Yandex is one of Russia’s leading technology companies. Just like Google, for more than twenty years it has served as the gateway to the internet, as well as a source of knowledge about the world and current events, for many users in Russia and abroad, especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The problem is that the Russian state has long manipulated the information Yandex users receive in their searches, shaping a distorted picture of reality. Those who buy and install Yandex products outside Russia may not realise they may be subjected to ideological conditioning through Russian propaganda.
Yandex is not just the Russian Google, it’s also an extensive ecosystem including cloud storage, maps, taxi rides, car sharing, music streaming, food ordering, delivery services and a smart speaker with an integrated AI assistant – ‘Alice,’ an analogue of Amazon’s Alexa, built on Yandex’s own large language model. The company has aimed to be the market leader in innovative technology since its founding in the late 1990s, and it is no surprise that it eventually attracted the attention of the Kremlin. In 2008, after the outbreak of the war in Georgia, government officials visited Yandex’s offices to demand that its search results and front-page news headlines reflected the Kremlin’s preferred way of how the war should be covered.
For Yandex, this was the beginning of a long journey towards censorship and state control. Through negotiations and compromises, it managed to preserve a measure of independence, giving up a little ground to the government each year. The final tipping point arrived after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: days after it began, the director of Yandex News resigned in protest, accusing the company of serving as “a key element in concealing information” about the war through its manipulation of search algorithms.
Indeed, two months after the start of the invasion, Yandex’s search results had become so sanitised that a search for Bucha, where retreating Russian troops left behind a trail of dead bodies and burned-out vehicles, returned nothing but postcard views of the once-idyllic Kyiv suburb. Several months later, Yandex’s founder Arkady Volozh – who had been hit with EU sanctions for helping to promote pro-Kremlin propaganda – stepped away from the Russian branch of the company, selling its services and the Yandex brand to the social media giant VK, which has been controlled by a close Putin ally, Yuri Kovalchuk, since 2021.
These days, state-controlled Yandex and its chatbots are forced to comply with an ever-widening set of rules serving Russian censorship. Upholding “national values” currently means censoring not only anything related to the war in Ukraine, but also anything to do with what the Russian authorities have labeled the “LGBT extremist organisation,” or with the works of individuals designated as “foreign agents,” including many well-known writers, journalists, musicians and scientists. In some of the most recent additions to the censorship toolkit, the state has also restricted the use of foreign words, and expanded the definition of “drug propaganda,” leading to the appearance of warning labels on any books that even mention mind-altering substances, including alcohol, sometimes with comical effects – such as warning labels attached to Vladimir Putin’s biography or famous classics. It has also led to less comical consequences, such as the disappearance of many musical tracks from Russian online libraries.
Forcing AI into ideological alignment
Independent research has repeatedly confirmed that queries on Yandex are more likely to return pro-Kremlin disinformation. A 2022 study found that between Google, Bing and Yandex, Yandex was the most likely to surface false claims about “US biolabs in Ukraine.”
It also turned out that Alice, Yandex’s AI assistant, provided false information in response to questions about Ukraine, particularly when the questions were asked in Russian. In a 2026 study led by Ihor Samokhodskyi, Policy Genome founder, six leading AI models were tested on seven well-documented war narratives in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, with the 126 responses scored by two independent evaluators. In Russian, Alice endorsed Kremlin narratives in six of seven answers (86%), claiming among other things that the Bucha massacre was staged and that Ukraine is run by Nazis. By contrast, when asked the same question in English, the chatbot mostly refused to answer. The researchers also captured Alice’s refusal mechanism on video.
Asked about Bucha, the assistant first generated a factually accurate answer: “No, there is no convincing evidence that Ukraine organized mass killings in Bucha”. This was instantly overwritten with a refusal: “There are topics where I might be wrong. It’s better to keep quiet”. The model produced the truth, but it was not shown to the user. This appears to be Alice’s standard reply to politically sensitive questions related to Russia. As one of the researchers later noted, when the model clearly knows the answer but the system prevents it from being displayed, it shows that the responses are being censored for political reasons.
