Amazon is suspending shipments to Russia and Belarus due to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the company announced in a blog post (via Bloomberg). It’s also barring access to Amazon Prime Video in Russia.
“Given the ongoing situation in Russia and Ukraine, we’ve taken additional actions in the region,” Amazon says in the post. “We’ve suspended shipment of retail products to customers based in Russia and Belarus.”
Amazon is also halting any new orders of the open-world MMO New World, the only game title it sells in Russia. A slew of other game companies, like EA Games, CD Projekt Red, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, and Epic Games, have suspended sales in the country as well. On Tuesday, Amazon’s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, stopped accepting new signups in Russia and Belarus.
In addition to Amazon, other major players like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Netflix, and PayPal have stopped doing business with Russia. Even if Amazon did keep its services online in Russia and Belarus, users would have a hard time making purchases — Visa and Mastercard shut down operations in the country, making any Russian-issued Mastercard or Visa cards useless for payments outside the country. To get around this major obstacle, Russian banks may start issuing cards that use China’s UnionPay system, which may allow Russians to make some overseas purchases.
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