Russia’s communications ministry is against the initiative of barring the government from purchasing foreign software if there are two or more local analogues, Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said during the Open Innovation investment forum.

“I stand for soft legislative regulation, including laws on state procurements, but I stand against direct restrictions, when draft bills forbid Russian contractors to buy this or that foreign software,”

Nikiforov said, adding that such measures will have a blowback.

“As soon as we approve such barriers, we will receive a boomerang of similar measures from other countries, which will ban our products,”

he said.

The draft bill envisages denying access of foreign software to a state procurement tender if it has two or more Russian analogues, and holding a public external audit procedure with the attraction of corresponding departments of the foreign software has a Russian analogue.