When Russian troops poured into Ukraine in February 2022, the reverberations were felt not only in the geopolitical order but across the globalised web of the technology business world. Russian tech giants and services like Yandex, Kaspersky and Telegram had spent years building cross-border empires bringing together development teams in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries, headquarters in the West, and clients and investors on both sides of the Atlantic. The invasion redrew the map overnight. In the new binary of wartime alignment, neutrality was no longer an option. The choice was tough: cut ties with Russia and face economic loss, leave your home country and settle in exile, or hold onto Russian assets and risk sanctions, reputational damage and expulsion from the global markets.
Some made their choice decisively. Arkady Volozh, co-founder of Russian tech giant Yandex, publicly denounced the war and disavowed the Kremlin. He relocated to Israel and helped negotiate the separation of Yandex’s Western-facing operations from its Russian core. In the process, he salvaged not only his name but also a future in global business circles. Similarly, the Bukhman brothers, Igor and Dmitry, founders of mobile gaming company Playrix, were early movers. Though their business had deep roots in Russia, they shifted headquarters to Ireland and relocated to London well before the invasion. After a slow start, they eventually severed ties with their Russian operations entirely. Today they are among the UK’s wealthiest residents, reportedly richer than King Charles himself, and feature prominently on Britain’s Sunday Times Rich List.
Others dug in or were forced to return to Russia. Mikhail Fridman, the co-founder of Alfa Group and a tech investor via his Western firm LetterOne Technology, was forced to return to Russia from his London mansion while attempting to fight EU and UK sanctions. Petr Aven, his longtime business partner, held onto his Alfa-Bank stake and his Latvian passport while keeping silent on the war. Though sanctioned and marginalised in the West, they have preserved their economic footprint in Russia and appear to be betting on a long game: that the war will end and the pendulum of global geopolitical fortunes will swing back.
But there is a third group: those who are trying to straddle the divide. These are tech entrepreneurs and outsourcing tycoons who continue to operate in or benefit from Western markets while retaining business operations in Russia. They are neither sanctioned oligarchs nor dissidents-in-exile. They present themselves as global businessmen, yet their commercial entanglements with the Russian state or domestic clients persist. Up until now this has allowed them to have a foot in both camps and keep options open. Yet, as the war goes on with no sign of abating, their position is becoming increasingly precarious.
Among the “straddles”, Pavel Zaitsev is definitely a man to watch. A former highly-ranked executive of the Russian Kremlin-controlled telco giant Rostelecom, Zaitsev built Voxys, Russia’s largest call centre outsourcing firm, serving both state and private clients. In 2018, he relocated part of the company’s ownership structure to Cyprus and raised Western funding, including from an EBRD-backed investment arm via Finland’s CapMan. European cash injection supercharged Voxys’s growth securing it a quarter of the Russian market and an international profile, with Zaitsev acquiring EU residency in the process.
After the beginning of the invasion in 2022, Zaitsev orchestrated a re-domiciliation of his Cypriot holdings. He dissolved the offshore parent and folded Voxys back into a Russian structure. Reportedly, he claimed to have no ties to the company, but news reports looking into the corporate records indicate otherwise: he remained the key beneficiary and is effectively controlling the business. In 2024, he reportedly pledged over 90 per cent of the company’s shares to Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned lender under international sanctions, as collateral for new loans. The move cemented Voxys’ position within the Kremlin’s economic orbit while allowing Zaitsev to continue extracting profits to Europe and enjoying the benefits of his EU residency, enabling him to travel freely and move capital.
He is not alone. Dmitry Volkov, another such figure, has built a tech investment empire spanning dating apps, blockchain ventures, and media platforms. He resides partly in the UK and Dubai, while his Moscow-based Social Discovery Ventures continues to invest in and profit from the Russian tech scene. Sergey Matsotsky, once head of Russia’s IT consultancy giant IBS, has launched a customer-service startup targeting Western clients while maintaining a portfolio of software companies in Russia through his holding firm GS Invest.
Russian tech straddlers are fluent in the language of the venture world and offshore structuring as well as in the mother tongue of informal social connections in Russia and the money leaks of Putin’s war machine. To have it both ways they have built twin-track systems, maintaining their stakes in Russian businesses while accessing Western markets through foreign passports, shell companies, the webs of informal control, circular cross-ownership and trusts.
The tech straddlers make the most of opacity and deniability. They rarely speak publicly, avoid political statements, and often deny formal control of their Russian assets. They pretend to be too small to get on the sanctions radars and maintain low profile. But as the war drags on and the EU intensifies its focus on sanction circumvention, their balancing act is getting trickier.
