The Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange have halted trading in US-listed Russian stocks, following the invasion of Ukraine and the West leveling harsh sanctions against Russia.

Among them were a number of tech companies, including search engine and cloud company Yandex, as well as telco Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), and e-commerce platform Ozon Holdings.

Russia has also ordered its own stock market to remain closed as its economy and currency plunged in value.

Yandex shares had already been in freefall since the invasion - one February 24 we reported that they were down 71 percent in value compared to February 16, and it has since fallen further. In pre-market trades on Monday before it was halted, it was down yet another 21 percent.

Russia's largest tech company before the invasion, it operates a popular search engine, a cloud computing service, and a ride-sharing business (Yandex.Taxi is currently a joint venture with Uber, but the US business is trying to sell its stake).

In 2019, the company agreed to a restructuring that created a Kremlin-backed 'Public Interest Foundation' that has the power to block transactions and temporarily remove Yandex’s management if it is in the national interest.

Other tech stocks impacted include Ozon Holdings and MTS, the largest mobile network operator in Russia.

MTS operates the Grom supercomputer, as well as a number of data centers in Russia - four in Moscow, two in Nizhny Novgorod, one each in the Moscow Region, Leningrad Region, Samara, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, and Krasnodar. New servers for these systems will likely come under semiconductor sanctions.

This February, MTS partnered with South Korea’s KT Corp to develop new data centers in Russia.