While the iPhone is relatively doing quite well in most countries, it seems to be having a hard time selling in Russia especially in the case of official partner carriers. As a result, these carriers, namely Vimpelkom, Megafon, and MTS, might face fines from Apple for failure to meet their obligation to sell a certain amount of iPhone units over a specific period of time. Vimpelkom pledged 1.5 million units while Megafon settled only for 1 million units both in 2 years time. MTS, meanwhile, committed to 1 million iPhones in a period of 3 years. Currently, 900K iPhones have been imported to Russia, but only 400K of them belong to Apple’s official partner carriers and majority of them are jailbroken iPhones. Worse, out of that figure, only 280K units made it into retail channels and only 127K iPhones were actually sold. Safe to say, they’re way off their target sales.

[via unwiredview]

The exact fines are still unknown, but it could range from $500 million to as high as $1 billion. Operators are blaming the high cost and quantity in their contracts with Apple as the main culprit in the poor turn-out . Likewise, Apple is now mulling the idea of selling iPhones directly to consumers via major retailers in Russia in lieu of the poor sales of the carriers. As a backlash to the plight Apple has put them in, Russian operators are now demanding for a renegotiation of the contracts or they will ban iPhones in Russia even going as far as threatening to block the use of jailbroken iPhones on their network.

It’s currently a game of chicken between Apple and Russian operators waiting to see who will budge first. The future of the iPhone in Russia is unclear at the moment, but what’s certain is that the things are definitely getting complicated in mother Russia as far as the iPhone is concerned.