Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh said that he is “categorically against Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine”

Co-founder and former CEO of Yandex Arkady Volozh condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. his statement The businessman’s representatives provided to The Bell and Meduza .

“I am categorically against Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, where I, like many, have friends and relatives,” the letter says. “I’m horrified that every day bombs are flying into the houses of Ukrainians. Despite the fact that I have not lived in Russia since 2014, I understand that I also have a share of responsibility for the actions of the country <…> There were many reasons why I had to remain silent. One can argue about the timeliness of my statement, but not about its essence. I am against war."

Volozh, who has been under EU sanctions since 2022, also commented on reports of the sale of Yandex’s Russian business. According to Meduza and The Bell , Volozh plans to retain only a few international areas of the company, including drones and cloud business. In July, publications wrote that the buyer had not been identified.

“In 2014, I moved to Israel and since then I have been developing international Yandex projects. But in February 2022, the world changed, and I realized that my story with Yandex was over. After the war began, I focused on supporting talented Russian engineers who decided to leave the country and start a new life. This turned out to be a difficult task that required a lot of effort, attention and caution. Now these people are outside Russia and can start doing something new in the most advanced areas of technology. They will bring enormous benefits to the countries where they remain.”

On August 7, Twitter users noticed that they tried to make changes to the English-language Wikipedia article about Volozh and remove phrases where he was called a “Russian billionaire.” In the biography on Volozh’s website , they wrote that he is “an Israeli IT entrepreneur born in Kazakhstan.”

On August 8, Meduza’s sources in the company also said that Yandex processes data from its foreign taxi services in Russian data centers - they operate in Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan, among others. The company's only data center abroad, in Finland, ceased operations in 2022. According to the new law, from September the FSB will have 24-hour access to the order databases of Russian taxi services.

Yandex denied that the law requires them to transfer data on trips abroad to the intelligence service, even if it is stored in Russia. The authorities of Finland and Norway prohibited the company from transferring personal information about trips to Russia