Dana Milbank wrote about the companies that have stopped making money in Russia to protest its invasion of Ukraine and its ruthless attacks on civilian targets. And those who didn’t.
Milbank said that all of us can help Ukraine by refusing to patronize the businesses still operating in Russia. Zelensky asked this of us when he spoke to Congress yesterday.
Milbank writes:
Zelensky made another ask on Wednesday morning, and it’s something all Americans can help with. We can stop buying the products of businesses that continue to fund Vladimir Putin’s war machine, even after its full horrors — indiscriminately targeting civilians, murdering children — are obvious to the world.
“All American companies must leave Russia. … Leave their market immediately, because it is flooded with our blood,” the young leader said, asking lawmakers “to make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny that they use to destroy our people in Ukraine, the destruction of our country, the destruction of Europe. … Peace is more important than income.”
Most American companies get that. Some 400 U.S. and other multinational firms have pulled out of Russia, either permanently or temporarily, according to Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who has kept the authoritative list of corporate actions in Russia. Oil companies (BP, Shell, ExxonMobil) and tech companies (Dell, IBM, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter) led the way, and many others (McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola) eventually followed…
Those who want to stop Russia’s murderous attack against Ukraine should stop investing in or buying the products of these companies.
Koch Industries, whose owners gave to right-wing causes for years, is now financing Putin’s war. The people who make Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Quilted Northern toilet paper, Vanity Fair napkins and Georgia-Pacific lumber are abetting the spilling of Ukrainians’ blood.
Like Reebok shoes? They’re being used to stomp on Ukraine. Authentic Brands Group, which also owns Aeropostale, Eddie Bauer, Brooks Brothers and Nine West, among others, is in the hall of shame.
The source of his information about the companies that closed their doors and those who didn’t was a list compiled by Jeffrey Donnenfeld at Yale University. Check it out.
The worst malefactor is Koch Industries. The father of the Koch brothers did business with Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s. It’s business.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Putin is purposely targeting civilian enclaves and buildings that are housing refugees from the bombings and missiles. His oxygen needs to be sanctioned, this amoral monster does not care how many piles of corpses he amasses.
The Koch company empire was founded by its namesake, Fred C. Koch, in 1940 after he developed an innovative crude oil refining process. Fred C. Koch died in 1967 and his majority interest in the company was split amongst his four sons.
By 1927, Koch developed an efficient thermal cracking process to create gasoline from crude oil. Unfortunately, it infringed on his employer’s patents, so the only sale the company could make was to the Soviet Union, which didn’t recognize U.S. patent laws.
Working in Russia, the elder Koch helped build Stalin’s regime set up its oil refineries. He was then referred to Germany to build refineries for the Third Reich in Germany.
By the time World War II broke out in Europe, Koch returned to the U.S. with his Axis fortune to create Wood River Oil and Refining Company. This is the company that eventually became Koch Industries after Fred’s death in 1967 at the age of 67 during a hunting trip with his son David.
Soviet Union
Stalin
Third Reich in Germany
That was where Fred Koch made the money used to launch the family business empire — working for dictators, tyrants, monsters.
No wonder his two oldest sons, Charles and David, turned out to be monsters, too, explaining the next proven fact.
“(Koch Industries) is among the worst in toxic air pollution in the entire United States … and churns out more climate-changing greenhouse gases than oil giants Chevron, Shell and Valero.”
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jul/19/harry-reid/reid-right-claiming-kochs-produce-more-pollution-o/
At the Charles Koch Foundation site, more than 150 universities are identified as “partners”. Those “partners” could publicly rebuke Koch.
Rhetorically, do you think the religious universities who claim preservation of life is the most important reason to vote GOP, would lead the “partners” in condemning Koch?
Oh, boy….is it going to hurt when the sanctions start biting us too – as they already are. All these businesses not doing business in Russia…honestly, how long can they be without the incomes generated in Russia? Wonder what shareholders reactions are…
Peskyvera,
Why is your server in Europe? Where are you? I am in NYC.
