Squatters Take Over Russian Tycoon's Home, Set Up Camp

A group of anti-war protestors have taken over the Amsterdam home of Russian oligarch Arkady Volozh, a technology tycoon and co-founder of his country's equivalent to Google.

The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported Monday that a group of activists had taken up residence in the empty, five-story home over the weekend with the intent of using it to house young people unable to afford rising rental costs in the city and to host political events.

In pictures on social media, signs could be seen hanging from the windows with slogans such as "No to war", "No to capitalism" and "Yandex + FSB = love," a reference to the company Volozh formerly led and their alleged ties with the Russian secret service.

The house has stood empty for a number of months due to EU sanctions against a number of Russian politicians and businessmen like Volozh, who resigned from the helm of Russia's largest tech company in June following accusations by EU officials of using his search engine to censor content critical of the Kremlin over the course of its invasion of Ukraine.

Volozh—who once made headlines for his company's invention of a robot politician—had seen problems even before the sanctions, however.

At the onset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the value of Volozh's stake in Yandex fell by approximately 60 percent after Wall Street cut traders' ability to buy or sell stock in Russian technology companies, cutting his net worth from an estimated high of about $2.6 billion to just south of $600 million, according to Forbes. Officials in the United Kingdom have also introduced legislation seeking to further limit Yandex's influence abroad, citing its rampant inclusion of Russian misinformation in its search results.

Volozh later left the country for his home in Israel with a number of other top executives at the company and, as of July, had not visited Russia for some time, an article in the Russian news outlet The Bell reported.

And while other Russian industrialists like Oleg Tinkov and Nikolai Storonsky recently announced they would renounce their Russian citizenship over their objections to the Ukrainian invasion, Volozh has all but fallen off the radar, rarely appearing in international headlines since his resignation.

It's also not the first time a home of a Russian oligarch has been seized by protestors.

In the early days of the Russian invasion, a group of protesters had previously broken into the London home of sanctioned Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

That same month, activists "liberated" a French villa believed to be owned by one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's daughters, while Italian media reported that unknown activists vandalized two villas in Italy reportedly belonging to Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov in April.