Because the war in Ukraine undermines the “McDonald’s Doctrine”. The flight of the big brands pushes Russia towards a USSR-style autarchy

When I arrived there as a correspondent for “Repubblica” in 1990, the first one had recently opened in Moscow McDonald’s. Success was instant: there were longer lines to buy Big Macs in the Pushkin Square restaurant than to visit Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square. It seemed like the transition between two eras, the victory of democratic capitalism over communism, which in fact had collapsed the year before in Eastern Europe and was to collapse the following year in the USSR.