MOSCOW — Sanat Parmanova arrived at Moscow’s flagship McDonald’s just off Pushkin Square on Thursday evening as a woman on a mission. Her friend Svetlana Toktorbayeva was carrying a takeout bag of wings from KFC, but Ms. Parmanova had a different dinner in mind: a double cheeseburger, country-style fries, cheese sauce and a medium Coke, no ice.

Alas, it seemed politics had denied her craving.

The door was locked. The restaurant, which in some years has been the busiest McDonald’s in the world, was dark. A small sign said: “The public eating-establishment of fast service is closed for technical reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Ms. Parmanova’s shoulders drooped in a dejected harrumph.

“I heard that they were going to shut down McDonald’s restaurants because of the conflict with the U.S.,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

The Pushkin Square restaurant — a symbol of the thawing of the Cold War when it became the first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union, in 1990 — was one of four in Moscow that the Russian government ordered closed on Wednesday. The official reason given by Rospotrebnadzor, the country’s consumer protection agency, was “numerous violations of the sanitary code.”