After the summit in Anchorage, Vladimir Putin said that Russia and the United States still had opportunities to cooperate in trade, energy, the digital sector, high technology, and space exploration. Commenting on the same meeting, Donald Trump also spoke in favor of working together. A week later, Putin described the talks in Alaska as “only the beginning of a full-scale restoration of our relations.”
Against this backdrop, discussion resumed in Russia about the possible return of Western business. The mass departure of foreign companies began almost immediately after February 24, 2022. The strongest wave came in the first year of the war, when the Russian authorities had not yet sharply complicated the sale of assets or the closure of businesses by foreign owners. Those restrictions were significantly tightened only in the second half of 2022.
According to the Leave-Russia.org project, about 100 US companies fully left the Russian market. The prospect of their return after Trump’s arrival in the White House was discussed especially actively in Russian media and on social networks. In spring 2025, those platforms saw the biggest wave of forecasts since 2022 about the imminent return of Western brands.
However, as Elina Rybakova, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Novaya-Europe, there is little reason to expect a large-scale reversal. In her words, departed American investors are not standing “at locked gates” waiting for permission to come back.
“There should be no expectation of a big return: each sector has its own logic for this,” Elina Rybakova said.
The expert stresses that legal and institutional problems for foreign businesses in Russia emerged long before 2022. Among the best-known examples, she cites Shell’s loss of control over the Sakhalin-2 project, the criminal case against Michael Calvey, IKEA’s land disputes, and corporate conflicts around British BP assets and its disputes with Russian oligarchs.
As a result, even amid political statements about possible rapprochement between Moscow and Washington, business reality remains far more restrained, experts say: for many American companies, the question of returning depends less on political signals than on accumulated risks and the specific conditions of each sector.