The joy of French motorways

The news that Heineken, the Dutch brewer, has sold its business in Russia to a local buyer for a token $1 – at a loss of €300 million, but with job guarantees for 1,800 Russian workers – raises moral issues about when and how multinationals should withdraw from pariah states. A database compiled by Yale professor and corporate responsibility campaigner Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, tracking 1,586 foreign operators in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, counts 534 as having made a clean exit versus 219 (including BT and some smaller UK-listed companies, alongside a plethora of Chinese names) ‘digging in’ for business as usual.

The rest, global brands and pharma giants among them, are in-between, keen to be seen postponing new investments or scaling back existing ones – but not quite ready to leave. All of which implies tough decisions: about PR shame at home; about a collapsing Russian economy and the risk of state confiscation; and the potential upside, unlikely as it may be, of a more benign post-Putin regime.