The Selective Morality of War: Who Got Cancelled, Who Didn't, and Why Video Games Never Made the List

In the spring of 2022, two wars were underway at once. One was fought by the Russian army in Ukraine. The other, far less bloody but remarkably loud, was fought online against cosmetics brands, fast-food chains, and clothing retailers accused of dragging their feet on leaving Russia. That second war had its villains and its casualties. It also had a blind spot: one of the largest entertainment industries on earth, video games, which to this day carries on doing business tied to Russia with almost no reputational cost at all.

Here is what the record actually shows, including the parts that complicate the popular version of this story.

The myth of the great exodus

The common belief goes something like this: almost everyone left, a stubborn few stayed, and the internet made them pay for it. The data does not support that.

The Kyiv School of Economics Institute runs the most complete tracker of companies operating in Russia, a project called SelfSanctions / LeaveRussia, built with Ukrainian ministries and the Yale School of Management database. As of July 2026, KSE tracks roughly 4,300 companies, organizations, and brands from 112 countries. The result: only 565 companies, 13.1 percent, have fully exited the Russian market. Another 1,373, or 31.9 percent, have scaled back or announced an exit they never completed. And 2,362 companies, 55 percent of everything tracked, are still operating in Russia.

That is not a fringe. That is a majority. Those companies generated a combined $200.8 billion in revenue in 2025 alone, according to KSE, and paid roughly $5.04 billion in profit tax into the Russian state budget, even as their combined net income fell 41 percent year over year.

The Financial Times reported back in May 2024 on the reverse phenomenon: companies that had announced they were leaving were quietly backing away from that decision. The reason is mostly financial, not moral. The Kremlin requires companies from "unfriendly" countries to sell their assets at a discount of at least 50 percent and pay a 15 percent exit tax, and acceptable Russian buyers are hard to find. Among the companies the FT named as stuck in the exit process, or having reversed course entirely, were Avon, Air Liquide, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Reckitt Benckiser, Unilever, Philip Morris, Mondelez, and Poland's own LPP. A senior Unilever executive said openly that leaving would simply hand the market to competitors like Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. Mondelez's CEO said investors did not seem to care about the moral dimension of staying.

Oriflame and Avon: two faces of the same playbook

Oriflame, the Swedish direct-sales cosmetics company, announced in March 2022 that continuing business in Russia "in its current form" was impossible, and it scaled back investment. In 2023, reports emerged that its Russian assets were being sold; Moody's downgraded the company's credit rating around the same time. Yet in July 2024, the Kyiv School of Economics' leave-russia.org project and the trade outlet Global Cosmetics News reported that Oriflame appeared to still be running full-scale operations in Russia and in occupied Ukrainian territory, with sales settled in rubles. The company's official Russian Instagram account had gone dark since March 2022, even as its business, according to monitors, had not. The European Parliament took the allegations seriously enough to file a formal question to the European Commission (E-001203/2024) asking whether Oriflame's continued activity violates the EU sanctions regime.

Avon took a more winding path. It suspended investment and exports from its Russian factory in March 2022. In April 2023, it began preparing to sell the plant and the Cyrillic rights to its brand name. In November 2023, its parent company, the Brazilian group Natura & Co, walked away from a binding sale offer, citing the Kremlin's 50 percent discount requirement. At the time, Avon was Russia's second-largest cosmetics company, with 13.89 billion rubles, about $151.5 million, in 2022 revenue.

Here the popular narrative needs a correction. Avon's revenue really was declining (down 6.1 percent in Q4 2023, 11.3 percent in Q1 2024, 8.4 percent in Q2 2024). But it is not accurate to say the company "went bankrupt because it was forced out of Russia." Avon Products Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States in August 2024, and the primary driver was a wave of more than 300 lawsuits alleging its talc products were contaminated with asbestos, with roughly $1 billion in associated liabilities. A Chicago jury had awarded a single plaintiff $24.4 million just the month before. The bankruptcy filing itself explicitly stated that Avon's international operations were not part of the proceeding and would continue as usual. Russia, the pandemic, and rising competition were cited as contributing headwinds, but talc litigation, not the Kremlin, is what sent Avon to bankruptcy court.

The Polish example nobody likes to bring up

This is where the hypocrisy stops being a purely Western European or American story. LPP, the Gdańsk-based owner of the Reserved, Cropp, House, Mohito, and Sinsay clothing brands, had 553 stores in Russia before the war, its second-largest foreign market, generating roughly 19.2 percent of group revenue. On March 4, 2022, LPP suspended its Russian operations. In May 2022, it announced the sale of its Russian subsidiary, RE Trading OOO, to a "Chinese consortium," which was ultimately set to pay $135.5 million in four installments through December 2026.

