The EU dropped Usmanov and Fridman and renewed its Ukraine list to 2029. Washington and London still block both

The European Union will not review its main Russia-related sanctions list again until 2029. On 22 September 2026 the Council renewed the listings made under Decision 2014/145/CFSP, the Ukraine territorial-integrity regime, for 36 months instead of six. The same day it deleted seven entries from Annex I of Regulation 269/2014, the list EU banks screen against.

Two of the deletions are among the best-known names on the list: Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman. The Council's press release gave no reasons and did not name anyone. Euronews reported that France pressed for Usmanov's removal in connection with a prisoner release involving Azerbaijan, and that Luxembourg, which Fridman is suing for $16 billion over frozen assets, argued he should go too. We have no primary source for either account.

The annex to Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/2160 deletes entries under two headings. The Council's release says it "decided not to renew" the first four. The result is the same as any deletion: the entry leaves Annex I.

We did not look up the listing dates of the three deceased.

Falaleev is the rector of the V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University in occupied Crimea. The EU listed him in December 2023 for signing a letter of support for Vladimir Putin on 4 March 2022. Redbird Corporate Services is a corporate and trust provider in Ebene, Mauritius, registration number C48211. The EU listed it in July 2025 as the registered agent of Sapang Shipping Inc, owner of the crude tanker ARGENT (IMO 9293002). The UK has specified ARGENT since 9 May 2025, and nothing in the EU deletion touches that.

Entry numbers matter here. Usmanov was 673 and Fridman 675. Entry 674, Petr Aven, Fridman's partner in Alfa Group, stays listed. So do German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev, the other Alfa shareholders. All three are among the 104 individual entries the regulation rewrites. A match on Aven is still a match.

We checked the four non-renewals against the OFAC SDN export and the UK Sanctions List file on 24 September. The UK file carries a report date of 21 September.

Usmanov's US footprint is larger than his own row. Eight further SDN entries carry "Linked To: USMANOV", among them the yacht DILBAR (IMO 9661792), the Airbus A340 registered M-IABU and six companies and trusts. None of them depended on the EU listing, and none is affected by its deletion.

We found no Falaleev or Redbird in either file with a plain text search, and a text search cannot prove a negative. It misses transliterations, and the UK's own primary name for Fridman is spelled Maratovic, without the final h. Run both names through screening with aliases before you record them as clear anywhere.

The spellings differ across the three lists as well. OFAC's primary name is USMANOV, Alisher Burhanovich, with Burkhanovich and USMONOV as aliases. The EU used Burkhanovich. A rule that suppresses alerts for "names the EU has delisted" by string will miss some variants and catch others. That is worse than no rule.

The three deceased entries show the same split. OFAC still lists SHVYTKIN, Yuri Nikolayevich under RUSSIA-EO14024. It still lists TANGSIRI, Ali Reza under four tags: SDGT, NPWMD, IRGC and IFSR. The UK still lists Shvytkin as RUS0529 and Tangsiri as RUS1954. A death that the EU recorded on 22 September is not yet a death on any other list.

That matters for estates and for companies the dead owned. A US or UK blocking still attaches to the property of a listed person until that list removes him, and the estate's executor is a counterparty you screen like any other. We did not resolve Alexander Georgievich Leonov against the US or UK files. Several other Leonovs are listed, and we are not claiming he is absent.

The deletions are the headline. The rewrites are the work. The regulation replaces the full entries for 104 individuals and 71 entities, which we counted in the annex; the total matches the regulation's recital. A replaced entry can carry new aliases, new identity documents or new reasons. In March the equivalent review rewrote 132 individuals and 77 entities.

A delta that reports only added and removed names will show seven changes this week. The annex changed in 182 places: 7 deletions and 175 replacements. If your screening compares customer records to identifiers such as dates of birth, registration numbers or addresses, re-run the customers whose earlier candidates touched any of those 175 entries.

The previous renewal, Decision (CFSP) 2026/696 of 14 March, ran to 15 September 2026. On that day, instead of the usual six-month renewal, the Council adopted Decision (CFSP) 2026/2103, which moved the expiry to 22 September "to comprehensively examine and review" the regime. The 36-month renewal was adopted and published on the last day of that stopgap.

Had nothing been adopted by 22 September, Decision 2014/145/CFSP, the CFSP act on which the listings rest, would have ceased to apply. The Council can still delete or add entries whenever it chooses, as it did this week, but the scheduled moment when every listing has to be argued again has moved to 2029.

1. Do not carry an EU delisting across to other lists. Usmanov and Fridman are EU-clear and US- and UK-blocked on the same day. Your rule set should decide each list on its own.
2. Find open alerts and frozen positions on the seven names. Record which list version cleared them, and which lists still hold them.
3. Keep the old EU entries in your history. A disposition made before 22 September against entry 673 or 675 must still be reproducible.
4. Re-screen against the 175 rewritten entries, not only the seven deletions.
5. Resolve Falaleev and Redbird with fuzzy matching before recording either as absent from the US or UK lists.

This is a report of what the Official Journal published on 15 and 22 September 2026, and of what the OFAC and UK files contained when we downloaded them on 24 September. It takes no position on whether any listing or delisting was right.

A deletion from Annex I ends the freeze under Regulation 269/2014 only. It does not decide whether another EU regime, a national measure or a court order still applies. The counts here are counts of list entries, not of assets or of people.