Abstract Since February 2022, EU restrictive measures adopted under the Common Foreign and Security Policy have increasingly focused on targeting private wealth in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. This paper analyses the Council’s strategies for maintaining, renewing, and expanding sanctions against Russian businesspersons (oligarchs) and their assets. It analyses the post-2022 amendments to the design and application of listing criteria, particularly the criterion (g), and the use of presumptions to secure the durability of listings decisions and the long-term imposition of asset freezes. These techniques enhance the resilience of listings to judicial review, limit opportunities for de-listing targets and unfreezing their assets, de facto immobilising private wealth within the EU. Nonetheless, they also raise broader questions about the purpose of sanctions, in particular whether asset freezes remain targeted, reversible and preventive tools to influence behaviour, or are increasingly used as instruments that aim at the long-term immobilisation of wealth.
Finelli et al. (Thu,) studied this question.