The European Union will remove Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh from the sanctions list on March 15, Reuters reports, citing three sources familiar with the situation.
In August 2023, Volozh released a statement in which he said that he was “categorically opposed to Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine.”
In the spring of 2022, Yandex sold its Yandex services to VK .News» and «Yandex.Zen», which since the beginning of the war, at the request of the Russian authorities, have censored independent publications. At the same time, negotiations began on dividing the company into two parts — Russian and international, which would include drones and cloud services. The deal was finally announced almost two years later, in February 2024.
No sanctions were imposed against Yandex itself, while the European Union added Arkady Volozh to the sanctions list in June 2022. This was explained by the fact that he, being a leading Russian businessman in the IT field, provides income to the Russian government. In addition, the EU recalled that Yandex censors content related to the war in Ukraine.
Arkady Volozh then left the post of CEO of the parent company of Yandex, the Dutch Yandex N.V., and resigned from its board of directors.