Mail.ru and Yandex are leaving the Ukrainian market

In an interview with the Kommersant newspaper, the CEO of Mail.Ru Group, Boris Dobrodeev, said that the Mail.ru Group holding company offers Ukrainian employees work in Russian offices. Ukrainian representation of the holding will be closed.

According to Dobrodeyev, the Ukrainian business did not make a significant contribution to the company's revenues, so the decision made would not affect the financial performance of the company for the worse. On the contrary, the measures introduced will hit primarily Ukrainian users, who will not be able to use Mail.ru services, he said.

The presence of representation on the market loses meaning, given the sanctions that Ukraine imposed against us. Of course, we will do everything to somehow compensate for this loss and help Ukrainian users to remain in contact with their friends.

In VKontakte, Ukrainian users were provided with instructions for circumventing locks. Officially, these guides helped "not to lose their contacts and important information."

According to the head of the Information Security Service of the Office of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine, Valentina Petrova, Ukrainian citizens will not be prosecuted for circumventing blocking Russian sites. “Now many recipes have appeared, how to get around [access prohibition], please use it,” he noted. Petrov added that the Russian sites were blocked in order to protect the data of Ukrainian users.
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On May 30, the leadership of the Russian social network VKontakte decided to close the company's office in Kiev. The exact number of laid-off workers is not yet known. Some of the Kiev office specialists will be able to move to work in Moscow - the employers kindly provided them with this opportunity.

The company "Yandex" got into a more difficult situation. On May 29, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) came with a search to the Ukrainian offices of Yandex. "As part of the criminal proceedings for high treason, searches are conducted in companies in Kiev and Odessa," - said the speaker of the SBU Elena Gitlyanskaya.

Law enforcement officials believe that the company's management illegally collected, saved and transferred to Russia personal data of Ukrainian citizens: occupation, lifestyle, home, residence, work, leisure, sources and amounts of income, phone numbers, email addresses and accounts in social networks. According to the SBU, the information was transmitted to the special services of the Russian Federation.

Yandex employees did not pass on personal information about Ukrainian users to Russian special services, the company said , commenting on the searches conducted by the special services of Ukraine on Monday.

On June 1, the media learned that Yandex.Ukraine would close its offices in Odessa and Kiev, because of the sanctions, it is virtually impossible to conduct activities in the country. All company accounts are blocked, and it became impossible for employees to pay wages. Therefore, employees of the Ukrainian division were offered jobs in Yandex offices outside Ukraine.

Also yesterday, representatives of Yandex announced the closure of the Odessa conference Odessa. Including canceled event, which was to be held on July 15. The reasons are sanctions by the state.

On May 16, the Ukrainian authorities imposed sanctions against Russian Internet companies Yandex and Mail.ru Group (including against its social networks Odnoklassniki and VKontakte). In addition to the resources of the listed companies, the sites of such companies as Kaspersky Lab and DrWeb, as well as the 1C representative office in Ukraine, came under sanctions. Probably, the products of these companies, anti-virus software and a number of other services will also fall under the sanctions.