The procedure for the capture of domains in the zone RU by foreign companies

I am the director of the IT department of a company that sells equipment of some Western European companies in Russia. To promote the trademarks of these companies in general and their equipment in particular, we registered domains in the RU zone of the form nameofcompany.ru. On these domains were posted sites with a description of this product and our addresses with phone numbers. An announcement that we are official representatives and the corresponding certificates were attached everywhere on all the websites. So we worked for about 5 years.

About half a year ago, one of the companies demanded that we “release and return the domain name”. Naturally, completely free. Being lightly shocked and believing that we had violated some very important international legislation, we deleted the contents of the site, leaving a redirect to a copy of the site on our corporate domain. A month later, after the start of events, this company tried to take away a domain from us through court, justifying its actions by the fact that the domain was not used for its intended purpose and we took it as cybersquatters. We had time to return the old contents of the sites to the conflict domains, removing at the same time all the links to our company, except for phone numbers, of course. The case of the transfer of domains after that stalled.

Today, a similar story began with another of our foreign partners, with whom we have been cooperating for 3 years: they sent us a letter, where they also demanded “to release and return the domain name”.