By Nina Prusac, lead author of the report Redefining “Responsible Exit” in the Context of the Crime of Aggression for the B4Ukraine Coalition and a PhD candidate in law at the University of Cambridge.
This article originally appeared in Sustainable Views, a service from the Financial Times
In November 2022, Rockwool explained why it would not leave Russia. The Danish insulation giant could not see how “handing over […] a well-functioning business to the Russian state or to a Russian competitor would contribute to ending the war more quickly.” Leaving would mean abandoning its employees and gifting the Kremlin, the company claimed. Rockwool waited nearly four years.
In January 2026, a presidential decree signed by Vladimir Putin disagreed. Rockwool’s four Russian factories were placed under administration by the Russian authorities. The company wrote down €469 million and conceded it was “not optimistic” about reversing the seizure. Within weeks, its former Russian subsidiary reportedly pledged 600 million roubles to a fund supplying drones and electronic-warfare equipment to Russian forces and announced it would resume cooperation with the military-industrial complex. The outcome Rockwool spent four years trying to avoid arrived anyway – only worse.
Compare Société Générale. The French bank announced its withdrawal in April 2022 and completed the sale of its Rosbank stake within weeks, absorbing a loss of around €3.2 billion. The exit was not flawless. The buyer’s links to a sanctioned oligarch drew justified criticism. But Société Générale severed its banking activities cleanly, early, while it still had the agency to choose how it left.
The lesson? In a war of aggression, time is the key variable.
Public debate has fixated on whether companies should stay or leave. The harder question is how a company leaves, and how fast. Here, the framework is clearer than some suggest. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, companies operating in conflict zones must conduct heightened due diligence, and where they cannot prevent involvement in serious abuses, they are expected to disengage.
In 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, a company might plausibly have said it needed time to assess the risk. In 2022, the situation was clearer, and many companies started leaving. Four years on, no claim of heightened due diligence survives scrutiny. Russia’s conduct in Ukraine is among the most thoroughly documented patterns of atrocity in any modern conflict. The recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights adds to the evidentiary weight, noting mass civilian casualties, forced deportations, torture, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. A company cannot credibly say it does not know.
This forces a wider view of who is harmed. Corporate human rights assessments traditionally look inward, to employees, suppliers and the surrounding community. But economic activity that sustains an aggressor state’s fiscal and technological capacity reaches far beyond this closed circle. The relevant stakeholders include the Ukrainian civilians killed and displaced by a war that the state can afford to wage, partly due to foreign businesses still in the market. The Kyiv School of Economics and B4Ukraine estimate that foreign firms still in Russia have paid roughly $60 billion in taxes since the invasion. In a war economy, where state revenue is fungible, ordinary tax compliance becomes a foreseeable contribution to the machinery of war. Time itself becomes a form of complicity.
That wider lens reframes what “responsible exit” requires. It is not a licence to remain indefinitely while citing the harms of leaving. Many companies that stayed (including Rockwool) claimed they were protecting Russian employees. Yet once Russian law compelled businesses to assist with military mobilisation, that argument inverted. Now, companies can (and have been) compelled to deliver conscription notices to their own staff. In contrast, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Accenture and Alphabet all demonstrated that workers can be protected through exit. They offered relocating staff, continuing employment abroad, supporting families who wished to leave. Protecting people and leaving were never mutually exclusive.
A genuine responsible exit therefore hinges on two things: it is time-bound and rights-based. It reduces foreseeable harm immediately. It refuses to transfer value or capability to the aggressor, which is why SAP and Microsoft cut off support and updates rather than leave usable systems behind, and why Cisco reportedly destroyed unsold equipment. And it supports affected workers as a complement to departure, not a substitute for it.
The companies still in Russia, Raiffeisen Bank International foremost among them, still operating the largest Western financial platform and describing exit as beyond its control, are facing similar fates to Rockwool. Perpetually delaying the exit has preserved neither their assets nor agency. It eroded both while deepening their entanglement in a war economy that the rest of the world is trying to isolate.
The choice was never between a clean and a messy exit. It was between leaving on your own terms and having them dictated by the Kremlin. More fundamentally, between ending contributions to atrocities and prolonging them. Every month of delay deepens both the harm to people and the harm to the company itself. For the companies that remain, the window to choose is still open – but it is closing.