Apple Halts Product Sales in Russia

Apple paused sales of its physical products in Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, the company announced on Tuesday.

The announcement marks Apple’s latest step after imposing limitations for Apple Pay in Russia, in addition to pulling some Russian news apps from the App Store outside the country.

In its statement, Apple said it “stopped all exports into our sales channel in the country” last week in response to the violence.

Moreover, the company noted that it will “continue to evaluate the situation” and that it’s communicating with the governments of affected countries.

Last week, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov published an open letter to Apple, urging the company to cut Russia off from its products, services, and App Store.

In the letter, Fedorov said he is “sure that such actions will motivate youth and active population of Russia to proactively stop the disgraceful military aggression.”

Although the statement did not mention any planned actions regarding the App Store, the company indicated  that it’s turned off traffic and live incident reports in Apple Maps in Ukraine as a safety measure.

On the other hand, Google temporarily disabled map traffic data features in Ukraine to protect users’ safety amid the Russian invasion.

The map features use anonymous location data collected from Android smartphones to show where there are traffic delays on roads and which businesses and stores are busy.

Experts believe that such data could offer insight into the progress of the invasion.

One open-source intelligence (OSINT) expert pointed out that he saw signs of the Russian invasion last Thursday after spotting unusual “traffic jams” at the Ukrainian border on Google Maps.

“I think we were the first people to see the invasion,” OSINT expert, Professor Jerry Lewis of the Middlebury Institute, told Motherboard last week. “And we saw it in a traffic app.”