Foreign companies that left Russia after the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine are now cautiously discussing a possible return. However, some never left. More than 11,000 Western-owned companies continue to operate in Russia, contributing an estimated $5 billion in annual tax payments to the Kremlin, The Insider has tallied. The countries with the most companies still active in Russia are the United States and Germany. Yet none of these businesses — nor any of the other foreign firms that have profited from the war — are in a hurry to devote their earnings towards Ukraine’s ongoing self-defense.
Donald Trump has been busy of late, resuming official contact with Vladimr Putin and kicking up a scandal with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. The American president’s actions have only further fueled discussions about the possibility of lifting sanctions, and several Western brands are showing increasing interest in returning to Russia. Russian media fueled speculation that Inditex — the Spanish fashion giant behind Zara, Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Stradivarius — was planning a comeback. The report about Inditex was later debunked, but South Korea’s Hyundai Motors appears more serious about resuming business, while Renault is also considering a return. Samsung, which suspended direct shipments, has already ramped up its advertising budget to promote smartphones in Russia.
The financial impact on Western companies that exited Russia varies, but for some, foregone revenues are counted in tens of billions of dollars. Russian officials claim that American businesses that exited the country have lost $300 billion over three years of war, while European companies lost an estimated €100 billion in just 18 months, according to the Financial Times. Some companies, however, chose to stay and avoid such losses. The Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company, for example, continues to profit in Russia through its subsidiary “Multon Partners,” which produces “Dobry Cola” (lit. “Kind Cola”) while retaining trademarks for Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta — brands it officially withdrew from the market.
The number of foreign-owned companies in Russia dropped from 29,000 in March 2021 to 19,000 by March 2024, according to a Kommersant report citing Kontur.Fokus research. However, The Insider’s analysis of SPARK-Interfax data suggests that as of early 2025, 14,200 companies in Russia had owners from Western nations, or 11,600 when excluding Cyprus-based parent companies (detailed methodology below).
Western-owned companies were defined as those with parent firms or direct ownership from EU nations, the European Economic Area, the UK, Switzerland, the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Japan. By early 2025, Russia had 14,200 registered companies linked to these countries.
This figure includes entities like Rosneft — a Russian company in which BP controls a 19.75% stake via BP Russian Investments Ltd (UK) — as well as Russian firms whose parent companies are registered in Cyprus. Due to Cyprus’s longtime status as an offshore haven, where distinguishing genuine foreign owners from Russian oligarchs is difficult, The Insider excluded all Cyprus-based firms from its analysis.
Since financial reports for 2024 have not yet been published for most companies as of March 2025, The Insider analyzed 2023 data using the average exchange rate of 85.163 rubles per U.S. dollar.
The total revenue of Western-owned (excluding Cyprus) companies in Russia amounted to 17.3 trillion rubles ($203 billion) in 2023, down from 23.6 trillion rubles in 2021, the last full year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis includes only companies that filed financial reports, covering about 80% of the total.
Total profits for these firms totaled 1.23 trillion rubles ($14.4 billion), with over half of this sum generated by two quasi-foreign companies — Rosneft and Russneft, the latter 31.28% owned by Swiss-based Rambero Holding AG.
Sectors where profits surged in 2023 compared to pre-war 2021 include pharmaceuticals, wholesale trade, machinery and industrial equipment, food production, construction materials, cosmetics and household chemicals, software development, hospitality (restaurants and hotels), and construction.
Plenty of individual companies benefited from this boom. For example, Swiss logistics firm InterRail Holding («Интеррейл Холдинг») tripled its revenue (from 1 billion to 3 billion rubles) after a dip in 2021, while French-owned cheese producer Bongrain Europa Vostok («Бонгрэн Европа Восток») saw growth of 100%. The revenue of German industrial equipment supplier AscoBloc Debag Rus («Аскоблок Дебаг Рус») increased by a factor of 5.5.
Part of this growth resulted from foreign competitors exiting Russia, allowing those that stayed to fill gaps in the market. For instance, in the banking sector, Austria’s Raiffeisenbank was one of the few large financial firms still processing transactions in dollars and euros, allowing it to hike fees and generate over half of Raiffeisen Group’s global banking profits. Despite pressure from the European Central Bank (ECB) to exit Russia, Raiffeisenbank is dragging its feet, pledging only to reduce its Russian loan portfolio by 65% by 2026.
Small and microbusinesses, particularly those involved in trade, saw explosive revenue growth — sometimes tenfold. Many of these firms likely played a role in rebuilding supply chains disrupted by sanctions.
As Andrei Yakovlev, an associate researcher at Harvard's Davis Center, explains: “To bypass sanctions, Russia heavily relies on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for foreign trade. Large corporations are easier to monitor, but there are tens of thousands of SMEs, making oversight nearly impossible. This has fueled the rapid rise of certain small businesses, particularly those involved in importing critical components for the defense sector and beyond. These intermediaries profit from the risk they assume, but identifying those facilitating sanctions evasion for military purposes is challenging.”
By remaining in Russia, Western-owned businesses are not only profiting from the war but also helping fund Russia’s military budget. The Insider estimates that their total tax contributions in 2023 reached approximately 500 billion rubles ($4.85 billion).
For context, Russia’s total non-oil-and-gas tax revenues in 2023 were 20 trillion rubles. The corporate income tax alone from these companies directly contributed at least 111 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) to the Russian war budget.
By remaining in Russia, Western-owned businesses are not only profiting from the war but also helping fund Russia’s military budget.
