On Oct. 23 the European Union levied a new round of economic sanctions against Russia, which, like all earlier sanctions, fall hardest on working people. One week later, Revolut, a London-based online bank popular among expatriates in the EU, began freezing accounts belonging to Russian and Belarusian citizens living there — many of whom are opponents of the Vladimir Putin regime’s war on the people of Ukraine.
The Russian depositors were told that to regain access to their own money they had to submit proof of valid residency permits. The bank said the measure is to comply with the new sanctions. Minutes later the bank sent out a second email, saying their accounts would be terminated at the end of December.
Writing in the Nov. 6 Moscow Times, Ilya Yashin, who was imprisoned in Russia for his views and is now living in exile, denounced the measures taken by the EU and the bank. “The people affected were not war criminals or Kremlin collaborators, but rather those who fled Russia for political reasons — often declared ‘extremists’ by the authorities at home,” he said.
Yashin criticized self-proclaimed bourgeois opponents of Putin in Europe who fail to “extend a hand to anti-war Russians and see them as potential allies.” Instead, he says, the damage of the financial sanctions “lands on Russians who oppose Putin, who resist his regime and who are already persecuted for it in their own country.”
He pointed out that this reinforces the Great Russian chauvinist propaganda line of the Putin regime, which claims “the war in Ukraine is being fought to protect Russia from European Russophobes who supposedly hate all Russians, regardless of their political views.”
“Sanctioning anti-war Russians in Europe only feeds that narrative,” said Yashin. “Many who initially opposed the war and fled to Europe seeking freedom and justice end up disillusioned.” Some have lost their “motivation to support anti-war movements or democratic organizations.”
Worse still, he said, some get demoralized and return to Russia and “even begin to think that perhaps Putin has a point” with his aggression because the nationalism of the European rulers casts “all Russians as enemies.”
The Socialist Workers Party agrees with Yashin’s point, Norton Sandler, the SWP candidate for governor of California in the 2026 elections, told the Militant Nov. 10. “The sanctions imposed by the U.S. rulers, the EU and other western imperialist powers, whatever their supposed target, fall heaviest on working people in Russia, as well as those who have gone into exile, who are the best potential allies of Ukrainian workers and farmers fighting to defend their country’s sovereignty.”
Yashin, a former member of the Moscow City Council, was released in 2024 in a prisoner swap between Washington and Moscow. He had been sentenced to more than eight years in prison for denouncing atrocities by Russian forces against civilians in their assault on Bucha, near Kyiv, shortly after Moscow’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine began.
He said one of the aims of Moscow’s repression is to force people into exile, undercutting the ability of outspoken political opponents like himself to be able to confront Putin inside Russia. “I understood my imprisonment not only as an anti-war fight but also as a fight to live in my country and engage in independent politics,” he said when he was released.
“Drawing a clear line between Putin and the Russian people would weaken the dictator’s domestic support base,” Yashin told the Moscow Times. This would help more Russians “understand that Putin’s aggressive policies have made the entire nation a hostage of his war.”
Yashin said he fights for “a free, peaceful, and democratic Russia built on the ruins of Putin’s regime.”