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Anti-Russian sanctions

Updated at:

Brussels confirms exclusion of four Russians from EU sanctions list

The Council of the EU does not specify why the decision was made

BRUSSELS, September 14. /TASS/. The European Union has confirmed lifting of sanctions against four Russian citizens. This is according to a statement on the website of the Official Journal of the European Union.

The four Russians exempted from sanctions are entrepreneur Farkhad Akhmedov, businessman Grigory Berezkin, deceased Colonel Georgy Shuvaev and former head of Ozon online store Alexander Shulgin.

"The entries concerning the following persons are deleted: Farkhad Akhmedov, Grigory Berezkin, Alexander Shulgin, Georgy Shuvaev," the document says.

The Council of the EU does not specify why Brussels decided to exclude the Russians from the black list.

On Wednesday, the Council of the European Union announced that it decided to lift sanctions that had been imposed previously on four Russian nationals due to the alleged "threat to and undermining of the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine." It did not identify the specific individuals who have now been de-listed from the sanctions blacklist.

On September 6, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled to lift sanctions imposed by the European Union on Shulgin, but he will remain on the blacklist for at least another two months. The EU has to date adopted numerous packages of economic sanctions against Russia and individual sanctions against Russian nationals due to the situation in Ukraine. These have included sanctions imposed on Russian businesspeople, journalists and companies. Last year, more than 60 businesspeople, including Berezkin, and Russian and Belarusian companies filed lawsuits with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to challenge their inclusion in the EU sanctions list. The businesspeople stated that their fundamental rights had been violated, citing in particular the fact that their assets in the EU had been illegally frozen.

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