This document analyzes communication failures between a Russian retail chain (X5 Retail Group) and a Western entertainment company (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation) during a licensing project facilitated by a Danish licensing agency (Ink) in 2009. The analysis has two parts: first, using Jakobson's communication model and Wegner's broker concept, it examines causes of failure from a micro-level perspective and finds divergence between the partners' codes and contexts increased miscommunication risk. Second, from a macro-level perspective, it discusses how the Russian sociocultural context, with its semiotic conflicts and heterogeneity internally and from other cultures, as analyzed through Lotman's semiosphere concept, further challenged communication efficiency. The