Placebo pulls out of Yandex Park Live festival in Kazakhstan amid backlash over Russia ties

British alternative rock band Placebo have announced their decision to pull out of a music festival in Kazakhstan less than a week before their scheduled appearance.

The band had already faced backlash from Ukrainian fans for agreeing to perform at Yandex Park Live due to the festival’s ties to Russian tech giant Yandex, whose services have on many occasions spread Russian military propaganda and whose contributions to Russian government coffers have helped fund the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In an Instagram post on Monday signed by the band’s lead singer Brian Molko and bassist Stefan Olsdal, the band said they would be unable to perform at Yandex Park Live in Almaty on 8 September due to “compelling circumstantial reasons” that they stressed were “not related to the professionalism of the organisers” but which they said they had been “unable to resolve”.

Placebo added that their decision to cancel the Almaty date had made it “logistically impossible” for the band to perform in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on 12 September, which they also cancelled.

The Park Live festival was founded in Moscow in 2013, hosting numerous international acts in the Russian capital every year until 2020, when the organisers were forced to cancel the planned festival dates due to the Covid pandemic. The festival was set to return in summer 2022, but numerous international acts, including Placebo, My Chemical Romance, and The Killers, all cancelled their appearances following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of the same year.

The festival has since rebranded itself as Yandex Park Live, and is due to be held over three days in early September in Kazakhstan’s biggest city Almaty. However, its rebranding as Yandex Park Live has caused many to question the festival’s ties to Yandex.

The Editors, an English rock band that had also been set to perform at the festival, pulled out in July over its ties to Yandex. “Having now been informed who the sponsor of the event is, we have decided to withdraw our involvement. We dearly hope to come to Kazakhstan in the future, under different circumstances,” the band wrote in a statement.

While Maria Axenova, a representative of Park Live Kazakhstan, admitted to IQ magazine in July that the production company that organised the festival had relocated to Kazakhstan from Russia, she stressed that Yandex Kazakhstan was a “separate entity” and was unconnected to the Russian tech giant.

Western sanctions on Russia led to Yandex, which is often dubbed “Russia’s Google”, being split into two companies, one overseeing operations in Russia and another one based in Amsterdam focusing on the international market.

The Russian tech giant has faced considerable backlash for censoring reports of Russian war crimes in Ukraine on its news aggregator, as most of its politically relevant services have remained under the Kremlin’s control following the split.