The largest taxpayer among foreign companies still operating in Russia is LLC Untygeyneft (ООО «Унтыгейнефть»), which paid 22.35 billion rubles in taxes. Half of this oil extraction company is owned by Canadian firm CanBaikal Resources Inc., while the other half belongs to billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev’s Neftisa. The company had to establish a Russian subsidiary in 2022 after a new law barred foreign companies from obtaining licenses for natural resource extraction.
A significant portion of tax revenues came from manufacturers of consumer goods and food producers — including Procter & Gamble, Mars, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo.
The German construction materials giant Knauf paid over 11.7 billion rubles in taxes in 2023, with an additional 2.3 billion rubles deferred to 2024. In November 2023, Ukraine added Knauf to its list of “war sponsors” due to its substantial tax contributions to the Russian budget. In 2024, the company became the focus of a journalistic investigation by German broadcaster ARD, which revealed that Knauf’s building materials were being used for construction in Russian-occupied Mariupol. The company’s press service responded by stating that it has no contracts with end-users and is not responsible for where its products ultimately end up.
Among the largest foreign taxpayers in Russia are: Universal Cigarette Manufactory (U.S.), a Kaliningrad-based tobacco producer; clothing retailers New Yorker (Germany) and Guess (The Netherlands and Switzerland); and pharmaceutical companies KRKA (Slovenia), FarmaMondo (Russia, Switzerland, Germany), and PUIG (France).
According to B4Ukraine, around 1,600 multinational corporations continued doing business in Russia and paid approximately $22 billion in taxes in 2023. B4Ukraine, along with the Kyiv School of Economics and the Squeezing Putin project, analyzed all foreign companies in Russia — including Asian firms — accounting for all forms of tax payments.
Their data indicates that 17 out of the 20 largest foreign taxpayers in Russia in 2023 hailed from countries whose governments support Ukraine. American companies led the list, paying $1.2 billion in corporate tax in 2023, while Germany followed in second place with $692.5 million.
Companies from countries whose governments support Ukraine were among Russia’s biggest taxpayers in 2023.
Foreign companies that chose to stay in Russia will see even higher tax bills moving forward. In 2025, the corporate tax rate in Russia will increase from 20% to 25%, meaning these firms will contribute even more to the country’s war economy.
Entities that have benefited from the conditions created by Russia’s full-scale invasion ought to share a greater proportion of their windfall with the victim of Putin’s attack, argues B4Ukraine. This includes those that formally back Kyiv. For example, as economists Howard Holland and Knut Anton Mørk point out, soaring natural gas prices in 2022-2023 resulted in approximately $111 billion in additional export revenues for Norway, based on the latest estimates from the country’s Ministry of Finance. Despite this, Oslo allocated only about $3.1 billion in its 2025 budget to support Ukraine, a figure the economists criticize as insufficient:
“Not only does Norway have the capacity to be making far more of a difference to the outcome of the war and the subsequent civilian reconstruction; it has an obvious moral obligation to do so. Given that its excess revenues are a direct consequence of Russia’s war, surely a greater share of them should go to those fighting and dying on the front lines to keep their country free.”
Norway’s boost in earnings thanks to the war represent about 6% of its sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, valued at $1.7 trillion — equivalent to $308,000 per Norwegian citizen.
However, not all economists agree with Holland and Mørk. Igor Lipsits, for one, argues that:
“War is not formally a force majeure event but an unpredictable risk, making it a complex issue. From an economic standpoint, a foreign company benefiting from wartime conditions is simply experiencing a favorable, albeit unexpected, turn of events. If a company profits due to external circumstances, it is not at fault and has no obligation to apologize. It sounds noble to say that those who profit from war should share with those who suffer. It's a nice moral position. But humans are fundamentally amoral and are not inclined to [follow] ethical rules. They follow them because it benefits them to do so. Humans are aggressive creatures and would gladly kill each other, but it is beneficial for them to live together and cooperate.”
Lipsits extends this logic to governments and corporations:
“If we see governments refusing to share their windfall gains with Ukraine, it’s simply a reflection of democratic governance. Politicians must answer to voters, who prioritize their own economic interests.
On the contrary, the fact that anyone is helping Ukraine at all is a moral miracle. The U.S. and Western Europe have no significant financial interests in Ukraine. If Ukraine were to disappear, their economies would not collapse. In fact, they are suffering due to trade disruptions with Russia. We should praise the Europeans for not abandoning Ukraine.
The real miracle is that they continue to support Ukraine despite these costs. That’s unprecedented. When World War II began, nothing like this happened. Czechoslovakia and Austria were abandoned, and only when Hitler invaded Poland did Britain step in.”
Lipsits emphasizes that corporate exits from Russia were not motivated solely by ethical concerns:
“Companies that left Russia feared consumer backlash in foreign markets. They calculated that staying in Russia could damage their global reputation and cost them more than they would earn. Take McDonald's, for example — it has faced multiple scandals in the past that hurt its sales. This was a purely economic decision. Now that fear is fading because global indifference to the Russia-Ukraine war is growing. Many companies are ready to return, and some, like [French supermarket chain] Auchan, never left.”
Ultimately, there are no legal mechanisms to compel businesses or governments profiting from the war to allocate part of their earnings to Ukraine, Lipsits concludes. Of course, public opinion still plays a role, but in the Western world, popular support for Ukraine is no longer as strong as it was in the early years of the war.