Five Russians fought before the Court of Justice of the European Union to have their frozen assets, subject to EU sanctions, unblocked. The CJEU ruled that the oligarchs’ names had been rightly included on the list in connection with Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine in 2022.
Applications to be removed from the sanctions list were filed with the CJEU by Dmitry Pumpyansky, Dmitry Mazepin, Tigran Khudaverdyan, Viktor Rashnikov, and German Khan. They lodged appeals after a lower court dismissed their complaints in 2023. On Thursday, the CJEU dismissed all of them.
The European Union imposed sanctions on the five Russian businessmen as early as February 2022, considering them leading entrepreneurs involved in sectors that constitute a significant source of revenue for the Russian government.
Russian oligarchs
Pumpyansky is the former CEO of TMK, a company specializing in steel pipe production; Mazepin is the former owner of the fertilizer group Uralchem; and Rashnikov is the owner of the metallurgical giant MMK. Khudaverdyan, who holds Armenian citizenship, is the former head of Russia’s largest tech company Yandex, while Khan, who holds both Russian and Israeli citizenship, is a co-founder of Russia’s largest private banking group, Alfa Group.
In dismissing the appeals on Thursday, the EU court in Luxembourg emphasized that the notion of “leading” entrepreneurs should be understood in the economic context in which these individuals operate, regardless of any potential links to the Russian government. “It is precisely because of the significant role these individuals play in the Russian economy that they may indirectly facilitate the financing of actions destabilising Ukraine, by contributing to maintaining the profitability of the economic sectors in which they operate, and even to the further development of those sectors,” the CJEU noted.
More than 2,600 individuals and entities are on the EU blacklist related to undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. A person subject to sanctions is barred from entering the EU, and their assets are frozen.