Last week, the Russian consumer authority announced that it would shut down several McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, including that famous flagship. The authority cited health-code violations, but it has long been known to wield its power almost exclusively to political ends: It banned wine imports from Georgia when relations with Russia soured, and dairy products from Belarus when the normally pliant neighbor edged westward. Since those first McDonald’s closures in Moscow, the authorities have shut down the chain’s restaurants in several other Russian cities. The other 420-plus McDonald’s outlets in Russia may not be around much longer.

But with this, McDonald’s has reclaimed its symbolic role in Russia. A quarter century ago, the opening of its first branch in Moscow symbolized that Russia was taking down barriers between itself and the Western world. It also symbolized the end of four decades of enmity between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. (no matter if the company that initially ran the Moscow restaurant was based in Canada rather than the United States). The same process is now occurring in reverse.

The Russian government is shutting down a symbol, not a business. Back in 1999, as soon as NATO planes started bombing Serbia, protesters stormed the McDonald’s in the center of Belgrade, breaking windows and looting the restaurant. The Russian state is following roughly the same logic today: Regardless of who owns it, McDonald’s serves as a symbol of America and the West, against which President Vladimir Putin has declared war. Some Russian politicians pointed out that McDonald’s headquarters yanked the franchise from its restaurants in Crimea after Russian forces annexed the area — an act of war if ever there was one. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a member of Parliament, demanded that Russia retaliate by shutting down all McDonald’s restaurants and kicking out Pepsi-Cola for good measure.

Like so many recent actions by the Russian government, this move is both entirely logical — if one accepts the logic of Russia’s war against the West — and utterly absurd, since most of the people affected will be the restaurants’ owners and customers, mostly Russians. Food importers, supermarket owners and restaurateurs in Russia are already struggling with the consequences of a recent ban on food imports from Western countries. And now the owners of McDonald’s franchises, though they use almost exclusively Russian suppliers, are being made to pay for hitching their wagon to a quintessentially American brand.

To the nationalist majority, that first McDonald’s in Pushkin Square was a symbol of Russia’s openness to the West, and that couldn’t end soon enough. To the cosmopolitan minority, it was also a symbol of Russia’s openness to its own people. And that is ending too soon.