'The right thing to do': McDonald's closes all restaurants in Russia
McDonald’s said it is temporarily closing all of its 850 restaurants in Russia in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine.
The burger giant said on Tuesday it will continue paying its 62,000 employees in Russia “who have poured their heart and soul into our McDonald’s brand".
But in an open letter to employees, McDonald’s President and CEO Chris Kempckinski said closing those stores for now is the right thing to do.
“Our values mean we cannot ignore the needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine,” Kempczinski said.
McDonald's was the first big Western fast-food chain to open a restaurant in the Soviet Union, after a summit between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan led to the USSR permitting joint ventures in 1987.
The burger chain opened its first restaurant in the Soviet capital in January 1990 — a joint venture between McDonald's Canada and Moscow City Council — beating its competitor Pizza Hut by several months.
The restaurant — the largest McDonald's in the world at the time — has not shut its doors since, bar a sanitary inspection closure in 2014.
The closure for "health and safety violations" was seen as an act of retaliation over US sanctions against the Kremlin for its annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and involvement in the war in the eastern region of Donbas. The restaurant, however, reopened after 90 days.
Now, Kempczinski said it is impossible to know when the company will be able to reopen its stores.
“The situation is extraordinarily challenging for a global brand like ours, and there are many considerations,” Kempczinski wrote in the letter.
Pressure has been mounting for McDonald's and other companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo that remain in Russia to pull
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