One half serves the Kremlin. The other wants to build the future. 🇷🇺☁️ We investigate the Yandex Divorce. We break down how the invasion of Ukraine forced Arkady Volozh to split his $30 billion empire, selling the search engine to a Russian consortium at a massive discount while fleeing to Europe with the "good assets" (engineers and GPUs) to launch Nebius.

1. The "Hostage" Deal: The largest exit in history. We analyze the split. We discuss how Yandex N.V. (the Dutch parent company) sold its Russian assets for $5.2 billion—a fraction of their pre-war value. We explain the Kremlin's mandatory "exit tax" and how the Russian government effectively nationalized the country's most successful tech company.

2. The Propaganda Machine: Why the Kremlin wanted Search. We expose the algorithm. We discuss how Yandex News began filtering out war crimes and promoting state narratives, turning the "Free Internet" into a digital curtain. We explain why Volozh had to cut off the Russian limb to save the rest of the body.

3. Nebius & The GPU Gold: Can they wash off the stain? We explore the rebirth. We discuss Nebius, the new AI infrastructure company built from Yandex's Finnish data center and 1,300 fleeing engineers. We analyze their bet on Nvidia H100 GPUs and whether Western companies will trust a cloud provider with Russian roots.

The full list of sources used to create this episode can be found on our Patreon under https://www.patreon.com/c/Morgrain