[csande17]

"Shield local employees from this" is the main hard part of this proposal. The Russian government does not especially care which part of the company Google claims is responsible for app review, and they will happily arrest/prosecute/murder any staff they can get their hands on if there's a chance it'll get then what they want.

[varjag]

It almost sounds as if operating in Russia is a bad idea.

[neonbones]

Yeah, that's an old story, but there were engineering offices of a few big US companies in Russian before. Almost all of them left in 2010x when they understood what was going on there. Same for Belarus, companies moved their offices to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

They want to market and engineers there, but they don't want to risk working in authoritative countries with batshit crazy wannabe emperors. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-...