I am a manager in an EU company of about 300 people in 3 countries. My company also had (until last week) a branch in Moscow with about 75 people. This branch generated about 25/30% of my company revenue and it was supposed to grow to 150/160 people by the end of 2023. After Russian invasion of Ukraine, during last week my company fired all the Russian employees, closed the Moscow branch, canceled all contracts with Russian clients and put our Russian website offline*.
I work in my company headquarter where there are the only 4 Russian employees not working in Moscow and having a EU contract instead of a Russian one. For 2 of them I’m (technically) their direct manager: they were assigned to me 2 years ago but they’ve never worked on my projects and I’ve never been involved in the Russian projects. I met one of them once and exchanged a few emails (less than 10 and last more than 1 year ago), the other I’ve never had any contact with.
After a brief chat with my boss, he informed me that my company will fire these 4 employees but (due to their contract not different from ours apart from the related work VISA) my company needs a few weeks. My boss did not know if my company already informed these people, but probably they didn't. My boss also said to simply wait and do nothing, but he did not offer any useful advice in case one of my subordinates contacts me.
I don’t think any of my 2 subordinates will contact me (in fact my plan is simply to ignore this situation until the end), but if this does happen, what are the right actions I should do? Try to respond to their questions? Should I forward their inquiries to my boss? Should I ignore them until HR steps in? Any other option?
* = I’m not here to judge my company actions and if they were appropriate and/or correct.