11 July 2023

While we have saluted the historic courage of 1,000+ global multinational corporations which fully exited Russia, we need to once again explicitly call out 400 major multinationals that continue to do business in the country, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in support of Putin’s mass slaughter in his assault on a peaceful neighbor 18 months into the conflict.

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we have been carefully tracking and updating our publicly available,  highly publicized list of companies exiting Russia on a daily basis. In fact, many have credited our list with helping to catalyze these exits, the largest exodus of global enterprises in world history. President Biden has cited the corporate exodus in media interviews as well as in private conversations with foreign leaders. Most importantly, these major corporate exits have badly crippled Putin’s economy, which limps along by cannibalizing its state-controlled enterprises, as well as the ongoing operations of over 400 feckless major multinationals.

Listed below are some of the most egregious cases of companies that continue to do business as usual in Russia (ranked as F on our A-F grading scale). Similarly, companies that we rank as D on our scale continue substantive business operations while suspending trivial tertiary operations such as advertising and marketing, or unspecified future investments.

Alibaba...Auchan...Babolat...Benetton...Carl’s Jr...Cloudflare...Emirates and Etihad Airways...Guess...Huntsman Corp...Mitsui...Nestle...Sbarro Pizza...Shell...Stryker...TGI Friday's...Unilever...Zimmer Biomet...

Activist groups like B4Ukraine and the Moral Rating Agency have commendably echoed calls for these companies to exit. But even beyond the feckless 400 multinational corporations, our friends and research partners at the Kyiv School of Economics have tracked over 1,000 more companies that continue to operate in Russia, largely European and smaller (defined as <$100 million in global sales). Activist groups like B4Ukraine and the Moral Ratings Agencies have echoed such calls. 

Even worse, there have been some companies that backtracked and reneged on their initial promises to exit Russia–and we have had to downgrade them on our list accordingly. Some of the largest, most well-known companies that are failing to keep their promises to leave Russia include: WeWork...Heineken...Xiaomi...Reckitt Benckiser...Philip Morris...Mondelez...

The companies that remain in Russia represent a massive amount of revenue funding Putin’s coffers. While there is very little transparency into exactly how much, our best estimate is that the Feckless 400 represent at least $200 million in Russian revenues...

Nevertheless, every penny is funding a desperate Putin and undermining Western economic pressure on Russia. There should be no excuse for corporations to sustain this lifeline. It’s past time for all Western multinationals to exit Russia as long as the invasion of Ukraine continues...