EDITORIAL: Naspers reaps the Russian whirlwind

If you thought things had been going pretty badly for Naspers before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has just got that much worse. In the years leading up to 2020, Naspers’s decision to climb into bed with two of the world’s most dubious regimes — Russia and China — seemed visionary, at least when it came to its stock price performance.

VK, which owns social media sites VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, is considered Russia’s answer to Facebook. These sites have been central to the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, designed to sell the Ukraine invasion to its citizens as a "peacekeeping mission". It may be tempting to think that Naspers and Prosus are innocent corporate casualties of a war they couldn’t have foreseen — but this would be wrong.

This isn’t a revelation. VK began inching in this direction a few years after Naspers first paid $166m for its 30% of the Russian firm in 2006. It’s why, in 2017, Ukraine banned VK, given the glut of Russian propaganda echoing Putin’s claim that Ukraine is controlled by "neo-Nazis and drug addicts".

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