The Biden administration placed broad penalties on Russian banks, energy and infrastructure corporations, and a number of Russian elites on Thursday in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The US Treasury Department released the complete list in a press statement, categorising sanctioned companies as “important Russian financial institutions” and “elites and families close to Putin.”
Vladimir Kiriyenko, the CEO of VK Group, the parent firm of Russia’s largest social network VKontakte, is among the sanctioned persons. While he is not sanctioned expressly for his work with the VK organisation, the decision prevents one of the country’s most powerful technology leaders from doing business with any US entity.
Image Source – Twitter
Though it does not have the global reach of Facebook, VK — formerly known as VKontakte — is Russia’s most popular social media platform. It claims to have over 70 million monthly active users, nearly a fifth the size of Twitter, and the great majority of these accounts post in Russian from within Russia’s geographical borders.
Kiriyenko was not a founder of Vkontakte; in fact, his affiliation with the company began in 2021. However, his appointment as CEO is the climax of a narrative that has seen the social network pivot away from a platform dedicated to privacy and free expression and toward one that is far more likely to toe Putin’s party line.
Pavel Durov, who was 22 years old at the time, founded Vkontakte in 2006. Its meteoric rise, fueled by a desire for a domestic alternative to Facebook, earned Durov the moniker “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg.” However, Durov was forced out of his CEO position in 2014 following disputed allegations of a hit-and-run incident involving a police officer and an attempted hostile takeover in which an investment fund controlled by Ilya Sherbovich, a Russian businessman and Putin ally, secretly acquired 48 percent of the company.
Durov laid the responsibility completely on the Russian authorities for his removal. “I’m afraid there is no coming back [to VK], not after I publicly refused to cooperate with the police,” he told TechCrunch at the time. They despise me.”
Following his expulsion from Russia, the entrepreneur shifted his focus to a new venture: the encrypted messaging service Telegram, which he created in 2013. Telegram has always advocated for a more robust approach to privacy and free expression, owing to Durov’s experience with repression in Russia.
Durov initially refused requests from French authorities and later pressure from Russia’s FSB security service to include a “back door” in the encryption that would allow countries to intercept encrypted messages. Russian telecommunications firms were ordered to restrict Telegram within the country, but they mostly succeeded. The Russian government finally abandoned it in 2020, by which time it had already been adopted as an official channel of communication for a number of government agencies. It has been similarly adopted in neighbouring Ukraine as a tool for both personal and professional interactions.
Meanwhile, Boris Dobrodeyev, the company’s previous deputy chief executive, has assumed leadership of VKontakte. Dobrodeyev remained CEO until 2021, when parent firm Mail.ru — the Russian digital services operator that controlled the remaining 52% of Vkontakte — rebranded the entire company as VK. Vladimir Kiriyenko was appointed CEO shortly after Dobrodeyev’s resignation in December 2021.
Kiriyenko, 38, previously worked at Rostelecom, Russia’s state-owned telecoms company. Prior to that, he served as chairman of the boards of directors of a telecommunications company, a bank, and an investment company — a function of his father, Sergei Kiriyenko, who served as Russia’s prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and is now the Putin administration’s first deputy chief of staff. (Sergei Kiriyenko is also named on the elite sanctions list.)
Under the leadership of a regime insider like Vladimir Kiriyenko, it’s difficult to envisage VK hosting content critical of the Putin administration or taking any of the privacy stances taken by Durov’s Telegram.
