Fire your Russian employees.

Then withdraw.

Hurts but if history should learn us a thing or two one of them should be not to give in to dictators.

The younger ones here are allowed to take a few minutes off to use their favorite search engine to look up the quote "peace in our time" by Chamberlain.

Edit:

It looks so simple the way I wrote it above. Please note that doing the right thing isn't easy. Telling lots of people their job is gone. Telling investors the money invested in one of the most promising markets is gone etc etc.

But I am afraid that sooner or later the alternative will be worse.

> Fire your Russian employees.

More like move them to a better place if they prefer this to simply terminating the contract. Benefits are numerous - retain already-hired quality personnel, have a good PR campaign about being moral and holy and doing the extra mile with bureaucracy (which would be true), grow some extra hairy balls overnight. Or something similar.

Good points.

Russia unlike certain others probably won't torture their loved ones because of this.

Of course, if they ever go back to Russia, they risk prosecution. Rather rough deal.

“Leave and never be able to visit your family for as long as the current regime lasts” is a tough call. People do do that, but the pain of remaining has to be very high to make the tradeoffs palatable.

Pavel Durov knows a bit of this I heard.

He doesn't. He regularly visited Saint Petersburg office after being "exiled".

It won't be worse for either Cook or Pichai though.

Option 3: choose to make less money and don't have offices in countries with human rights records as bad as russia. I know this isn't realistic, because we can't expect a company to make less money. that'd be crazy!

Surely option 4 is the best option - the US government issues a list of countries within which no US business can have any operations or sales. Better than leaving it to individual companies.

Don’t forget to write up your list and start lobbying your congressional representative

No - this is elementary game theory. By precommitting to "if I withdraw the app I will go to jail", then the Russian threat would become ineffective and they wouldn't make it to begin with.

Granted, the real world is more complicated but this is equivalent of using the strategy of disabling your steering wheel before playing a game of chicken.

It's not a game of chicken. Russia is well prepared to collide - did that many times. Threats won't work - actually jailing important Russians abroad for supporting Russian organizations under sanctions will.

Direct action is the primary working approach here.

For those reasons Google and Apple should be considered aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal as of now - but how well it looks?

> Google and Apple [are] aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal … - but how well it looks?

Meh, no quite as bad as the US quietly making Russia its second largest supplier of oil, no?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/russia-ca...

If you want to starve Crazy Ivan of his forex…

The only winning move is not to play (i.e. don't have offices in authoritarian states)

Bingo. Those who do have offices should also feel heat from unfair competition, so this should be legalized somehow.

If you look more close into Chamberlain’s record it’s pretty clear he was playing for time while he put his efforts into Britain’s depleted armed forces and armaments. It wasn’t all about appeasement.

I know it, and I know that British Empire had absolutely monstrous material advantage over Germany, enough to sweep it within months in mid-thirties.