Russian billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev spent years fighting EU sanctions over Belarus. He finally won (but remains sanctioned over Russia’s war in Ukraine).

Filed 1h ago · Via Meduza · The Buffoon Desk

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Local Forecast - Elevator

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Geoffroy Van der Hasselt, Geoffroy van der Hasselt · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

EU ambassadors removed Russian billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev from the bloc's Belarus sanctions list on Oct. 7, ending a years-long legal battle he waged since the 2021 sanctions, which cited his ties to Alexander Lukashenko and investments benefiting the regime. In May 2026 a European court annulled the latest renewal of those sanctions, finding the Council of the EU hadn't presented sufficiently current evidence of ongoing ties. He remains sanctioned separately over Russia's war in Ukraine.

Czech outlets reported in 2024 that Gutseriev had offered Western intelligence services information about Putin's and Lukashenko's plans in exchange for sanctions relief, meeting FBI and Czech police representatives in Prague in 2022. The move follows September's removal of sanctions on billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, pushed respectively by France and Slovakia, and by Luxembourg, which is separately fighting Fridman's $16 billion lawsuit over frozen assets.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A sanctions list is supposed to track who still has their hand on the regime's shoulder, and if the evidence goes stale enough to lose in court, that says more about how the list gets maintained than about anyone's innocence. It's also worth noticing how often a country's support for lifting sanctions lines up neatly with that country's own unrelated legal or diplomatic troubles. Call it coincidence if you like, a farmer would call it something else.

Source: Read the original at Meduza → Scored: Local Forecast - Elevator · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0