How Putin crashed a Russian Internet stock

With a few ill-chosen remarks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has crashed the share price of his country’s largest Internet company, the Google-beating search engine company Yandex.

At the time of this writing, Yandex NV, the Dutch-registered parent company of Russia’s search giant, was 16 percent down on Nasdaq. All Russian shares were doing badly because of the new escalation in eastern Ukraine, but Yandex, the country’s technology blue chip, was worse off than others — as if by presidential decree.