Why There’s No McDonald’s in Belarus (2026)

I went looking for Belarus in the same January 2026 Big Mac Index CSV that doesn’t carry Russia anymore. Belarus has never been on it — the Economist never tracked it as a standalone data point — but I wanted to understand whether the country still had a McDonald’s at all in 2026, because that determines whether shadow pricing is even possible. The answer is no, McDonald’s left Belarus in 2022, and the path the local restaurants took after that is messier than what happened in Russia.

This is my working notes on the Belarus case for bigmacindex.app. It belongs to the same 2022 sanctions sub-cluster as Russia, but the ending is different.

The short answer

McDonald’s operated in Belarus from December 10, 1996 until March 2022, when it closed all 25 restaurants in the country alongside its broader Russia/Ukraine market response. The Belarus chain spent most of 2022 in a strange limbo — open, serving food, but operating without a name. In April 2023 the stores formally rebranded to Mak.by (Мак.бай), run by a local licensee called KSB Victory Restaurants. Then in January 2024 the Belarusian government seized Mak.by through the courts and resold it to an unnamed Belarusian buyer whose identity was removed from the official registry. The same buildings are still selling burgers in 2026. None of them are McDonald’s.

December 10, 1996: three stores in one day

Belarus’s McDonald’s launch is one of the more interesting opening-day stories in the company’s history. On December 10, 1996, three restaurants opened simultaneously in Minsk — one at the corner of present-day Independence Avenue and Lenin Street, one near the State Medical Institute, and one at Bangalore Square. Belarus was McDonald’s 100th country, and the simultaneous triple opening was a first for the brand (BelarusFeed retrospective; Reuters Archive).

The crowd was large enough that Minsk closed the central avenue from the Circus down to the main post office. Reuters’ field reporting at the time noted police clashes with students who’d come hoping for free food. The footage is worth pulling up if you have access to the archive — it captures the same post-Soviet “Western brand as cultural event” mood that the 1990 Pushkin Square opening had in Moscow, just six years later and with the political situation already drifting in a different direction.

1996–2022: a small but stable chain

McDonald’s never expanded aggressively in Belarus. By 2022 there were 25 restaurants, almost all in Minsk with a handful in regional centres like Brest, Vitebsk, Gomel and Mogilev (bne IntelliNews: The McDonald’s question in Belarus). At its peak the chain served around 10 million customers a year, which in a country of roughly 9 million people is essentially “everyone, occasionally.”

The Belarus operation was run as a master franchise rather than a corporate-owned chain. The local operator at the time of exit was KSB Victory Restaurants. This matters for what comes next: when McDonald’s Corporation pulled out, the physical assets, supply contracts and staff were already owned locally. There was no 850-store divestment package the way there was in Russia. There was a 25-store franchisee that suddenly needed a new identity.

2020 onwards: Lukashenko, sanctions, and the slow squeeze

The Belarus case can’t be told without the 2020 political backdrop. The disputed August 2020 presidential election, the protests that followed, and the brutal crackdown that followed those protests led to escalating EU, US, UK and Canadian sanctions (US State Department: Belarus Sanctions). These were largely targeted — individuals, state enterprises, the potash sector — and didn’t directly affect Western consumer brands operating in the country. McDonald’s continued to serve burgers in Minsk throughout 2020 and 2021.

What changed was the political risk calculus. Western companies were being asked, increasingly publicly, why they were still operating in a country whose security services had hijacked a Ryanair flight to arrest a journalist (May 2021) and was generally drifting toward open dictatorship. The reputational cost of staying was rising. McDonald’s stayed anyway. The trigger that broke the situation was not Belarus itself.

February–March 2022: the Ukraine war exit

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Belarus was not a passive bystander. Lukashenko allowed Russian forces to stage and launch attacks from Belarusian territory, which made Belarus a de facto co-belligerent for sanctions purposes. EU and US sanctions on Belarus expanded sharply through March 2022.

McDonald’s announced on March 8, 2022 that it would temporarily close all Russian restaurants. The Belarus chain was caught in the same response. On May 16, 2022, McDonald’s confirmed its permanent Russia exit (McDonald’s corporate statement, May 2022) and the Belarus operation was wound down in parallel, even though Belarus was a smaller, separately-franchised business. The 25 Belarusian stores closed, the McDonald’s branding came down from the signage, and the franchisee — KSB Victory Restaurants — was left with the buildings.