In March 2024, the American short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report alleging that LPP's withdrawal was largely cosmetic: the actual buyer, it claimed, was an obscure Dubai-registered entity with no disclosed owners, and LPP's goods kept flowing into the Russian market long after the announced exit. LPP's stock dropped more than 20 percent that day. The company denied the allegations and threatened lawsuits, but Poland's financial regulator, the KNF, opened formal proceedings over LPP's failure to promptly disclose material information about the 2022 negotiations. By May 2025, LPP was reportedly working toward a settlement with the regulator. The company itself acknowledges that a small share of its sales, about 3 percent in 2024, still flows to Russian "purchasing agents" tied to the original deal, though it says it earns no profit from this.

In other words, one of Poland's proudest corporate exports ended up running the exact same maneuver as Oriflame and Avon: a loud exit announcement, a quiet continuation, an outside investigation, denials, and eventually a settlement or an explanation involving a "transition period." The pattern is not confined to any one country or industry. It is a template.

The parallel universe of gaming

This is where the real inconsistency in the public response shows up most clearly.

To be fair, part of the games industry genuinely did leave, fast. Sony cut off access to the PlayStation Store for Russian users in early March 2022. Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Microsoft (including Bethesda), Ubisoft, Rockstar, CD Projekt Red, 4A Games, SEGA, and Ukraine's own GSC Game World all followed. That is a real, documented boycott involving some of the biggest publishers in the world.

But the platform that carries most PC game sales globally, Valve's Steam, never left Russia at all. Russian accounts, an estimated 10 million of them, can log in, play games they already own, and, despite payment friction from Western banking sanctions, still make new purchases, including by switching account region. On top of that, Steam has run an annual sales festival called "Games From Russia" since 2022, spotlighting titles from Russian and post-Soviet developers. The 2025 edition drew a wave of criticism on Steam's own forums, with one user comparing it to holding an exhibition of German literature in London in 1943.

In February 2022, according to reporting by the Russian business daily Kommersant, Russia's Ministry of Digital Development considered forcing Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Games Store, and Epic Games Store to pay a 5 percent levy on their Russian revenue into a fund supporting "patriotic" Russian-made games. In October 2024, to avoid an outright ban, Valve complied with a demand from Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, and removed 260 titles and 11 pages from the Russian version of Steam. The games stayed available in every other region. Russian authorities confirmed at the time that they had no plans to block Steam entirely, since the platform had "mostly" met their demands.

Russia's own domestic games market, meanwhile, keeps growing. It was worth 186.6 billion rubles in 2024, up 6.1 percent year over year, and analysts put it at roughly $2.06 billion in 2025. Revenue for Russian game developers more than tripled between 2019 and 2024, reaching 178 billion rubles, and Russia now accounts for an estimated 7 percent of all games released worldwide, according to Moscow's own creative industries agency. The asymmetry gets sharper still: in 2025, Russia's prosecutor general designated the Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, maker of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, an "undesirable organization," accusing it of funding the Ukrainian military. A Ukrainian developer is treated as an enemy of the Russian state. Russian developers, in the same window, got their own annual promotional festival on the world's biggest PC gaming storefront.

Why Russian stayed in games and smaller languages didn't

This raises the question that probably bothers players more than anyone else: why does almost every major game ship with Russian text and voice, while languages spoken by tens of millions of people, often in countries with strong, gamer-dense markets, get skipped entirely?

Poland is a good illustration, if not the only one. It has one of the highest rates of PC gamers per capita in Europe, second only to Canada, with 16 to 20 million players and a market worth roughly 1.29 billion euros in 2022. And yet Polish localization is routinely dropped from major releases, most famously in 2015, when Konami shipped Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain with Russian language support and no Polish option at all, a decision that still gets brought up by Polish players a decade later.

The honest answer is mostly economic, not political, and that is the uncomfortable but accurate part of this. Russian is spoken natively by about 150 million people, and by as many as 260 to 410 million total once second-language speakers are counted. It carries official status not just in Russia, but in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and it remained widely understood across Ukraine before the war. For a publisher, adding Russian localization is not really a decision to "serve Russia." It is a decision to serve the entire Russian-speaking post-Soviet space plus a large global diaspora, a market measured in the hundreds of millions. Polish, despite Poland's strength as a single national market, has around 45 million speakers worldwide, 38 million of them inside Poland, and no other country uses it as an official language. That is not a moral justification for the decision. It is the mechanism behind it: localization budgets follow linguistic reach, not national borders or the political conduct of the government that happens to use that language officially. The same math plays out for other mid-sized European languages that get passed over in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason.

