That's a 25% import duty on devices imported into the Russian federal territory.

Yeah, sorry - that's not totally obvious from the bit I snipped. Apple (and presumably the other phone manufacturers) do sell into Russia, and a 25% import duty would probably have a significant impact on their sales.

I was surprised when I saw GLONASS support appear in recent Garmin devices. http://garmin.blogs.com/my_weblog/2011/09/garmin-etrex-and-g... Now it starts to really make sense.

That's hardly a motivation for Apple. They still don't have an official dealer in Russia and afaik don't have any plans. Yet, most of government officials widely use iPads (including the president) and every hip kid around the block has an iPhone. This suggests that Sergei Ivanov is merely looking for more ways to tax their own population, not Apple. Russian GLONASS is an archaic POS that they them selves have trouble working on their own, approved devices and a 25% import duty on GPS-capable devices won't fix it.

According to http://www.macnewsworld.com/rsstory/64365.html, MegaFon and VimpleCom are legitimate carriers of the iPhone in Russia.

Tim Cook mentioned sales growth in Russia as something to keep an eye on in Apple's latest conference call: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq411

The GPS chips include it (and Galileo) anyway since the frequency is close enough that you don't need any extra HW and with ASICs it's easier to just put everything it and fab a single device.

Whether the ASIC implementation works and whether the iPhone API actually uses it - is another matter