Linux kernel delisted eleven developers, including everyone with a .ru address, then restored one

On 18 October 2024 the kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman mailed a patch for MAINTAINERS, the file that names who looks after each part of the Linux kernel, and committed it to his own tree within nine minutes. Its explanation reads in full: "Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided." The mail went to one patch list and to himself; none of the people removed was addressed, and the commit carries no review tag. Linus Torvalds merged it on 20 October.

The commit changed no code. It deleted 178 lines and removed eleven people from the file, nine listed as maintainers and two only as reviewers. A count on the file shows that before the commit MAINTAINERS held 23 lines with a .ru address, belonging to ten people, and after it none. The eleventh person, Serge Semin, was listed under a gmail.com address.

On 21 October another kernel maintainer asked on the mailing list what the requirements were, adding: "I am also afraid this is opening the door for further (ab)use..." A second maintainer replied the same day: "I agree." No public answer from Kroah-Hartman was found. Phoronix wrote on 22 October that those dropped "appear to all be Russian or associated with Russia"; LWN noted that there had been "no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries". On 23 October the administrator of kernel.org, who in the same post referred to himself as a "Russian identified person" in "one of the senior positions in the Linux Foundation", wrote in a public argument on the kernel.org social-media server that he did not speak for the Foundation and that the people removed "were identified as employed by companies on the US and EU sanctions list". These companies, he went on, "are directly involved in the Russian military complex"; if the people removed worked for companies that "develop weaponry or logistics used by the Russian military", he wrote, "I hold them responsible at a very personal level". The post names no company and cites no source.

Less than an hour after that post Torvalds answered a proposal to revert the removal: "Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about." It was, he wrote, "entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting reverted", and "using multiple random anonymous accounts" would change nothing; for "the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts" he added that the requirements "are not just a US thing". He went on: "If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day." And: "I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian aggression?" Asked whether he was under a non-disclosure agreement, he answered: "No, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into the details that I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers." Neither of his replies names a rule or a list.

Semin posted a farewell to the kernel mailing list on 24 October. By his account, the senior maintainer with whom he had discussed the matter in private had not explained what the requirements were; of that exchange he gave only the key words: "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can do", "talk to your (company) lawyer". His own kernel work, he wrote, "has been purely _volunteer_ for more than a year now", so that he had no company lawyer to talk to, and the patch had gone in "Silently, behind everyone's back, _bypassing_ the standard patch-review process, with no affected developers/subsystem notified". One of the two removed reviewers had written on 21 October, when another developer offered to take over drivers he had looked after: "I am still interested, of course... but looks like I'm not allowed to anymore." Another of the eleven had answered the proposal to revert on 23 October with a single line endorsing it, an Acked-by tag under his own name.

About ten hours after Semin's farewell the kernel developer James Bottomley replied to it: "Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled." He gave a summary of the legal advice: "If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file." To Semin he wrote: "In your specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list." Neither man named the employer. Bottomley thanked Semin for his contributions, offered to arrange an entry in the kernel's credits file for him "or anyone else", and wrote: "all of the Linux infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can't ignore the requirements of US law". The same day he also answered the question of 21 October. "We finally got clearance to publish the actual advice", he began, and repeated the rule; the documentation asked for, which Linux Foundation lawyers would verify, was that a removed person "doesn't actually work for an OFAC SDN sanctioned entity"; he added: "I agree we should have been more transparent about this", but thought it would be hard for anyone other than Kroah-Hartman to have a maintainer removed on such grounds, "so it's probably not that open to abuse". Asked in what capacity he spoke, he answered: "It's Linux, so no official capacity at all. However, I am expressing the views of a number of people I talked to but it's not fair of me to name them." Lawyers, he added, "will produce a much longer policy document later".

Two companies whose names match removed entries were already on that US Treasury list: a company named Metrotek since 31 March 2022 and Baikal Electronics since 15 September 2022, the first year of the war in Ukraine. One removed reviewer was listed under a metrotek.ru address; Semin was the listed maintainer of the kernel's two Baikal-T1 entries, and when he posted patches from a Baikal Electronics address in March 2023 a networking maintainer answered: "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization." A third person was removed under a sberdevices.ru address: the list as it stood on 13 October 2026 has no entry under the name SberDevices, and Sberbank has been on it since 6 April 2022; whether SberDevices belongs to Sberbank was not examined. Patches from removed people were still accepted: on 13 October 2026 GitHub's commit search found seventeen commits in the mainline kernel, dated after the removal, from the .ru addresses under which two of them had been listed; one, dated April 2025, is from the other removed reviewer, the one quoted above. In March 2025 QEMU, another open-source project, removed two maintainers in a reviewed commit that names two organisations as being on the US sanctions list. In the same month a reviewed kernel commit that assigned maintainers to another part of the kernel stated the rule in its message: it calls a company "an OFAC sanctioned entity", "which makes employees ineligible as maintainer", and cites Bottomley's answer to the question of 21 October.

One of the eleven returned: Abylay Ospan, removed under a .ru address, sent a patch dated 23 October from an amazon.com address restoring himself as maintainer of six media driver entries, and Kroah-Hartman committed it on 29 October 2024. The Linux Foundation's general guidance of 29 January 2025 on US sanctions says it would be an issue to provide services to "a developer who is employed (directly or indirectly) by an SDN", that is, by a person or entity on the US Treasury list; it mentions neither the kernel nor MAINTAINERS, and LWN presented it as "the reasoning that went into the removal of a group of Russian kernel maintainers in October". The report of the kernel's Code of Conduct Committee for April 2024 to March 2025, which Kroah-Hartman posted to the kernel mailing list on the committee's behalf on 30 April 2025, lists "Reports about Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) related actions and offhand comments in technical discussions that do not rise to the level of violations"; it does not say which reports or actions these were. In the kernel as it stood on 12 October 2026, Linux 7.3-rc7, MAINTAINERS holds no .ru address, and none of the other ten is listed there or in the CREDITS file. No primary source read for this record states the nationality or citizenship of any of the eleven.