Sanctions on the side. Microsoft is renewing licenses for Russians on the sly, crossing out its own bans

Microsoft is very willing to renew licenses for its Russian clients, although quite recently it stated that it would not do this. The fear of losing their source took over. However, Russian business is increasingly abandoning Microsoft software in favor of domestic developments.

Change from sneakers to felt boots without touching the ground

Microsoft Corporation, as it turned out, did not even think about stopping selling licenses for its software to Russian clients – not to private consumers, since they began to switch to pirated software, but to companies. As TASS writes, citing unnamed market sources, this also applies to subscriptions to cloud services.

This is apparently being done indirectly, since Microsoft openly declares only a complete refusal to cooperate with Russian business. So, in the fall of 2023, she allegedly stopped supplying him with licenses, and in March 2024, she began to refer to new European restrictions – more precisely, the 12th package of anti-Russian sanctions of the European Union. It was approved on December 19, 2023, and includes a ban on the supply of various software to Russia. Using this package as cover, Microsoft kicked Russian companies out of its clouds, giving them about a week to find a new virtual home for their infrastructure.

Money is more important than principles

TASS’s interlocutor directly stated that Microsoft, without canceling its blocking decisions, itself violates them. According to him, sales volumes and license renewals, of course, have shrunk, but in general they have not gone away – individual sales channels have been preserved and are willingly exploited by the corporation, which back in March 2022 officially turned its back on Russia and then threatened to destroy its Russian representative office. As a result, it still exists, and not in a single copy. Moreover, Microsoft’s Russian legal entities, although not all of them, still bring money to the corporation.

Another TASS source believes that Microsoft could hardly be expected to comply 100% with its own restrictions. In his opinion, the corporation is in no hurry to destroy its own customer base in Russia, which it has built up over the years.

As the agency was informed by Softline Group of Companies (it is negotiating with Microsoft regarding new limits), although Microsoft threatened to close Russian business access to the clouds at the end of March 2024, at the beginning of April 2024 it had not decided to do so.

Will there be somewhere to return?

TASS’s interlocutor believes that Microsoft is not at all against returning to the Russian market in the future and even hopes for it. The only question is how the Russians, whom Microsoft has been oppressing in every way available to it for the past two years, will react to such a return. Here are just a few examples: Russian citizens were deprived of the opportunity to participate in the Windows Insider beta testing program, they were not allowed to test the ChatGPT neural network, and in the summer of 2022, Microsoft decided to prohibit them from updating Windows.

But while in the private sector all these restrictions are easily circumvented, in the business segment it is impossible to solve the problem of Microsoft blocking using the methods familiar to Russians – there is a real threat of facing criminal prosecution. Therefore, hundreds of companies have taken the path of import substitution, and this is especially clearly seen in the example of large businesses.

Corporations are purchasing hundreds of thousands of Russian OS licenses to install them on PCs that previously ran Windows. For example, in April 2024, Gazprom purchased licenses from the Russian Red OS for hundreds of millions of rubles. In the fall of 2023, Rosseti announced the acquisition of more than 100 thousand licenses of the Viola OS from the Basalt SPO company. In February 2024, VTB decided to undertake import substitution on a large scale – CNews wrote that the bank intends to transfer about 86 thousand of its employees from Windows to Astra Linux. In May 2022, Rosatom announced the purchase of licenses for the Russian Astra Linux OS for 130 thousand workstations.