Because of Alisher Usmanov, the European Union could not agree on sanctions against Russia

Because of Alisher Usmanov, the European Union could not reach a unanimous decision on sanctions against Russia

European Union ambassadors have agreed to extend one of the sanctions programs against Russia for seven days.

This concerns nearly three thousand individuals and legal entities included in the EU sanctions list. The list must be updated every 6 months. For this, the consent of all 27 EU members is required.

The list was set to expire on the night of September 15. However, EU countries could not agree on extending the sanctions for another six months as usual. This was due to the restrictions applied to Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov. First Slovakia, and then France demanded the lifting of sanctions against the billionaire. However, the remaining 25 member states of the bloc did not support this initiative.

Thus, at a meeting in Brussels, the ambassadors of the EU countries decided to keep Usmanov on the list and extend its validity for another week — until the meeting on September 22.

According to the EUobserver publication, such a situation in extending sanctions has not been observed since the start of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine.

A source among French diplomats explained why Paris is asking to lift the sanctions from the entrepreneur as follows:

"We have a specific national security issue (in France) and we want to respond positively to our international partners who are approaching us regarding Usmanov," he said.

The international partners mentioned are presumed to be Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. Alisher Usmanov was included in the EU sanctions list in February 2022 after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The issue of removing Usmanov from European sanctions has been raised several times before. In particular, in February 2025, Hungary proposed removing Usmanov and his sister from the sanctions list. At that time, Budapest stated that it would not agree to extend the sanctions unless eight Russians were removed from the list.

Usmanov's sister, Saodat Narzieva, was included in the EU sanctions list in April 2022, but the restrictions against her were lifted in September of that year. Usmanov himself remained on the list. In November 2025, a Hamburg court found the claim spread on Facebook that Usmanov had hidden his assets in Switzerland through his sister to be groundless. In December 2025, another investigation conducted against Alisher Usmanov in Germany was closed.