Russia

Founders continue to incorporate and to sell to Russian customers, including where foreign software and payments have withdrawn. That is import substitution as a commercial fact. It is not evidence that a foreign fund can participate.

Limited liability companies and joint-stock companies are the ordinary forms. A foreign shareholder now has to ask, before the form, whether the investment itself is permitted from the investor’s side and whether the Russian side can pay the shareholder anything later.

Cross-border venture from the United States, the EU, and the UK is the exception that has to be licensed, if it is possible at all. Domestic investors, corporate buyers, and state development institutions are the capital that remains inside the system. Their objectives are not the same as a financial fund’s.

The stack that can still be built is the stack that does not depend on restricted components, cloud regions, or app stores. Payments have been redirected toward domestic rails. Software that assumes a Western cloud is a different product from software that does not.

Technical education remains deep. The constraint reported by firms outside Russia is that many of the people they want to hire no longer want the Moscow employment contract, or cannot be paid across the border. GRIP does not quote a migration figure. The payment problem alone is enough to break a cross-border team.

Moscow and St Petersburg concentrate the institutions foreign researchers would recognise. Collaboration with those institutions is itself restricted for many public funders and universities in sanctioning states. A joint lab is not a neutral academic detail.

Domestic regulation of platforms, data, and ‘foreign agents’ has tightened in the same years as external sanctions. A product that handles speech, news, or personal data inherits both regimes. Neither is advisory content GRIP will summarise into a checklist.

Rents and salaries in roubles are a domestic fact. The cost that dominates a cross-border conversation is the inability to pay or to be paid. Doing Business ranks are not used. They would also describe a pre-sanctions legal fiction.

The towers in the photograph are commercial real estate. They are not an innovation policy. Digital infrastructure works inside the country on domestic substitutes where foreign services have withdrawn. Cross-border hosting and cross-border app distribution should be assumed broken until a lawyer shows otherwise.

The customer that remains is domestic: households, firms, and the state. Export of technology to ‘friendly’ markets is a political and logistical project. It is not the default scale-up path it might have been described as before 2022.

Where foreign products left, local substitutes were written. Some of that is genuine engineering under constraint. Some of it is a captive market. A research note should say which one it is looking at, and should not call a captive market a global product.

Scale inside Russia is possible for a company that does not need foreign payments, foreign components, or a foreign store. Scale that includes a foreign shareholder in a sanctioning state is a legal question first and a commercial question second. GRIP does not invite that shareholder in.