By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-03-26

TASHKENT -- Russia's most popular search engine has become an enabler and servant of Kremlin disinformation.

Yandex, which began as a search engine and email provider in the 1990s, has turned into a large ecosystem that includes a taxi service, delivery service, online video platform, a neural network, the Alice virtual assistant and other services for a broad range of situations and users.

And they are all in one way or another helping the Kremlin regime promote its agenda.

Yandex.News censors search results for users from Russia and even visitors from other countries, the Digital Forensic Research Lab found in early 2022, shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Independent media outlets banned by Roskomnadzor, the Russian media regulator, receive lower rankings than in a Google search, for example.

This process started when Alexei Navalny, the main Russian opposition figure, was still alive. A Yandex search for the term "Navalny" began primarily displaying negative content.

Navalny tried in vain to get explanations from Yandex.

He died in prison in 2024.

The YandexGPT language model, which powers the Alice virtual assistant, also limits search results related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and refuses to discuss not only the war and the status of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions but even the history of Ukraine in general.

Meanwhile, Russia's military has taken advantage of Yandex's advertising network. One of the search engine's most successful endeavors, the network uses advanced algorithms to help pick out audiences that are likely to click on an ad banner.

As of the end of last year, display ads on the Russian internet seeking recruits to join the Russian invasion of Ukraine had more than quintupled compared to 2023, according to a special investigation by the outlet Verstka.

The campaign to recruit men to sign a Russian army contract reached even the post-Soviet republics: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan and other countries where residents use Yandex.

More than 20% of the online recruiting ads posted by the government of Moscow province on Yandex appeared in ex-Soviet countries outside Russia.

Meanwhile, the number of military recruiting display ads posted by Russia's Digital Development Ministry on Yandex jumped from 171 million in 2023 to 1 billion in 2024.

Propaganda for war

Since the war in Ukraine started, Yandex has been ramping up activity in Central Asia.

In 2023, Yandex's search engine had a much smaller market share in Uzbekistan than did Google, the most popular search engine -- 14.6% for Yandex compared to 83.5% for Google, according to the data analytics company We Are Social.

However, that figure still represented a 25% increase from Yandex's market share in 2022.

Residents of neighboring Kazakhstan also prefer Google for their online searches -- Google's market share there is almost 76% -- but Yandex has a 23% market share.

The targeting of Central Asia may be deliberate, Verstka reported.

For example, a military recruiting ad from the prolific government of Moscow province appeared on computers in Bishkek and Tashkent more often than in any Russian province except for the Moscow area.

The Kremlin forced Yandex to run the military ads for free, the independent Moscow Times reported in February.

Ads aiming to recruit men for the Russian invasion of Ukraine need to be construed as propaganda for war, said Alisher Ilkhamov, director of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence center.

Yet international law prohibits such propaganda -- specifically, Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Moreover, this advertising should be viewed as Yandex's complicity in Russian war crimes on Ukrainian soil, he said.

"In that regard it's surprising that so far no Western countries have imposed sanctions on Yandex ... and that its assets in the West haven't been frozen," Ilkhamov told Kontur.

At the same time, Yandex has no legal footing to claim extenuating circumstances, even if the Kremlin forced it to run the ads.

"If the authorities force you to commit a crime, you need to resign from that company, and the shareholders need to hurry up and get rid of their shares," Ilkhamov said.

The same principle applies to Central Asian governments that turn a blind eye to the war propaganda targeting their citizens, he said.

"This violates the neutrality they've declared. All the states in the region need to block Yandex. If they don't do that, they'll be knowing accomplices in the war Russia unleashed against Ukraine," Ilkhamov said.

'An instrument for warfare'

In May, Tashkent hosted the Yandex Ads Conference Uzbekistan, which addressed changes in internet users' habits and demands, and the most up-to-date and effective digital advertising methods.

Such targeted advertising can be construed as war propaganda, said Dmitry Dubrovsky, a social scientist at Charles University in Prague.

"The laws of the Central Asian countries bar their citizens from being mercenaries in other states' armies. This is a criminal code article -- it's a crime that potentially carries a serious sentence," Dubrovsky told Kontur.

In his view, at the very least, such appeals on Yandex should be blocked. At most, the companies disseminating them should be held liable.

The Central Asian countries need to coordinate their actions when it comes to regulating propaganda from the outside, Adil Turdukulov, a journalist and analyst from Kyrgyzstan, said.

This need for coordination applies to politicians at the national level as well as to initiatives by local civil society.

"Yandex is now an instrument for warfare. It's obvious that advertising like this made in this context was created and serves to recruit mercenaries to wage an aggressive war in Ukraine," Turdukulov told Kontur.

However, he predicts that Yandex will not suffer any legal losses, but the company's reputational damage is evident.