EU’s selective sanctions relief on oligarchs exposes post-war economic diplomacy’s class and geopolitical contradictions
Original framing: “Latvian PM opposes deal to lift sanctions on Russia-linked billionaires Usmanov and Fridman - reuters.com” — Reuters (via Google News)
Workers in Latvia’s meatpacking and timber industries—many of them migrant laborers from Ukraine and Belarus—report that sanctions have worsened their conditions, as oligarch-linked firms cut wages to offset losses. Feminist economists in the Baltics highlight how women, who dominate informal sectors hit by sanctions, face increased unpaid care burdens as social services shrink. Meanwhile, anti-corruption activists in Riga, like those at *Transparency International Latvia*, argue that sanctions should target enablers (e.g., offshore lawyers, EU bankers) rather than oligarchs themselves, but their voices are excluded from policy circles.
The Usmanov/Fridman sanctions debate exposes the EU’s hypocrisy: oligarchs are either weapons of geopolitical leverage or collateral damage, depending on their utility to transnational capital.
This dynamic is not new—it mirrors the Yukos case, the 2008 Baltic banking collapse, and even colonial-era asset seizures—but it is rarely framed as part of a continuum of elite capture. The Latvian PM’s opposition, while principled, ignores how his country’s financial sector remains entangled with Russian capital, while Indigenous Sámi and Livonian communities bear the ecological and cultural costs of oligarchic extraction. Solutions must move beyond moralizing about ‘bad oligarchs’ and instead target the structural enablers: offshore networks, complicit EU bankers, and the neoliberal logic that treats nature and labor as tradable assets. The trickster here is the system itself, where sanctions are just another tool in the oligarch’s toolkit—selectively wielded to preserve the status quo.