LONDON, August 27. /TASS/. Arkady Volozh, a co-founder of the Russian technology company Yandex, has formally asked the European Union to remove the sanctions against him that had been put in place after the start of the Russian special military operation, the Financial Times reported.

Lawyers for Volozh petitioned the EU to repeal the restrictive measures, the report said. EU officials are expected to review the appeal next month, according to the newspaper.

A person close to Volozh told the newspaper he doubted the request would be granted. He said many Russian businessmen previously believed they were on the cusp of being excluded from sanctions, the person told the Financial Times. They "were convincing themselves they were oh-so close before·.·.·.·and that was completely wishful thinking," he said.

In a statement to TASS in early August, Volozh said he was engaged in supporting Russian engineers who had left the country and his "story with Yandex was over" as of February 2022. He expressed disagreement with Russia's decision to conduct a special military operation.

News media earlier discussed Volozh's profile on his website, which portrays him as a Kazakhstan-born technology entrepreneur working in Israel. According to the Internet Archive service, the website of the Yandex co-founder never listed Russia as an area of his business interests, except mentioning his participation in the creation of the Russian IT distributor CompTek.

Volozh left his post as CEO of Yandex, as well as management positions in the group's international subsidiaries in June 2022 after being placed on the European Union's sanctions list. At the end of December, he said goodbye to his employees. The company's press service told TASS at the time that Volozh would not be affiliated with Yandex even as an external consultant.