Yandex, Russia’s largest tech company, has sold its news aggregator, blogging platform and homepage after facing criticism for supporting Kremlin narratives around the invasion of Ukraine.

The all-share deal, announced on Tuesday, effectively gives the Kremlin even further control over Russians’ access to information while ridding Yandex of its most problematic assets.

VK, the state-controlled social media giant, will take over Yandex’s media assets in exchange for food delivery app Delivery Club.

Yandex said its board and management had “concluded that the interests of the company’s stakeholders [ . . . ] are best served by pursuing the strategic exit from its media businesses”.

Once known as “Russia’s Google”, Nasdaq-listed Yandex had a market cap in excess of $30bn at its peak in November last year, and had made successful forays into everything from streaming entertainment to food delivery.

But the war in Ukraine has roiled Yandex, forcing its top two executives to resign after the EU placed them under sanctions and prompting thousands of its employees to flee the country. The company’s valuation collapsed to less than $7bn before trading was suspended in the early days of the war.

Yandex’s critics and many of its employees have accused the company of complicity in the war by promoting the Kremlin line on its news platform, which draws about 30mn visitors a month. The company declined to comment.

Yandex hopes the sale will distance it as much as possible from the war, according to people familiar with the matter.

In explaining its decision to put founder Arkady Volozh under sanctions, the EU said Yandex was “responsible for promoting state media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”.

Volozh, who resigned from Yandex in June, has said he considered the decision “misguided” and has appealed, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lawyers for Yandex’s former deputy chief executive Tigran Khudaverdyan — who was sanctioned for attending an oligarchs’ roundtable with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on the first day of the invasion and later resigned — wrote in court filings in June that he disputed the EU’s claim that Yandex was a “key element in hiding information from Russians about the war in Ukraine”.

Users who visit Yandex’s homepage — which, much like Google’s, displays the top news stories in Russian media — will be redirected to a new site that unites the news and blogging platforms under VK’s control.

Gazprom, the Russian state gas monopoly, purchased VK last year and appointed the son of Sergei Kirienko, one of the top Kremlin officials overseeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the company’s chief executive.

Yandex, which accounts for about 62 per cent of Russia’s search market, will focus on a spartan homepage, ya.ru, that contains only a query bar and widgets for traffic, weather and exchange rates.

Originally envisioned as a neutral aggregator such as Google News, Yandex increasingly complied with Kremlin pressure on independent media by limiting access to websites banned by Russia’s internet censor.

Once the invasion began, Russia introduced wartime censorship, shut down independent outlets and blocked several leading social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Russia’s media censor bans calling the war a “war” or “invasion”, while people who question the Kremlin’s version of events can face prosecution and a possible jail sentence of up to 15 years for “discrediting the Russian armed forces”.

Tech investor Esther Dyson and Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev quit Yandex’s board in early March.

In a statement announcing their resignation, they said “it has become impossible for the team to continue to provide a free and open platform for information for the Russian public without breaking the law and putting the company and its employees at risk”.