Founder of Russia's equivalent to Google decides to leave Russia

Yandex, often referred to as "Russia's Google," has announced that it will withdraw from Russia. Its parent company, based in the Netherlands, sold its Russian operations for 475 billion roubles ($5.2bn; £4.2bn), which is considerably less than its estimated market value. This sale means that Yandex's Russian business is now fully owned by Russian entities. The company has been accused in the past of concealing information about the war in Ukraine from the Russian public. The deal has been welcomed by Moscow, with the company stating that it was the result of extensive planning and negotiation over an 18-month period. Anton Gorelkin, the deputy head of the Russian parliament's committee on information policy, expressed satisfaction with the deal, stating that it was what they had hoped for years ago when Yandex faced the threat of being taken over by Western IT giants. He added that Yandex is an asset of the entire Russian society. Established during the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, Yandex has developed its own search engine, mapping, advertising, taxi, and food delivery businesses. The $5.2bn deal is significantly lower than Yandex's market value, which was estimated to be nearly $30bn in 2021. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many foreign-owned businesses have left the country, often selling assets at unfavorable terms. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also ordered the seizure of assets belonging to Western brands such as Danone and Carlsberg. Yandex's co-founder, Arkady Volozh, is one of the few high-profile Russian businessmen to have publicly spoken out against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He left the company in 2022. Both the company and Volozh have faced sanctions imposed by the European Union, which accused Yandex of promoting Russian state media and narratives while suppressing content critical of the Kremlin and its aggression in Ukraine. Volozh is seeking to have these sanctions removed through a European Union court, stating that he was never close to President Vladimir Putin. To comply with the Russian government's content requirements, Yandex sold some of its online resources to state-controlled rival VK in late 2022. Despite branding itself as independent, experiments conducted by BBC Monitoring in 2022 revealed that Yandex's search results failed to report Russian atrocities committed in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.