A year and a half after the start of the Russian invasion, the United States added the founders of Alfa Group, Peter Aven and Mikhail Fridman, to the sanctions list.
Friedman and Aven do not live in Russia, although they have long been on the EU and British sanctions lists, which they are trying to challenge. Some Russian politicians who had traveled abroad even vouched for them, although this caused a scandal.
In the spring, it became known that Friedman and Aven were preparing to sell their stakes in Russia’s Alfa Bank, primarily to try to lift sanctions. At the time, a source from the Financial Times said that they would do anything for this.
In May, the BBC reported that they were preparing to sell other assets in Russia, such as Alfa Insurance. This became known after the Ukrainian publication Schemes found out that the company insures Russian military equipment.
The inclusion of Friedman and Aven on the US sanctions list sends a clear message to Russian businessmen: people closely associated with the Russian government are unlikely to be able to avoid sanctions, analysts say.
At the same time, Friedman publicly opposed the war, but much more restrainedly than Oleg Tinkov, who managed to get the sanctions lifted.
The case of Tinkov is rather an exception: his lawyers were able to prove that there were no close ties, and Tinkoff Bank did not even issue cards to Crimean residents after the annexation. This is hardly the case for Friedman and Aven.
This week, Arkady Volozh, the founder of Yandex, also condemned the Russian war.
