A look at the decline of Yandex, which has pushed Russian propaganda thanks to new laws and sank in value from $31B+ in November 2021 to <$7B after the invasion
including this one that quotes John Boynton — include no mention of his role with the PHF. Hard to imagine this detail would be ignored if he held the same role in a men's league. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://www.nytimes.com/... Bianna Golodryga / @biannagolodryga : Another example of Putin the “master strategist”. He managed to blow up one of Russia's few successful INNOVATIVE companies. “The decline of Yandex, Russia's version of Google, is emblematic of the troubles spawned by the invasion.” https://www.nytimes.com/... https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Yandex's collapse is a slow-motion story the coverage has tracked for years. The legal groundwork came early: a 2017 law making news aggregators responsible for what they link already pushed Russia's main search engine toward state-licensed sources. When the invasion hit, the financial damage was immediate — by March 2022 Yandex had lost over 75% of its value in six months despite no direct sanctions, as deals with Uber, Grubhub, and DuckDuckGo appeared likely to end.
What changed by this July report is that the decline is now framed as emblematic rather than company-specific: new laws compelled Yandex to carry state propaganda, and earlier coverage showed it trying to sell its news unit amid Putin's broader crackdown that also saw Group-IB's founder arrested for treason. The NYT piece lands between those events and the later chapters — war-driven isolation of Russia's tech sector and co-founder Arkady Volozh publicly breaking with the war while Yandex plans a Russian spin-off from its Dutch parent.
First-order effects
- Yandex's market value has fallen from over $31B in November 2021 to under $7B, and its Western partnerships — Uber, Grubhub, DuckDuckGo — are unwinding even without direct sanctions on the company.
- New Russian laws have forced Yandex's search and news products to disseminate state propaganda, converting its core consumer products into instruments of state messaging.
Second-order effects
- Yandex is restructuring to survive the split: it sought to sell its news unit during the crackdown and now plans a Russian spin-off from its Dutch parent, separating the sanctioned-market business from the internationally listed one.
- Other successful Russian tech firms face the same forced choice the coverage documents — comply with propaganda laws at home or lose international partners and market access, accelerating sector-wide isolation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Russian consumer internet consolidates around state-aligned platforms: the legal mechanism that captured Yandex's news aggregation becomes the template for controlling any domestically dominant information service.
- Founder-level exits and public breaks — Volozh calling the invasion barbaric while the corporate entity complies — point to a structural split between Russian tech's capital and its operations, with the domestic business increasingly severed from global markets.
The trend: Russia's invasion is converting its most globally integrated tech companies into isolated, state-aligned utilities, with legal coercion doing the work sanctions alone could not.