This is also why outrage aimed at Oriflame or Avon never touched Steam or the big publishers still shipping Russian voice packs. It is not that cosmetics do more harm than video games. It is that some industries are visible, personal, and easy to boycott, a lipstick has a face you can post about, while others are structural and abstract, nobody boycotts a language option in a settings menu. Russia's share of global games revenue, worth several hundred billion dollars a year, is genuinely small, somewhere around 1 percent, which paradoxically made it cheap and easy for major publishers to make a clean, symbolic exit. That calculation never applied to the distribution infrastructure itself, or to the hundreds of smaller, non-Western studios nobody was monitoring the way people monitored a cosmetics brand.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian ledger

The corporate story is messy. The humanitarian response to the war, at least on the ground in the countries bordering Ukraine, tells a cleaner story, and it is worth stating plainly rather than rounding up.

Across the European Union, more than 4.38 million people from Ukraine held temporary protection status as of May 2026, according to Eurostat. Germany hosts the largest number in absolute terms, around 1.28 million. Poland, as the frontline neighbor and the main crossing point, recorded 15.47 million border crossings from Ukraine since February 24, 2022, a figure that counts trips, not unique individuals, since many people crossed back and forth repeatedly. At the peak in the first months of the war, more than a million refugees were present in Poland at once. Cumulative registrations in Poland's PESEL-UKR system, created by a special law passed in March 2022, reached 1.9 million people by early 2025, though the system continuously removes anyone who has since left the country or registered elsewhere in the EU.

By mid-2026, the number of people still holding temporary protection status in Poland had settled at just under a million, the second-highest figure in the EU after Germany. Counting both war refugees and Ukrainians who were already living in Poland as economic migrants before 2022, Poland's Office for Foreigners puts the total Ukrainian population in the country at 1.8 to 1.9 million in 2026, a figure that supports the widely repeated claim of "nearly two million," provided one understands it includes people who arrived well before the invasion. Among the refugee population specifically, women make up roughly 57 percent overall and about 70 percent of adults, since most men of conscription age remained in Ukraine under mobilization law. Poland's central bank estimated around 329,000 minors holding Ukrainian passports among the refugee population. From the earliest days of the war, refugees in Poland had access to the labor market, healthcare, education, and social benefits under the March 2022 special law, an unusually fast and broad response by European standards. New rules taking effect in March 2026 have begun tapering some of these protections, and anyone whose PESEL UKR status rests only on a self-declaration now has until August 31, 2026, to confirm their identity with a passport in order to keep it, ahead of the law's statutory expiration on March 4, 2027.

What this actually adds up to

None of this means the corporate boycott of Russia was meaningless. Real companies took real losses, real assets were frozen or handed over for a fraction of their value, and the wave of public pressure in 2022 genuinely accelerated hundreds of decisions that would otherwise have dragged on for years. But the tidy version of the story, where the world punished the villains and everyone else left with clean hands, is wrong on both ends. Most of the companies tracked by the Kyiv School of Economics never left Russia at all, and almost none of them faced the kind of public shaming that hit a handful of consumer brands, simply because they are not household names the way a lipstick or a soda is. A flagship national retailer in Poland ran, according to an independent investigation and an ongoing regulatory case, essentially the same maneuver as a Swedish cosmetics firm. And the video game industry, one of the largest entertainment sectors on the planet, never became the target of a comparable campaign, even though its central distribution platform never formally left Russia, runs an annual festival celebrating Russian-made games, and bent to a Russian censorship demand rather than risk losing access to ten million accounts.

Not because anyone cares more about lipstick than about video games. Because online outrage flows toward whatever has a visible target and a simple story, a brand you can name, not toward wherever the actual money is moving.

