Navalny died in a penal colony in February and was buried in Moscow’s Borysovsky cemetery in early March.

The map pin marking his grave had disappeared from the Yandex search engine’s results by the end of the month.

This is not the case when it comes to the graves of other recently deceased prominent Russians in the same cemetery, or of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late leader of the infamous Wagner mercenary group, who is buried at the Prokhorovsky cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Yandex has previously, in November 2022, removed images of bombed-out houses in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which the Ukrainian authorities chalked up to the Kremlin’s desire to hide the devastation inflicted on the city by the Russian siege away from the eyes of the Russian populace.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yandex began to limit access to information for users with Russian IP addresses. According to the Washington-based Atlantic Council think-tank, Yandex’s actions unmistakably amount to censorship.

Yandex is among the global leaders when it comes to web browser engines. According to Statista, at the start of this year, Yandex held a 1.7% share in the global market, making it the 4th most popular search engine worldwide.

It should be noted, however, that Yandex is popular primarily in Russia, where it serves 63% of Internet users, compared to Google’s 36%.