The strange in-between: November 2022 to April 2023

Here’s the part of the story that has no equivalent in Russia. The original plan, announced in November 2022, was for the Belarus stores to rebrand as Vkusno i tochka, the same successor brand running the former Russian McDonald’s network (Interfax, November 2022). For a few weeks it looked like Belarus would simply become a regional franchise of the Russian operation.

That deal collapsed. The reasons reported at the time were a mix of Vkusno i tochka not wanting cross-border legal exposure and the Belarusian operator wanting to keep its independence. From late November 2022 until April 2023, the restaurants operated without a public brand name at all. Signage was stripped to a generic green sign reading “We are open!” in Russian. Menus dropped McDonald’s-trademarked product names. The chain effectively spent five months as a no-name fast-food operation that everyone knew used to be McDonald’s.

On April 18, 2023, the chain formally rebranded as Mak.by (bne IntelliNews: Ex-McDonald’s outlets in Minsk rebrand to Mak.by). The name is a calculated piece of branding: “Mak” is the colloquial Russian/Belarusian abbreviation for McDonald’s, and “.by” is the Belarusian country domain. It’s a “we are not McDonald’s but we know exactly what you think when you see us” name.

January 2024: the state takes Mak.by

The story doesn’t end at the rebrand. In January 2024 the Belarusian government moved against Mak.by through the courts, alleging “unfriendly actions against Belarus” by its foreign-linked owners. KSB Victory Restaurants had two ultimate owners through Singapore-registered entities: Belarusian businesswoman Victoria Danko, and Kazakh businessman Kairat Boranbayev (separately detained in Kazakhstan on embezzlement charges in 2024). The state moved both stakes into state-affiliated control.

Lukashenko publicly announced that the network had been sold to an unnamed “reliable Belarusian guy.” Ownership details were classified and removed from the official business register (belarus-nau.org analysis). As of 2026 the chain is still trading under the Mak.by name with the same menu, but the entity behind it is effectively opaque.

This is structurally different from the Russian Vkusno i tochka case. In Russia, the successor is privately held by a known franchisee (Alexander Govor) and operates at arm’s length from the state. In Belarus, the successor passed through a private rebrand and then into a state-controlled holding. That makes the price signal it generates harder to read.

Comparing to Vkusno i tochka

Same physical infrastructure, same recipes (in both cases the successor claims to have retained McDonald’s-era recipes and supply chains), same staff turning over the same fryers. The differences:

Scale: Vkusno i tochka has ~900+ stores across 150+ Russian cities. Mak.by has the original 25 (give or take), almost all in Minsk.
Ownership transparency: Vkusno i tochka has a named owner. Mak.by, since January 2024, does not.
International expansion: Vkusno i tochka has explored CIS expansion. Mak.by has not.
Brand strategy: Vkusno i tochka markets itself as a domestic replacement (“Tasty and that’s it”). Mak.by chose a name that explicitly preserves the McDonald’s mental association.

For PPP purposes, both function as shadow data. The Mak.by signal is narrower (25 stores vs ~900) but the urban-Minsk price level is probably more representative of Belarusian retail food prices than headline CPI is.

The Lukashenko-era political context

Belarus has been governed by Alexander Lukashenko continuously since 1994. The 2020 election crisis pushed the country into much closer alignment with Russia — economically, militarily, and now in terms of being subject to the same Western sanctions architecture. Western brands that left Russia in 2022 mostly left Belarus too, even where Belarus exposure was tiny. McDonald’s is the most visible example. IKEA, H&M and several others followed similar paths.

The political question of whether McDonald’s could return is essentially the question of whether Lukashenko’s government changes or normalises relations with the West. As of mid-2026 there is no public signal either way. The belarus-nau.org analysis I cited above characterises the country bluntly as “a zone of risk, instability, and economic disaster” from a foreign-business perspective — citing the Mak.by seizure itself as evidence that any returning Western brand would be exposed to the same kind of asset capture.

Shadow product: Mak.by Big Burger

The closest mental Big Mac analog on the Mak.by menu in mid-2026 is the Big Burger (Биг Бургер): a single chopped-beef patty, lettuce, tomato, three slices of Emmental cheese, onion, and a grill sauce, on a sesame bun. As of June 2026 it lists at 16.5 BYN on the official Mak.by catalog (mak.by/catalog/burgery/big-burger).

At the June 19, 2026 exchange rate of roughly 2.78 BYN per USD (Trading Economics BYN; Wise BYN/USD history), that converts to roughly $5.94 USD.

