Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ban on the iPhone, government officials have quadrupled iPhone sales in the first nine months of 2024, according to Vedomosti, a Russian business newspaper.

The media outlet reported that sales of Russian iPhones purchased by government officials reached 6,879,899 rubles, compared to 1,642,166 for the same period in 2023.

Putin banned government officials from using iPhones in spring 2023 due to alleged security concerns and asked them to switch to using phones running the Android operating system, Russia’s Aurora system or a Chinese software.

News week contacted the Russian government for comment via a form on its website.

The order was issued by Sergei Kirienko, first deputy chief of staff of the presidential executive office. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov neither confirmed nor denied the report at the time, although he said Russian officials could not use smartphones for their work because they were “too vulnerable to processing classified information.

Government agencies the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Federal Protective Service (FSO) imposed the ban after reportedly discovering a specific security issue involving a “US intelligence operation using a virus on Apple mobile devices” and discovered that several thousand phones were infected. .

The investigation also reportedly revealed that U.S. intelligence operations viruses targeted not only Russian users, but also foreign users who used SIM cards registered with “diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia.”

Government ministries and companies that banned the purchase and use of Apple mobile phones included the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Transportation and many others again, according to Oreanda News.

Even if the ban applied to the entire government, some would have been exempted from complying with the rule and had their contracts maintained due to “the impossibility of respecting the ban on the admission of software from of foreign countries for the purposes of public procurement for the State and municipalities. needs.”

Despite the government’s rapid growth in iPhone sales, it was not the most popular phone purchased and was outpaced by devices from South Korea’s Samsung, China’s Realme and Xiaomi, and Google.

Russian retailers including M.Video-Eldorado and mobile network operator MTS have launched pre-sales of the latest model, the iPhone 16, with deliveries starting next week, according to Reuters.

This follows Apple stopping sales in Russia in 2022 after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and services such as Apple Pay and Apple Maps were also limited.

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