“There are no orders, so why should people go to the office – in a month the holidays will either be extended or the employees will be returned from it,” an anonymous source told Forbes Russia. The business mag also reported that Chinese nationals working for Huawei Russia are still going to the office. The Forbes account agrees with a report in a Russian publication Izvestia which claimed that Huawei terminated new contracts for the supply of Russian mobile operators in early April. The news agency credited the freeze on sales to US sanctions banning the export of certain US technology to Russia. The ban on such exports was imposed on Russia as a punishment for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. U.S. officials have warned Chinese companies not to help Russia avoid sanctions, and have warned the world that it could also impose “secondary sanctions” on Chinese companies that defy sanctions against Russia. Huawei knows how damaging US sanctions can be: they have already damaged their smartphone business and made their servers so difficult to get rid of. If Huawei has laid off staff, El Reg suggests that its human resources team be among those on unplanned vacations – because the company continues to advertise employees in Moscow. At the time of writing, LinkedIn lists a dozen jobs in the Russian capital – including a concert as a core OS architect in Huawei’s IoT operating system, pre-sales professionals and even a design engineer specializing in programmable gate arrays and applications. will find their way into its fiber optic communication devices. The Register contacted Huawei for comment, but did not receive a response at the time of publication. ®

Updated on 10:13 UTC on 13 April 2022: Huawei cited a statement by Guo Ping’s rotating president in late March in response to a question about where Huawei would leave Russia to avoid the risk of additional sanctions: “We noticed that some countries and regions have issued certain policies, and they are complex and constantly changing. Huawei continues to carefully evaluate these policies. “