Sources:
1. KSE Institute, "565 international companies have fully exited Russia, but 55% of foreign companies still operate in Russia" (July 2026): https://kse.ua/about-the-school/news/565-international-companies-have-fully-exited-russia-but-55-of-foreign-companies-still-operate-in-russia-kse-institute/
2. KSE Institute, SelfSanctions / LeaveRussia tracker: https://kse.ua/selfsanctions-kse-institute/
3. KSE Institute, digest dated July 9, 2026: https://institute.kse.ua/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/leave-russia_regular-digest_09_07_26_eng_july_2026.pdf
4. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, "Western businesses backtrack on their Russia exit plans" (2024): https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/western-businesses-backtrack-on-their-russia-exit-plans-due-to-bureaucratic-obstacles-imposed-by-govt/
5. Dagens.com, reporting on the Financial Times, "Western Companies Backtrack on Russian Exit Plans" (May 2024): https://www.dagens.com/news/western-companies-backtrack-on-russian-exit-plans
6. European Parliament, parliamentary question E-001203/2024 on Oriflame: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2024-001203_EN.html
7. Global Cosmetics News, "Oriflame named and shamed for allegedly continuing operations in Russia" (2024): https://www.globalcosmeticsnews.com/oriflame-named-and-shamed-for-allegedly-continuing-operations-in-russia/
8. Interfax, "Oriflame suspending investments in Russia" (2022): https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/77214/
9. The Moscow Times, "Cosmetics Brand Avon Halts Russia Exit" (December 2023): https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/12/27/cosmetics-brand-avon-halts-russia-exit-reports-a83575
10. Retail Dive, "Avon Products files Chapter 11 bankruptcy" (2024): https://www.retaildive.com/news/avon-products-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy-escape-talc-lawsuits/724229/
11. NewBeauty, "Avon Files for Bankruptcy" (confirms international business excluded from the filing): https://www.newbeauty.com/view/avon-files-for-bankruptcy
12. CosmeticsDesign, analysis of Avon's 2023-2024 revenue decline: https://www.cosmeticsdesign.com/Article/2024/11/26/financial-focus-avon-bankruptcy-analysis-industry-impact/
13. Money.pl, on the Hindenburg Research report about LPP (2024): https://www.money.pl/gielda/hindenburg-research-oskarza-lpp-o-ukrywanie-dzialalnosci-w-rosji-7006172752321408a.html
14. dlahandlu.pl, "LPP moving toward a settlement with Poland's financial regulator" (2025): https://www.dlahandlu.pl/nonfood/lpp-na-drodze-do-porozumienia-z-knf-chodzi-o-sprzedaz-biznesu-w-rosji,156957.html
15. LPP SA, official statement on its Russia exit process: https://www.lpp.com/en/press-releases/lpp-explains-its-exit-process-from-the-russian-market/
16. Wikipedia, LPP (company): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPP_(company)
17. rp.pl, on Russia's proposed 5 percent levy on gaming platforms: https://cyfrowa.rp.pl/gry-e-sport/art35695771-kreml-wycisnie-zagraniczne-platformy-zbiera-pieniadze-na-patriotryczne-gry
18. Novaya Gazeta Europe, "Games platform Steam removes more than 260 banned items in Russia" (2024): https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/10/15/games-platform-steam-removes-more-than-260-banned-items-in-russia-en-news
19. ppe.pl, on Steam complying with Kremlin pressure (2024): https://www.ppe.pl/news/354571/steam-ugina-sie-pod-presja-kremla-ponad-260-gier-znika-z-platformy.html
20. PCElite, on Steam's roughly 10 million Russian users: https://pcelite.pl/steam-kasuje-zakazane-w-rosji-gry/
21. Steam Community, "Please Reconsider the 'Games From Russia 2025' Sale": https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/601903308219620192/
22. Root-Nation, on the 2025 Games From Russia festival and GSC Game World's "undesirable organization" designation: https://root-nation.com/en/news-en/en-steam-games-from-russia-2025-wtf/
23. TAdviser, data on the Russian video game market and developer revenue: https://tadviser.com/index.php/Article:Computer_and_video_games_(Russian_market)
24. IMARC Group, Russia Gaming Market Size Report: https://www.imarcgroup.com/russia-gaming-market
25. 300gospodarka.pl (Polish Economic Institute), on the size of Poland's gaming market: https://300gospodarka.pl/news/ile-jest-wart-rynek-gier-wiecej-niz-cala-branza-filmowa-ale-graczy-w-polsce-ubylo
26. UF GAMES S.A., data on the number of gamers in Poland and the PC market: https://ufgames.pl/spolka/otoczenie-rynkowe/
27. Wikipedia, Russian language, speaker figures: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C4%99zyk_rosyjski
28. dobrewiadomosci.net.pl, on the number of Polish speakers worldwide: https://dobrewiadomosci.net.pl/75689-ile-osob-na-swiecie-mowi-po-polsku-ta-liczba-moze-zaskoczyc/
29. Demagog.org.pl, fact-check on the number of Ukrainian refugees in Poland: https://demagog.org.pl/wypowiedzi/ilu-uchodzcow-z-ukrainy-przyjela-polska/
30. Bankier.pl, citing Eurostat, on Ukrainian refugee numbers in Poland in 2026: https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/Juz-ponizej-miliona-Ubywa-uchodzcow-z-Ukrainy-w-Polsce-przybywa-ich-w-Niemczech-i-Wloszech-9166362.html
31. Money.pl, report on the number of Ukrainians in Poland and the PESEL-UKR registry: https://www.money.pl/gospodarka/ilu-jest-ukraincow-w-polsce-najnowszy-raport-zaskakuje-7127315017648928a.html
32. Dziennik Narodowy, compilation of ZUS/GUS/UdSC data on Ukrainians in Poland in 2026: https://dzienniknarodowy.pl/imigracja-w-polsce-dane-statystyki-2026/