Russian leader Vladimir Putin signaled punishment on Monday for Western tech firms still operating within his country’s borders.
“You just have to strangle them. I agree completely,” Putin said at a meeting in the Kremlin with Russian business leaders.
“I say it without any embarrassment, because they are trying to strangle us. We need to reciprocate. That’s it,” he said.
Putin made the remark after Stanislav Yodkovsky, who runs a Russian company offering videoconferencing services, said at the meeting that some of his Western competitors still had services available in Russia in some capacity.
“Slightly limit the work of services that have left Russia, such as Zoom and Microsoft,” Yodkovsky urged. He told Putin that local analysts had assessed the international competition in the local market was costing Russian companies “billions.”
Responding to Yodkovsky, Putin said Russian companies and consumers who used Western services should give up their “bad habits.”
“No one was expelled from Russia, no one was interfered with,” Putin said of the Western companies that left Russia in 2022.
“We provided the most favorable conditions for them to operate here, in our market, and they are trying to strangle us. We need to respond in kind, act as a mirror,” he added.
Microsoft officially closed its office and operations in Russia amid the 2022 Western exodus brought on by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
In March of that year, the firm said it had suspended all new sales in the country and was “stopping many aspects of our business in Russia in compliance with governmental sanctions decisions.”
However, it’s unclear how widely Russian consumers still use the firm’s services, such as its popular videoconferencing tool Teams.
Zoom similarly banned its distributors in April 2022 from selling services to Russia’s government and state-owned conglomerates. In October 2022, it stopped selling new licenses to Russian consumers.
But the company was fined 115 million rubles in October 2023 by a Russian court for what a local judge said was operating in the country without a local office.
Neither Zoom nor Microsoft responded to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
Putin’s comments on Monday come as the Kremlin has said that departed international firms hoping to re-enter the Russian market in the future wouldn’t be welcomed so easily.
“We are not waiting for anyone with open arms. There will be a price to pay for past decisions,” Anton Alikhanov, the Russian industry and trade minister, said in February.
Nearly 475 foreign companies have fully left the Russian market since the war began, per the Leave Russia database from the Kyiv School of Economics.
