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Google is closing its Russian engineering office, according to a report in The Information.

Google’s Russian engineers will be offered jobs in other countries or in other departments, the Financial Times noted. The company is not saying why it is shutting its Moscow engineering office, which focuses on Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store, but it said in a statement: “We are deeply committed to our Russian users and customers and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them.”

The move follows a series of new restrictions on internet activity in the country, ranging from requirements for popular bloggers to register themselves and abide by censorship limitations, to requirements for Wi-Fi hotspot users to log on with personal ID.

Perhaps most pertinently — unless the department’s shuttering is purely for business reasons — [company]Google[/company] has been ordered to store the data of its Russian users in Russian data centers, and also to comply with the bloggers register law. Russia’s security services have previously urged the use of locally developed encryption in the country’s data centers, suggesting that the move is tied to a desire to be able to access citizens’ personal information.