But it seems that even Alice’s refusal to answer is not enough when it comes to matters important to the Kremlin. In 2024, Dmitry Medvedev criticised Yandex’s AI assistant for its evasive answers, describing it as a “terrible coward.” “Are they scared of losing clients who hate Russia?” the deputy chairman of the Security Council asked rhetorically. Since then, Alice might have been working on correcting this lack of loyalty – at least, a new “benchmark for adherence to ideological sovereignty,” established by the Institute of Social Sciences of the Presidential Academy, has placed Alice AI in first place for “alignment of responses with national values and ideological principles”, or in other words, for adhering to the Kremlin’s established propaganda narratives.
A data leak from the Social Design Agency, an organisation operating under the direct supervision of the Russian Presidential Administration, revealed the extent of the Kremlin’s interest in manipulating LLM frameworks. According to the leaked materials, the agency developed operations aimed at “poisoning” AI-generated outputs in targeted regions. The goal was to influence how AI assistants respond to politically sensitive queries, ensuring that users asking about local politicians or upcoming elections would receive answers reflecting pro-Kremlin or anti-government narratives.
The Yandex ecosystem: exporting disinformation
Meanwhile, millions of people outside Russia, often in countries with large Russian-speaking populations, continue to use Yandex and its services. Yandex Browser, which integrates the Alice AI assistant, reached 71 million monthly active users, making it a top ten mobile AI product globally. In Belarus, Yandex controls an estimated 34,5% of the market, 28,5% in Kazakhstan, 13% in Kyrgyzstan, and keeps a limited but noticeable presence in some EU countries, such as Latvia (9% of the market), Estonia (7% of the market) and Lithuania (6.2% of the market).
Because the company has deeply integrated its proprietary LLM framework, YandexGPT, directly into search results, users are routinely presented with AI-generated answers from Alice during ordinary web searches, without needing to open a separate chatbot interface. At the same time, smart speakers equipped with the Alice assistant are widely available through major local electronics retailers, further expanding the reach of Yandex’s AI ecosystem beyond Russia itself.
In Kazakhstan, according to recent company data, use of the assistant in the Kazakh language is growing rapidly: over the past three months alone, the number of Kazakh-speaking users has increased by more than 30%. More than one million smart speakers are currently in use across the country, and Yandex estimates that a device with Alice is now present in every sixth household. Since the beginning of 2026, Alice’s daily audience in Kazakhstan has grown by 18%. Users rely on the assistant not only for entertainment and smart home management, but also for educational purposes, including help with studying and explaining complex topics.
On Russian-language forums and Yandex help pages, one can encounter questions from people living in European countries looking for ways to buy the Alice speaker – all they want is to listen to their favourite music ad-free, play audiobooks for their children at bedtime, or simply communicate with the AI assistant in Russian. Though not licensed for sale in the EU, Yandex’s devices can easily be found on eBay, as well as on EU-based websites that also offer assistance in bypassing regional restrictions: currently, Yandex services can only be activated in Russia, but resellers have found workarounds. One such website operates in Latvia, a country where Yandex had been blocked by the authorities. Yandex apps, including its browser with Alice AI, are also available in mobile app stores across Europe, where its search engine retains a stable market share of slightly above 2.14%, placing it third after Google (87.5%) and Microsoft’s Bing (5.6%).
TV as a propaganda tool? Yesterday’s news
People who pride themselves on never watching Russian television, where propagandistic messaging is blatant, may nevertheless fail to realise that the version of reality offered by their smart speaker or browser in response to their questions has been censored by the Russian authorities.
In previous decades, authoritarian states controlled television. Today, they are learning to control algorithms, search engines and conversational AI. And the problem is not only that these systems censor information domestically, but that for the first time in history state propaganda is now exported through convenient digital services – alongside navigation apps, delivery platforms and voice assistants. Yandex has long ceased to be merely a technology company; it has created an entire infrastructure of controlled information: a combination of algorithmic censorship, state regulation and embedded propaganda forms a special version of reality for millions of Russian-speaking users, both in Russia and beyond its borders.
