[joiguru]

There are two primary criticisms of this move in this thread:

C1) This is just hurting ordinary Russian citizens and serves no other purpose. I empathize strongly with the Russians. But I also empathize with the Ukrainians. Since Russia has nuclear weapons, the only thing rest of the world can do is impose sanctions. Sanctions work in the long run, but they take a long time to show effects. Ukrainians do not have a long time. All of these moves will cumulatively amplify the unrest among common Russian people, giving Putin less time to sit back and let his plan go to work. Will these be enough? Only time can tell. But ignoring the impact of secondary and tertiary effects for the primary negative effects is short sighted.

C2) This is just virtue signaling. Virtue signaling may be a component of this move, but this is business for Cogent. They make money moving data, and Russian money has lost a lot of its value. So I am not convinced this is just virtue signaling, there is definitely a business component.

[stefan_]

It's crazy I had to scroll all the way to here for someone to mention that Cogent sells interconnects and well Russian clients can't pay them now. If you don't pay, you don't get peering.

[NicoJuicy]

A third option would be that the firewall requirements are pretty severe and they don't want to contribute to that ( just mentioning)