The French service, which aims to deliver grocery orders within 15 minutes using darkstores - dedicated warehouses that cater only to online clients.  It operates in Israel and under a different brand in its primary market of Russia.

"Yango Deli is gradually suspending its ultra-fast grocery delivery operations in Paris," a Yango Deli spokesperson said. "This was a pilot project with a small number of darkstores, and it has underperformed our internal targets."

The spokesperson said its London unit might be flogged off to other parties.

"The ultrafast delivery market in London is highly competitive and we see a considerable amount of interest in our business there, including from peers," the spokesperson said, adding that they couldn't give further details.

In London, where the service began in autumn last year, the source said Yango Deli was looking at several scenarios, one of which is a possible sale, for preserving what the team has achieved.

The company operates five dark stores in London, with around 2,500 SKUs (stock keeping units). Customer retention is as high as 40 per cent, which Yango Deli said is around 1.5 higher than the market average, according to its own estimates.

Nasdaq-listed and registered in the Netherlands, Yandex and its subsidiaries have so far avoided Western sanctions that have crippled Russia's access to global financial systems and supply chains.

Former Deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan quit after the European Union imposed individual sanctions on him, something Yandex said it had been shocked and surprised to learn.

The EU has criticised Yandex for warning Russian users looking for news about Ukraine on its search engine of unreliable information on the internet.

Meanwhile, the company has flagged that it lacks funds to cover a potential convertible bond redemption due to a trading suspension of its Nasdaq-listed shares, while earlier in March a data leak exposed personal user data on its food delivery app, Yandex.