BRUSSELS — The vote was not close, and the reasoning behind it was not hidden for long.
On September 22, foreign ministers of European Union member states gathered in Brussels and removed two of Moscow’s most prominent financial figures from Europe’s Russia sanctions list. Alisher Usmanov, the metals and telecommunications oligarch whose fortune is estimated at $14 billion, and Mikhail Fridman, co-founder of the Alfa Group conglomerate, are now free to move assets across European borders again. The decision did not happen because either man had changed. It happened because two EU member states needed something and found a way to get it.
France needed Usmanov gone. Azerbaijan had been holding French nationals in detention, and Baku made clear through intermediaries that a gesture on sanctions would be repaid in kind. Three days after the EU vote, Azerbaijan announced the pardon of a French citizen who had been convicted in Azerbaijani courts. French officials declined to describe a direct connection between the two events. They did not need to.
Luxembourg needed Fridman gone. The grand duchy faced a $16 billion international arbitration claim filed by Fridman’s associates over the freezing of his assets in Luxembourg accounts. That figure, roughly double Luxembourg’s annual defense budget, had concentrated ministerial minds considerably. The arbitration exposure did not appear in any official statement explaining Luxembourg’s position. It did not have to.
The price extracted from their partners was a three-year renewal of the broader Russia-Ukraine war sanctions framework, replacing the standard six-month rollover that has governed EU restrictions on Moscow since 2022. EU ambassadors sealed the compromise ahead of a midnight deadline, according to Euronews. On the surface, the extended timeline looked like hardened resolve. In practice, it bought two exits.
The reaction from the eastern members of the bloc was immediate. Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, announced that Tallinn would not be bound by the EU-level decision and would impose national sanctions on both men independently. “This is a very bad signal at a wrong time,” Tsahkna said. Latvia also abstained in the council vote, its abstention carrying enough weight at the qualified majority threshold to allow the compromise to pass. A senior EU diplomat, speaking without attribution, warned the French and Luxembourg interventions “send the signal that you can blackmail your way to delisting.” Earlier that day, Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the decision “suicidal.”
His sanctions enforcement commissioner, Vladyslava Vlasiuk, said her office was “shocked.” At the UN General Assembly in New York, where Zelenskyy had spent the week pressing Western partners on multiple fronts, the Brussels vote landed as a direct blow to the coalition he was trying to hold together. What concerned Kyiv was less the loss of two names from the list and more the mechanism that produced the outcome.
Usmanov built his fortune through Metalloinvest, one of the world’s largest iron ore producers, and USM Holdings, a conglomerate extending into steel and telecoms. He was among the first individuals listed when the EU launched its Russia restrictions in February 2022, cited for alleged ties to the Kremlin and for financing state-aligned media projects. He has denied both charges in court challenges across multiple European jurisdictions, winning partial relief in several proceedings. His legal representation is, by the account of opposing counsel, the most systematically resourced of any sanctioned Russian individual currently pursuing European litigation.
The session that produced the two removals also renewed the full sanctions architecture covering more than 1,700 individuals and entities, including export controls, asset freezes, and financial restrictions worth hundreds of billions of euros. EU officials cited the three-year renewal in public statements as evidence of institutional resolve. What the statements did not address was the logic France and Luxembourg had just demonstrated: that concessions on individual designations could be extracted from the collective framework at the right price, at the right moment.
Zelenskyy had spent the week pressing European governments, speaking from New York and working the bilateral margins of the UN session, urging them to hold the sanctions regime intact against Russian legal and diplomatic pressure. His sessions with European foreign ministers had focused on exactly that vulnerability. The Brussels vote answered that appeal directly, though not in the direction he had sought.
The parallel track running through Washington now carries added weight. The Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which passed the House of Representatives 262 to 159 and is now before the Senate, would impose mandatory secondary sanctions on any state purchasing Russian energy, arms, or raw materials. Whether American legislative pressure can compensate for the fractures the Monday vote exposed in the European framework is a question Tsahkna and others are not inclined to wait and see answered.
Usmanov and Fridman have made no public comment since the vote. Their legal teams, which spent three years systematically challenging the evidentiary basis for their designations across European courts, have not needed to.
