Many employees of Yandex, Avito and Tinkoff Bank left for Turkey

According to The Wall Street Journal, citing its own sources, more than 1,000 employees of Yandex, Avito and Tinkoff Bank moved to Turkey after the start of a military special operation in Ukraine. At the same time, about 900 people are Yandex employees. About a third of them left the country some time later.

In response to a request from Vedomosti to comment on the situation, Yandex said that it was possible to work remotely in the company for a long time. “We do not control where remote employees work from,” a Yandex spokesperson said.

Avito told Forbes that the company did not relocate specialists abroad: “We have preserved hybrid and remote modes of operation, we do not regulate the movement of employees if this does not prevent them from working from any location convenient for them.” A representative of Tinkoff Bank declined to comment.

At the end of March, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), Sergey Plugotarenko, said that in April, from 70,000 to 100,000 representatives of the IT industry could leave Russia as part of the “second wave” of emigration. According to him, the “first wave” has already passed after the start of the military operation in Ukraine, when 50,000 to 70,000 people left Russia.

Co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, head of the InfoWatch group Natalya Kasperskaya, during her speech in the State Duma, said that over the past month, “herds” of IT specialists have left Russia, but over time they will return. In Russia, they even suggested complicating the travel of IT specialists abroad, but the Ministry of Digital Development did not support any legislative restrictions related to the movement of IT personnel and their employment. The regulator noted that “such measures can lead to an increase in the outflow of specialists and have a destructive effect on the industry as a whole.”