BRUSSELS — The European Union’s sweeping sanctions framework against Russia nearly collapsed at midnight Sunday. It was preserved not through consensus but by a procedural escape hatch that the bloc’s diplomats had never previously needed to use.
EU ambassadors agreed to extend nearly 3,000 individual and entity designations for seven days, buying Brussels time until September 22 to resolve a deadlock that exposed how contested the West’s economic pressure campaign against Moscow has become.
France and Slovakia had refused to approve the standard six-month renewal. France’s objection focused on a single name: Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbekistan-born metals, telecommunications, and media billionaire whose European assets were frozen and whose movements were restricted after the EU added him to its Russia sanctions list in March 2022. The bloc cited his “particularly close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”
Slovakia made a broader demand, seeking the removal of both Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, another Russian-born billionaire included in the EU’s post-2022 sanctions designations.
What made the French position immediately destabilising was the justification offered. French officials told Euronews they wanted to act on a “national security” matter involving “international partners,” citing a wish to “respond positively.” The language was deliberate in its opacity. Diplomats from other EU member states immediately began speculating about a side deal: a prisoner exchange involving French nationals held in Russian custody, most notably Martin Ryan, convicted in Russia on a 10-year espionage charge, and Anass Derraz. Neither Paris nor Moscow confirmed any such arrangement.
But France’s decision to join Slovakia, which has long used sanctions renewal debates to advance the interests of its own business community, changed the calculus entirely. Two EU member states must vote against renewal for a lapse to become possible; previously, Slovakia had stood largely alone. The coalition of two was enough to paralyse the six-month renewal process. That left EU ambassadors scrambling to adopt the emergency seven-day extension, a move with no precedent since Russia launched its full-scale military operation against Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the delay “immoral and self-destructive,” naming Fridman and Usmanov directly in a statement on September 12 that demanded the EU continue applying economic pressure rather than accommodate what he described as a bid to “rescue Russian oligarchs.” The Kyiv Independent reported Zelensky warning that with Russia firing up to 500 Shahed drones daily, the timing of any sanctions softening was indefensible. By Sunday, after the emergency extension was confirmed, his position had hardened further. “This is definitely not the time to lift sanctions, to rescue Russian oligarchs from them,” he said.
The Usmanov case carries a longer legal history. The billionaire has spent years contesting his designation in EU courts, winning partial procedural victories without achieving removal from the list. His net worth, estimated at between $14 billion and $18 billion at the time of his designation, has been substantially impaired by the asset freeze: his superyacht was seized in Hamburg, his Sardinian estate investigated, and his stake in Arsenal Football Club sold. Whether the courts or a French diplomatic intervention will ultimately secure his delisting is now genuinely uncertain.
As Brussels counts down to September 22, the broader pattern of European disunity on Russia has been deepening. Germany closed its last consulate in Russia this month, a gesture toward confrontation that arrived just as France was charting a divergent course on economic pressure. Meanwhile, Russian drone strikes continued across Ukraine; Russian unmanned aircraft struck near Yahodyn this weekend, minutes after a diplomatic train carrying Boris Johnson departed. The contrast between the battlefield and the Brussels briefing room was not lost on Ukrainian officials.
Putin himself remarked in August that he expected the Russia-Europe standoff to eventually end, pointing to deep economic interdependencies as the underlying pull toward normalization. In the debate over Usmanov, that pull has acquired a name and a constituency.
France’s insistence on his delisting, whatever its origin, represents a calculation that a national interest can be served without triggering a cascade of defections from the broader regime. French officials have repeatedly stressed that Paris remains committed to pressure on Russia’s war machine. But the precedent established by Sunday’s emergency extension is already being weighed carefully. If Usmanov is removed on September 22, the diplomatic landscape around Russia sanctions will shift: not because of what one name represents, but because the rule that the list cannot be bargained for has been broken.
Whether Zelensky’s public condemnation will move Paris appears unlikely. The French government has shown no sign of retreating.
