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Alexei Kudrin leaves public office to take top role at new look Yandex

Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, once a leading reformist in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, is leaving public service to go into business. He is set to take charge of Yandex, Russia’s leading digital company. The transformation of a senior official into a businessman appears to be one of those common attempts to convert political …

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Russian IT specialist hides in the forest to escape draft order

Vladimir Putin’s September 21 mobilization announcement sparked a massive new wave of emigration out of Russia; in early October, Forbes Russia reported that roughly 700,000 people had left the country in the previous two weeks (the Kremlin has denied that the real number is that high). Other potential conscripts, unable or unwilling to leave the country altogether, have gone …

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Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner renounces Russian citizenship

Billionaire Silicon Valley investor Yuri Milner said Monday he had renounced his Russian citizenship. “My family and I left Russia for good in 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And this summer, we officially completed the process of renouncing our Russian citizenship,” the Moscow-born Milner tweeted. Milner, founder of the internet investment firm DST Global and …

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Putin grants Edward Snowden Russian citizenship

President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, who exposed massive surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and was granted refuge by Moscow. A presidential decree published Monday included Edward Joseph Snowden born June 21, 1983, on a list of newly-minted Russian citizens, at a time when relations between …

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Ex-Yandex head takes EU to court over sanctions

The former head of Russia’s top tech firm Yandex Tigran Khudaverdyan has challenged sanctions against him over the Ukraine war in a European Union court. Khudaverdyan filed a lawsuit on June 7 demanding the European Council lift its “discriminatory and disproportionate” sanctions against him. The lawsuit was first reported by TV channel RTVI on Monday evening.  Khudaverdyan quit as Yandex executive …

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How the war in Ukraine led Yandex into a trap

All Russian businesses have been affected by the fallout from the war and Western sanctions, but “perhaps the most dramatic events have unfolded at Yandex,” writes TheBell, a respected Russian online publication, in its English edition. While founder Arkady Volozh and head Tigran Khudaverdyan were sanctioned by the European Union, “compromises with the authorities have …

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How this Moscow-based VC investor navigates uncertainty in times of war

Sergey Dashkov, who has had a start in business as the exclusive partner of Ahmad Tea in Russia, rose to become one of the most engaged early-stage investors in the Russian venture capital space. Describing his investment thesis as industry-agnostic, most of Dashkov’s portfolio right now consists of companies operating outside of Russia.  “We love …

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Yet another Yandex woe: company founder and CEO resigns after falling under EU sanctions

Arkady Volozh, the founder and CEO of Yandex, has resigned from his company after being included in the EU’s latest package of sanctions on June 3, in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.  The EU points out Yandex’s responsibility in “promoting state media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, …

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How Ukrainian “Inglorious Basterds” are combating Russia on the cyber front

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many cybersecurity experts and activists have joined the Ukrainian cyber front. They carry out DDoS attacks on Russian resources, defacing Russian sites, taking their popular services offline, and even more drastic operations.  One of the coordinators of such IT armies is Kharkiv cybersecurity specialist Mykyta Knysh. Having worked …

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How a Ukrainian tech entrepreneur created a startup from a Russian prison

Serge Faguet, a Ukraine-born tech entrepreneur who studied at Stanford and co-founded Russian booking service Ostrovok.ru in the early 2010s, made a public confession last week in a Medium post.  In the summer of last year, a Russian customs agent at the Moscow airport found five tabs of acid — in addition to a US-physician-prescribed …

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Russian owner of one of the world’s top digital banks says Kremlin forced sale of his stake

UK-sanctioned Russian businessman Oleg Tinkov said the Kremlin forced him to sell his stake in a major bank he had founded after he criticized the Ukraine war. Tinkoff Bank, one of Russia’s most impressive success stories in the tech field, has over 20 million customers — making it one of the world’s biggest digital banks. It is …

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Russia arrests alleged co-founder of world’s largest darknet marketplace

Russia has arrested the alleged co-founder of dark web platform Hydra a week after U.S. and German authorities said they shut down what they called the world’s largest illegal darknet marketplace.   German police said this month it took control of Hydra’s Germany-based servers and seized $25 million in bitcoin assets. The U.S. Justice named Dmitry Pavlov, 30, as the …

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