Google is set to shut down its Russia-based engineering team, pulling its team of more than 50 engineers, who will be able to transfer to Google offices elsewhere.

"We are deeply committed to our Russian users and customers, and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them," Aaron Stein, a Google spokesman wrote to Ars in an e-mailed statement.

Stein confirmed the move, which was first reported by The Information.

On Thursday, Google pulled the plug on Google News in Spain rather than pay Spanish publishers a licensing fee.

The move comes a few months after Russia passed a new law, taking effect in September 2016, that will require data held on Russian citizens to be kept in-country. The Kremlin and the Russian data protection authority known by its local acronym Roskomnadzor have used the law as a way to exert more pressure on Russian companies and foreign companies doing business in Russia, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others. Many Russia observers note that this law is likely to drive tech companies out of the country.

Earlier this year, Pavel Durov—the young founder of VKontakte, a Russian equivalent of Facebook—fled Moscow in favor of a self-imposed nomadic exile.

Over the last 14 years, Moscow has put forward three distinct Internet policy documents, which are essentially extensions of the "Information Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation" (2000), which has sentences like:

The state’s interests in the information sphere consist of creating conditions for harmonious Russian information infrastructure development… the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia, and political, economic and social stability; the interests of the state also consist in the unconditional maintenance of law and order and in the promotion of equal and mutually advantageous international cooperation.

In September 2011, Russia introduced the "Convention on International Information Security." This lengthy document inspired a second, related document, which has since received support from China, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan and has been put forward at the United Nations. It largely argues for national interests driving Internet policy.

The family of one of Google's cofounders, Sergey Brin, famously fled the Soviet Union when he was a child.