The online retail giant cuts off service as punishment for Ukraine conflict
Online retail behemoth Amazon has stopped shipping retail products to customers in Russia and Belarus, the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday. It will also no longer stream Prime content to customers in Russia, and declared it will no longer take new Russian or Belarusian customers for Amazon Web services or allow anyone from those countries to become third-party sellers.
The single game – ‘New World’ – that Amazon sells in Russia will no longer be taking new orders, either.
All this is a major contrast to what Amazon is doing for Ukraine, including donating $5 million to “support those impacted,” matching the donations of “over 10,000 employees,” and partnering with a swarm of NGOs to ferry the hefty fundraising sums to Ukraine, where it is supposed to end up in the hands of the aid groups Save the Children and the Red Cross.
Jeff Bezos’ empire doesn’t have any data centers, infrastructure, or offices in Russia, as the company’s own statement pointed out, so apparently it didn’t have many employees to lay off, and it’s not clear how much business the company actually did with Russian customers – even during the pandemic, when Amazon made up fully half of online shopping dollars spent in the US, Russians found lower prices, easier payment processing and better selection with domestic online retailers.
The conflict in Ukraine may sideline Amazon’s chances of ever capturing the Russian market if it stays out of the country for the duration. Ozon, a Russian e-commerce site that has been termed the “Russian Amazon,” was so successful after a year of pandemic lockdowns it began trading on American stock exchanges before the financial sanctions levied in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to trade in the US as of late last month, but the company – as well as competitors Wildberries and Yandex – continue to do e-commerce in Russia.
RT (Russia Today) is a state-owned news organization funded by the Russian government. The information provided by this news source is being included by the Libertarian Hub not as an endorsement of the Russian government, but rather because it is being actively censored by Big Tech, Western governments and the corporate press. During times of conflict it is imperative that we have access to both sides of the story so we can form our own opinions, even if both sides are spewing their own propaganda. The censorship of RT, despite likely being a propaganda outfit for the Russian government, reduces our ability to hear one side of the conflict. For that reason, the Libertarian Hub will temporarily republish the RSS feed from RT. Visit https://rt.com
