Arbitrary imprisoning or harming the employees of Google or Apple would likely result in many other western IT firms closing their offices and leaving, that would be a very stupid thing to do for the Russian government. So I don’t think such threats could have been real (but I guess you can’t really count on authoritarian regimes not doing something completely irrational).
I’m not denying these threats were issued, but actually following them through would be a very irrational thing to do. So it’s probably just a bluff. Of course it doesn’t really matter that much since Google/Apple were going to comply with their requests anyway.
Autocratic leaders can get pretty irrational in their quest of preserving power down to the point of harming what seems to be their interests in major ways.
It’s not an all or nothing outcome. And I’m not talking about Google or Apple leaving. There are many companies which have dev offices in Russia, they would be less likely to hire new employees in Russia if they believed they can be arbitrarily imprisoned for random reasons.
Just look at what’s happening in Belarus in the last year (IT companies started fleeing to neighboring countries)
