Source: AliExpress Russia, Alibaba's joint venture in the country that had ~1,000 employees before March, has laid off ~40% of staff since Ukraine's invasion
Nikkei Asia :
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after reporting showed Alibaba navigating sanctions on its AliExpress Russia partners while insisting it would not exit the country, the joint venture itself is shrinking: roughly 400 of its ~1,000 pre-war employees have been cut since the invasion, per Nikkei Asia. That tracks with the pressures Protocol documented at the outset — sanctioned JV partners, shipping delays, and a depreciating ruble crushing orders.
The Russia cuts also land inside a broader retrenchment: Alibaba had already cut 9,241 employees in the June quarter alone and let 4,375 go in January-March, with the AliExpress Russia reduction extending that pattern into its international arm.
First-order effects
- AliExpress Russia's workforce drops to roughly 600 people, leaving a skeleton team to run a marketplace whose JV partners are sanctioned and whose order volumes have fallen on shipping delays and ruble depreciation.
Second-order effects
- Alibaba's stated refusal to exit Russia now means operating a hollowed-out JV rather than a full marketplace — a middle path that keeps the asset without the cost base, while group-wide cuts of ~20K staff in both 2022 and 2023 squeeze the international business alongside the core.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sanctioned-market operations at Chinese and Western platforms converge on the same structure: minimal local headcount, degraded logistics, and a JV held for optionality rather than growth — a de facto retreat short of formal exit.
The trend: Global platforms are responding to the Russia sanctions regime not with exits but with deep staff and service reductions, shrinking to minimal-presence operations while retaining legal entities.