For comparison, the Double Big Burger — the closer structural match for a Big Mac, given the Big Mac’s two patties — is listed at 21.7 BYN, about $7.81 USD. The retail-price “Mak Burger” sits at 11 BYN (~$3.96), closer to a Quarter Pounder slot. I lead with the single-patty Big Burger because Mak.by clearly positions it as the brand’s hero menu item, which is the role the Big Mac plays on a McDonald’s menu.

Either way, this is not a cheap burger in absolute USD terms. $5.94 for a single-patty Mak.by burger sits well above the 2026 Big Mac Index entries for most Eastern European tracked countries. Some of that is genuine price level, some is the fact that Mak.by has limited competition in its segment and prices accordingly.

The Belarusian ruble

The BYN is a redenominated currency — Belarus knocked four zeros off the old “first ruble” in 2016 — and it has run a managed peg-like relationship with the Russian ruble for most of the post-2020 period. In 2026 the rate has bounced between roughly 2.72 and 3.05 BYN/USD, with mid-June 2026 sitting around 2.78 (National Bank of Belarus official rate).

The official rate is the rate I use, because unlike, say, Iran’s rial, Belarus does not currently have a wide official-versus-parallel spread that meaningfully distorts comparison. There is an informal market premium but it’s small (low single-digit percent), and most retail transactions clear at the official rate. That makes the Mak.by USD conversion reasonably trustworthy as a price signal, even if the underlying ruble is itself moving on Russian rather than purely Belarusian fundamentals.

What this means for the Big Mac Index

Belarus has never been in the Economist’s index, so unlike Russia there is no historical Big Mac time series to lose. What the country gives us is a shadow data point: a successor chain on McDonald’s former infrastructure, with a hero burger at a knowable BYN price, in a currency with a transparent official rate. The signal is narrower than Russia’s because the store count is small and the ownership opacity makes it harder to know how prices are being set. But for someone trying to estimate Belarusian retail PPP in 2026, ignoring Mak.by is worse than including it with the caveats.

The broader pattern this fits into — using successor brands and adjacent products to extend PPP analysis beyond the 54 countries the Economist actually tracks — is what most of the bigmacindex.app methodology page is about, and what the Why PPP fails: Big Mac limits writeup tries to be honest about. Belarus is a textbook borderline case: not in the index, never will be at current trajectory, but not informationally empty either.

FAQ

How is Mak.by different from Russia’s Vkusno i tochka? Same playbook (former McDonald’s franchisee operates ex-stores under a new brand), much smaller scale (25 vs ~900 stores), and a different ownership trajectory. Mak.by passed through a private rebrand in April 2023 and then into state-affiliated control in January 2024 after a government seizure. Vkusno i tochka has stayed in the hands of its original buyer.

Could McDonald’s return to Belarus if Lukashenko changes course? In principle, yes — but the practical barrier is now higher than it was in 2022. The January 2024 state seizure of Mak.by signalled that even the local successor was not safe from arbitrary expropriation. A returning Western brand would be negotiating with a government that has demonstrated it will take assets when politically convenient. That’s a much bigger deterrent than the original sanctions question.

Is there a black-market BYN/USD rate I should be using instead? For most retail price comparisons, no. The official rate and the informal cash rate were within a few percent of each other through 2024-2026, and the National Bank of Belarus has so far avoided the kind of dual-rate regime that distorts comparisons in Iran or pre-2024 Argentina. If that changes, the Mak.by USD figure on this page will need an adjustment caveat.

Who actually owns Mak.by now? Officially: a Belarusian buyer whose name was deliberately withheld from the public register when Lukashenko announced the sale. Practically: a state-affiliated holding under indirect Belarusian government control. The previous owners — Victoria Danko (Belarusian) and Kairat Boranbayev (Kazakh, via Singapore-registered entities) — were stripped of ownership through the January 2024 court action.

Are the original Minsk McDonald’s locations still operating as Mak.by? Mostly yes. The three 1996 opening-day locations — on Independence Avenue, near the State Medical Institute, and at Bangalore Square — were all reported still operating as Mak.by in 2025. The full 25-store network has stayed largely intact through the rebrand and the state takeover, though menu lineup has narrowed slightly compared to McDonald’s-era offerings.

Sources used in this article

For the closest sister case, see my Russia writeup. For other sanctions-driven absences, see Iran and Cuba. For where this kind of shadow-data analysis fits into the broader index, see the 2026 Big Mac Index breakdown.

Want to see where McDonald’s is? Big Mac Index data → · Methodology → · Spot a mistake? Email me at [email protected].