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What I don’t understand is there must be tonnes more Russian maintainers and contributors to this? What’s the score there?

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That's because the sanctioned entities are individual Russian companies on the OFAC list, not Russian citizens generally. All of the initial media reporting (speculation, really) turned out to be wrong (because of deliberate non-transparency on the part of Torvalds, in his public statements).

https://lwn.net/ml/all/7ee74c1b5b589619a13c6318c9fbd0d6ac7c3...

- "We finally got clearance to publish the actual advice: If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file."

I am pretty sure they just grep'd mail.ru, added a couple of other sus entries and pushed the commit. It's painfully obvious if you take a look at the file https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/MAINTAINERS, there are no mail.ru addresses left (it's a public email service akin to gmail). The next day someone woke up Linus and told him to answer the public and he came up with the usual FU. That's basically all.

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