NACP adds Yandex services to the list of candidates for sanctions

05.10.2023

The National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) has added a number of Yandex subsidiaries to the list of candidates for sanctions. The company operates in Russia and pays significant taxes to the aggressor's state budget. Yandex services have long been working for Russian propaganda and closely cooperate with the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), providing them with access to massive amounts of private user data. It is important to note that this is not just one Yandex company but a number of services, both domestic and international. Back in June 2022, Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh was placed on the EU sanctions list because of his financial support for the Russian government. In August 2023, for the first time since the start of the full-scale invasion, he made a public statement condemning the war against Ukraine and removed everything related to his work in Russia from his online biography. Immediately after the statement, he filed a request with the European Union to lift sanctions against him and to restore the operation of non-Russian Yandex services (e.g., Yango). Volozh stressed that in recent years, Yandex has been under pressure from the Russian authorities. However, it is known that the company has long and voluntarily cooperated with the Kremlin. In 2009, for example, Yandex sold one so-called golden share (an asset that gives broad powers to control stakes in a company) to the Russian state-owned Sberbank for 1 euro. The co-founder of Yandex has also had numerous personal meetings with Putin since the annexation of Crimea. It is known that they met at events on artificial intelligence development in 2017 and on IT investment in 2020. Also in 2017, Yandex disconnected e-wallets for Russian oppositionists at the behest of the authorities. "Yandex has not become 'dependent on the state', but was originally created as one of the elements serving the interests of the Russian authorities. It remains a powerful propaganda tool, on a par with Russian TV channels. Yandex data sets are stored in three large data centers located in Russia. The FSB has round-the-clock access to them, and it is quite official. I think we all understand that the security of personal data is out of the question here", — said the Head of the NACP Oleksandr Novikov. Read more about the dangers of Yandex services:

Yandex search works according to custom algorithms that provide information the Kremlin needs on the first pages, and does not include criticism of the authorities or the truth about the war against Ukraine.
Yandex-Money is 75% owned by Sberbank of Russia and has all the data on online money movements of users.
Yandex-food and Yandex-taxi have data on clients' home and work addresses, their work schedules, movements during the day, addresses of schools and kindergartens where clients pick up their children.
One of the most dangerous services is Yandex Maps and Yandex Navigator, which some Ukrainian drivers continue to use with the help of VPNs after the invasion. Apart from that, Russians can obtain data on the movement of military equipment and sensitive facilities on the territory of Ukraine via the Yandex services listed above.

These services are still available on the App Store and Google Play platforms worldwide. Yandex can transmit information, for example, about people coming to work in government agencies or embassies of other countries via access to name tracking, payment cards, and addresses. In particular, Yango, a taxi, delivery, and food service that operated in 16 countries outside Russia, was restricted and banned by the authorities of several countries for security reasons, namely Latvia, Estonia, the UK, France, and Kazakhstan. On behalf of the aggressor state regime, Vladislav Surkov (sanctioned by the US, EU, UK, Ukraine, Canada, Switzerland and Australia) and later Vyacheslav Volodin (sanctioned by the US, EU, UK, Ukraine, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Japan and New Zealand) were responsible for overseeing Yandex. The NACP has already submitted proposals for sanctions against Yandex companies to the Security Service of Ukraine and other responsible authorities. The NACP obtained this information from the "Zaporizhzhia Investigation Center" NGO. We remind you that the NACP's "War and Sanctions" Portal has a new section "Candidates for Sanctions", which will help you easily find potential candidates for sanctions both in Ukraine and in the countries of the sanctions coalition. The section also offers a list of justifications and evidence base for the quick and effective application of sanctions. The role of the NACP in sanctions policy is envisaged in the Roadmap for Individual Sanctions developed by the Stanford International Working Group on Russian Sanctions. Reference: On 16 May 2017, the National Security and Defence Council blocked Yandex LLC's operations in Ukraine. On 15 April 2023, according to the Decree of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, sanctions were imposed against Russian companies, including Yandex LLC, for a period of 10 years. The following legal entities remain unaffected by the sanctions: Yandex Bank, Yandex Delivery, Yandex Traffic, Yandex Lavka, Yandex Taxi, Yandex DC, Yandex Testing, Yandex Drive, etc.