The European Union has extended sanctions against 1,600 entrepreneurs and institutions for another six months. However, three men were removed from the list. They probably can’t really be happy about it.
As EU diplomats confirmed on Wednesday, businessmen Grigory Bereskin, Farhad Akhmedov and Alexander Shulgin have been removed from the sanctions list. For all three, the basis for sanctions is considered too thin.
Several Russian oligarchs had filed a lawsuit against their inclusion on the EU sanctions list. Germany and its EU partners had already imposed extensive economic sanctions on Russia since Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. With the large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, punitive measures were further tightened with a slew of further sanctions packages.
Shulgin, director of a Russian electronics trading platform, was considered a major source of income for Vladimir Putin’s war machine. A political connection apparently could not be proven – despite a personal meeting in February 2022.
Peskov: “They are traitors!”
It is unclear whether the three entrepreneurs have a future in Russia. Statements by Putin’s spokesman Dimtri Peskov show that their loyalty is being questioned. “We know that there are entrepreneurs who stoop to anti-Russian positions and who are trying (…) to get out of sanctions,” he said in Moscow. “They are traitors.”
He explicitly left open whether he also meant Schulgin, Bereskin and Akhmedov. The sanctions include travel restrictions and asset freezes. It was also forbidden to provide money or other economic resources to those sanctioned.
Source: Krone
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