Diane
Are you in Zurich?
pesky-
You and Putin suffer from the Napoleon complex
(Putin’s only 5′ 5″).
Russia is the U.S.’ 26th largest goods-trading partner. Goods exported to Russia- $5.8 bil.
Goods imported from Russia $22.3 bil.
In total, U.S. exports of goods and services – $2.53 trillion.
If Putin believed the Koch-funded think tanks about the U.S. and Ukraine, I can see why he’s falling short- no pun intended.
Linda, why do you think Putin is obsessed with showing off his physique, his muscles, his masculinity? Is it because he’s 5’5” and has to prove he is a “man?” Or something else?
What you said and,
a small rodent, with a bent for violence, failed to process that he was taking a bite out of a large coyote.
Sociopaths inaccurately assess risk, its an identifying characteristic.
The Russian people pay the price- it’s their history. The perpetual, disturbing gloom of Russians is rooted in cause.
Russia is importing Syrian mercenaries to serve as an occupying police force in Ukraine. Insane. It would take a million troops to hold Ukraine against its will. These clueless conscripts will be nothing but cannon fodder in Putin’s insane and criminal war.
Not only is Charles Koch keeping his private businesses going in Russia, he is also lobbying the United States government to take the most extremely isolationist stance possible.
which is odd given the fact that his father had planes fly over Stalin’s countryside, dropping leaflets.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, direct from the end of a long, long, long table in the bunker of one of the palaces that definitely doesn’t belong to Tsar Putin and view the world through the Magical Mirror of Vladimir, where everything becomes the opposite of what it is. The desire of Ukrainians to rule themselves becomes a longing to be liberated. (from themselves?) A freely elected democratic Jewish president whose family members fought against the Nazis and died in the Holocaust becomes a leader of fascists. Ukrainians decide that it’s a great idea to bomb their own breadlines, maternity wards, schools, and theatres because, of course, that’s what people do. Unprovoked war becomes a “special military operation.” Murdering civilians becomes humanitarian relief efforts. A desire to remove NATO from Russia’s borders becomes annexing a country with several NATO countries on its borders. And it all started with exercises that definitely weren’t preparation for an invasion of Ukraine being preparation for an invasion of Ukraine.
Followed by exercises in turning living Ukrainian children and grandmothers into dead Ukrainian children and grandmothers.
Putin, I hope to see you hanging from a girder like Mussolini, though in the best of all possible worlds, you would be handed over to the parents of the children you have killed.
It is not a surprise that Putin’s dog, Trump, would call any reality mentioned by reporters “fake news.” Or that the same lapdog so carefully bred by the FSB would name his social media platform “Truth Social.” I can imagine the conversation:
Don the Con: What should I call the new social media platform?
Tsar Vlad: Well, in the old days, we called the propaganda newspaper Pravda.
Don the Con: OK. Pravda it is.
Tsar Vlad: No, no, Donald. Pravda means “truth” in Russian.
Don the Con [trying to think]: OK. Sure. We’ll call it “Truth in Russian.”
Diane Ravitch,
Thank you for publishing this. Everyone needs to know this.
International Paper is on the blacklist. It’s headquartered in Memphis and one of our largest employer.
LG, Subway is also there…
It is a tragedy, of course, that ordinary Russians will suffer because of the sanctions, but Putin has brought this upon his country, and the rest of the world has no choice in the face of his criminality. I keep hoping that China, recognizing that it makes more sense for it to be a lawful actor internationally, will intervene to stop him. His invasion was a horrific miscalculation verges on, perhaps spills over into, insanity.
cx: and verges on
Forgive my outburst above. I do not want to see him go the way of Mussolini. I want to see him arrested by his own people and turned over for trial by the International Court of Criminal Justice.
Well, now that the two declining world powers are at each other’s throat, China will do what is best for herself. I doubt you can expect China to make a decision based on morale.
China will do what is good for China.
Yes.
There is good reason to blame the West for his actions today: the rest of the world did nothing when Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, and did nothing when he invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea in 2014, and did nothing when he seized the eastern region of Ukraine. He had good reason to believe we would not care if he seized the whole country.