Ukraine imposes sanctions on Russian web firms citing cyber threat
Ukraine said on Tuesday it was imposing sanctions on Russia's largest internet group Yandex and other popular online firms to protect itself against cyber attacks.
The restrictions, announced in a presidential decree, froze any of the Russian businesses' assets inside Ukraine and banned hosts there from linking to them - though they were all still accessible in Kiev early Tuesday afternoon, according to Reuters.
Yandex declined to comment, as did Mail.ru Group, which owns Vkontakte, Russia's version of Facebook, and the Odnoklassniki social network. There was no immediate comment from other companies on the list.
The restrictions were imposed partly to protect against companies "whose activities threaten the information and cyber security of Ukraine," the Kiev government's Security and Defence Council said in a separate statement.
They added to a list of more than 400 Russian firms blacklisted by Kiev since Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing pro-Russian separatist uprising.
"The servers of these Russian social networks ... store the personal data of Ukrainian users and information on their movements, contacts, communications," lawmaker Volodymyr Ariev, a member of President Petro Poroshenko's political faction, said on Facebook.
Many of the affected sites are hugely popular in Ukraine.
Vkontakte was the second-most visited website in Ukraine as of March, according to data cited by the Ukrainian Internet Association.
Yandex, Odnoklassniki and Mail.ru were also in the top five most popular sites that month.
News.Az
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