. Two people who are familiar with the matter but cannot speak publicly about it because the talks are private.
The company’s plan is meant to protect it from its home market and shows how Western sanctions have hurt Russia’s once-thriving tech industry.
Before the war in Ukraine, Russia’s Google was making it hard for big ideas like self-driving cars, machine learning, and cloud services to take off in Russia. One of them added that these businesses, which need access to Western markets, experts, and technology, would fail if they stayed tied to Russia. The second person who knows about the situation said that Yandex’s Russian subsidiary would keep selling the same products in the country after the new owners took over.
The Russian government is trying to stop Yandex’s plan and is trying to work out a deal to stop Yandex’s plan from going forward. One of the people said that the company must get permission from the Kremlin to move technology licenses that were registered in Russia outside of the country. It would also have to find buyers for its businesses, most likely in Russia, and Yandex’s shareholders would have to agree to the plan as a whole.
Aleksei Kudrin, who is Russia’s top government auditor and has known Vladimir Putin for a long time, agrees with Yandex’s plan. Mr. Kudrin is one of the few well-known economic liberals left in the Russian government. He is helping the company informally, but in the future, he is expected to take on a managerial role.
One person who knows about the situation said that Mr. Kudrin is likely to meet with Mr. Putin this week to talk about the future of Yandex and other things. Dmitri S. Peskov, who works for the Kremlin, said Thursday that he didn’t know anything about such a meeting.
Yandex didn’t want to say anything. Mr. Kudrin works for the Audit Chamber of Russia, which did not respond to a request for comment. The Russian economic news outlet The Bell was the first to report on the company’s plan to change.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine destroyed a company that used to do well, the rest of the West is doing everything it can to cut Russia off economically and technologically.
In the past year, the price of Yandex shares that are traded in Moscow has dropped by 62%. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the value of the company’s shares that were traded on the New York Stock Exchange fell by more than $20 billion before the Nasdaq stock exchange stopped trading them.
Since the invasion began, more than 18,000 people who worked for Yandex have left Russia. Tigran Khudaverdyan, who was the company’s deputy CEO at the time, went against what the Kremlin said when he called the war a “monstrous war” in a Facebook post in March.
Yandex sold its online news aggregator in August because it had become full of state propaganda because of stricter Russian media laws that make it illegal to criticize the war. This was done to get away from the political fallout of the war.
In March, the European Union put sanctions on Mr. Khudaverdyan because Yandex helped spread the Kremlin’s war story. A few months later, the bloc put sanctions on Arkady Volozh, the founder of the company who lives in Israel. Both left the company so that it could keep doing business in Europe.
