The European Union (EU) General Affairs Council was held in Brussels. (AA Photo)
Azerbaijan’s president on Sept. 23 pardoned Martin Ryan, a Frenchman jailed since 2023 on espionage charges, following the European Union’s removal of two Russian billionaires from its sanctions list.
President İlham Aliyev pardoned 20 people in total, having taken into account their “personalities, state of health, family circumstances” and other reasons, his website said.
A senior diplomat in Brussels had told AFP that France had pushed for the EU to lift sanctions on a Russian oligarch, seeking the release of French prisoners.
EU countries on Sept. 22 took oligarchs Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman off a renewed Russia sanctions list in a move condemned by Ukraine as “shameful.”
A deal to extend the sanctions against some 3,000 individuals and entities, including President Vladimir Putin, was agreed just ahead of a Sept. 22 deadline when Latvia agreed to drop its veto opposing French efforts to secure the exemptions, diplomats said.
Ukraine lashed out at the decision to remove the asset freezes and visa bans on the two billionaires.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga called the EU move “shameful and unjustifiable.”
Usmanov and Fridman were added to the sanctions list after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 over allegations that their businesses provided significant revenues to the Kremlin.
A spokesman for Ireland, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said the “compromise” would extend the sanctions regime until Sept. 22, 2029.
The Kremlin said it backed taking Usmanov and Fridman off the blacklist, and that the bloc should lift sanctions on “all Russian businessmen.”
