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Comment by wwtrv | Hacker News Reader

Arbitrary imprisoning or harming the employees of Google or Apple would likely result in many other western IT firms closing their offices and leaving, that would be a very stupid thing to do for the Russian government. So I don’t think such threats could have been real (but I guess you can’t really count on authoritarian regimes not doing something completely irrational).

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NYT and Bloomberg report that threats were real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28563916

I’m not denying these threats were issued, but actually following them through would be a very irrational thing to do. So it’s probably just a bluff. Of course it doesn’t really matter that much since Google/Apple were going to comply with their requests anyway.

Autocratic leaders can get pretty irrational in their quest of preserving power down to the point of harming what seems to be their interests in major ways.

Russiam government needs to shut up Navalny a lot more than they need western IT companies. Successful multinationals know when to blink.

Putin has attacked a good many political dissidents on foreign soil, is it really such an unbelievable claim?

> likely result in many other western IT firms closing their offices and leaving

That's just naive. Russia and China are huge markets. Apple and Google are not going anywhere unless their hands are forced.

It’s not an all or nothing outcome. And I’m not talking about Google or Apple leaving. There are many companies which have dev offices in Russia, they would be less likely to hire new employees in Russia if they believed they can be arbitrarily imprisoned for random reasons.

Just look at what’s happening in Belarus in the last year (IT companies started fleeing to neighboring countries)

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