The US on Tuesday blacklisted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s purported girlfriend and the tycoon owner of the second-largest estate in London in the latest round of sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.
Also hit with US business bans were several other oligarchs believed to be close to Putin, four officials Russia has named to administer occupied territories in Ukraine, and about two dozen high-tech institutes and companies, including key state-backed electronics entities.
The US Department of the Treasury announced sanctions on Putin associate and billionaire Andrey Grigoryevich Guryev, who owns the Witanhurst estate, the second-largest estate in London after Buckingham Palace. Guryev is the founder and former deputy chairman of PhosAgro, a major supplier to global fertilizer markets.
Photo: AFP
He and his son were hit with financial sanctions, which ban US businesses — including banks with US branches — from transactions with them, and freeze their assets under US jurisdictions.
The department also blacklisted Guryev’s Caribbean-based 81m yacht, the Alfa Nero, which puts it at risk of seizure.
However, the department said that the Alfa Nero “has reportedly shut off its location tracking hardware in order to avoid seizure.”
The department also imposed sanctions on Alina Kabaeva, a former Olympic gymnast widely described as Putin’s girlfriend, and Natalya Popova, the wife of Kirill Dmitriev, who manages the Russian government’s sovereign wealth fund. Popova works for technology firm Innopraktika, which is run by one of Putin’s daughters, the department said.
“As innocent people suffer from Russia’s illegal war of aggression, Putin’s allies have enriched themselves and funded opulent lifestyles,” US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said in a statement. “The Treasury Department will use every tool at our disposal to make sure that Russian elites and the Kremlin’s enablers are held accountable for their complicity in a war that has cost countless lives.”
Viktor Filippovich Rashnikov, one of Russia’s largest taxpayers, and two subsidiaries of his MMK, which is among the world’s largest steel producers, also were hit with sanctions.
In a joint action, the US Department of State imposed sanctions, including visa restrictions, on oligarchs “running massive revenue-generating companies,” including Dmitry Aleksandrovich Pumpyanskiy, Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko and Alexander Anatolevich Ponomarenko.
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