Why Doesn’t Russia Have McDonald’s? (2026)

I went looking for Russia in the January 2026 Big Mac Index CSV and it wasn’t there. That used to be a data point I cared about, because the Russian Big Mac was one of the only burgers in the index that could move 30% in either direction inside a single quarter — a sort of canary for the ruble. As of 2026, the canary is gone.

This article is my notes on why, what replaced it, and how I’m thinking about Russia in the dataset for bigmacindex.app.

The short answer

McDonald’s operated in Russia from January 31, 1990, when it opened a single store on Moscow’s Pushkin Square, until May 16, 2022, when the company announced it was exiting the country permanently after the invasion of Ukraine. At the time of exit, McDonald’s operated roughly 850 restaurants across Russia. The stores were sold to a local licensee, Alexander Govor, and reopened in June 2022 under the new brand Vkusno i tochka (“Tasty and that’s it”). The Big Mac Index has not tracked Russia since 2021.

The 1990 opening: 30,000 people in line

The Pushkin Square store is one of the most-photographed restaurant openings of the 20th century. On January 31, 1990, with the Soviet Union still nominally intact, McDonald’s served more than 30,000 customers on opening day. Lines stretched around the square. CNBC’s 2022 obituary for the brand called it “the end of an era for American soft power” — and that framing was not exaggeration; the original opening was treated by both sides as a Cold War cultural event (CNBC, May 2022).

Between 1990 and 2022, McDonald’s grew to roughly 850 restaurants across Russia. The Russian Big Mac was a fixture in The Economist’s index from the mid-1990s, and it was almost always one of the cheapest in Europe — a reliable signal that the ruble was undervalued against the dollar on a PPP basis.

The 2022 exit

On March 8, 2022, McDonald’s temporarily closed all of its Russian stores after the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. On May 16, 2022, the company announced it would exit the country permanently and divest its 850+ restaurants (McDonald’s corporate statement, May 2022; NPR, May 16, 2022).

On May 27, 2022, McDonald’s confirmed the sale of its Russian business to Alexander Govor, an existing Siberian franchisee who had operated 25 McDonald’s outlets since 2012. The new brand, Vkusno i tochka, opened its first store — the same Pushkin Square location — on June 12, 2022.

Shadow data: what Vkusno i tochka tells us

Here’s where it gets interesting for a PPP project. Vkusno i tochka is the same physical infrastructure: the same buildings, the same fryers, the same supply chain (minus a few branded inputs), the same staff in most cases. The flagship double-patty burger is now called Big Hit, and as of early 2026 it’s reported to sell for roughly ₽169–195 depending on city (eathealthy365 price guide, 2026; Young Pioneer Tours 2026 guide).

At the May 18, 2026 exchange rate of roughly 72.83 RUB per USD (Trading Economics, May 2026), that converts to:

Big Hit (low end, ₽169): ~$2.32 USD
Big Hit (high end, ₽195): ~$2.68 USD

For comparison, the last Russian Big Mac price published by The Economist (January 2022) was ₽135 at an exchange rate of roughly 78 RUB/USD — about $1.74. So in USD terms the burger is up roughly 30–55% in four years, mostly driven by ruble inflation rather than ruble strength. The ruble has actually strengthened modestly against the dollar over the past year (Trading Economics).

[TODO: verify Big Hit January 2026 official menu price from vkusnoitochka.ru directly — current sources are secondary.]

I treat Vkusno i tochka as shadow data: not strictly comparable to a Big Mac (different brand, different supply chain), but the closest continuous-product proxy that exists. It’s not in the Economist’s CSV, and probably never will be. But for someone trying to estimate Russian PPP in 2026, ignoring it is worse than including it with a caveat. I’m thinking about whether and how to publish this as a separate column on bigmacindex.app.

How many Vkusno i tochka restaurants now?

Reports for early 2026 vary between roughly 885 and 970+ locations across 150+ Russian cities (Wikipedia: Vkusno i tochka; bne IntelliNews). That’s more than McDonald’s ever ran in Russia. The chain has also started looking at foreign expansion in CIS markets (TASS, 2025).

[TODO: get an authoritative single-source 2026 count from Vkusno i tochka’s own investor materials.]

What this means for PPP

If you’re modelling Russian purchasing power in 2026 and you stop at “Russia isn’t in the Big Mac Index,” you’ll under-estimate how much information is actually available. The post-McDonald’s successor brand serves an almost-identical product to a price-sensitive urban consumer, and its price moves track ruble inflation more cleanly than headline CPI does in some quarters.

That’s the broader pattern I’m trying to capture on bigmacindex.app — the index covers 54 countries, but the idea of PPP via a standardised burger applies to many more. I cover the methodology I use for borderline cases on the about page.

Iceland is another case where a former McDonald’s market still has rich pricing data through its successor chain (read my Iceland writeup →). Bolivia is the inverse case: McDonald’s left in 2002 and nothing branded replaced it, so the shadow-data trick doesn’t work (Bolivia writeup →).

Sources used in this article

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