The company suspended its operations in March but has now decided to withdraw permanently. “Since our announcement on March 3, we have continued to closely monitor the war in Ukraine.
We have now decided to begin an orderly winding-up of our operations in Russia and Belarus,” the company said in a statement on its site. “At Cisco, we strongly and unequivocally condemn the unjustified war and violence unleashed on innocent civilians.”
Cisco thus joins a long line of mainly Western organizations that have been withdrawing from Russia and its most important ally since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Earlier, Microsoft and IBM also decided to drastically reduce their services in the country or shut them down altogether. That way, the country would also have less access to important technology.
In the meantime, Russia itself is working on a new law that allows the government to seize goods and buildings of foreign companies that leave the country. This would also involve fines, which seems to ensure that companies that were already planning to leave, now do so a lot faster.
