Latvia Says No: The Oligarch Who Didn't Leave
When Riga raises its hand in a Brussels meeting room, it is not performing geopolitics.
Latvia Says No: The Oligarch Who Didn't Leave
There is a particular kind of power that lives in a small country's refusal. Latvia has a population of under two million people, a border with Russia that runs for nearly 250 kilometres, and a memory of Soviet occupation that no diplomatic euphemism has ever fully erased. When Riga raises its hand in a Brussels meeting room, it is not performing geopolitics. It is speaking from scar tissue.
That is what happened when Latvia blocked the removal of Alisher Usmanov from the European Union's sanctions list — a move France had quietly championed, and which EU ambassadors had been edging toward finalising. Usmanov, the Uzbek-Russian billionaire whose assets include a €600 million superyacht and stakes across European football and tech, had been on the list since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. The French argument, stripped of its diplomatic packaging, was essentially procedural: the legal case had weakened. Latvia's counter-argument was simpler and older: this is not the moment.
It wasn't. Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in New York for the UN General Assembly as overnight Russian missiles and drones struck several Ukrainian regions, killing three people. Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga had already called the proposed delistings — Usmanov and fellow billionaire Mikhail Fridman were both under consideration — "unacceptable." Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Vsevolod Chentsov framed it with more precision: Russia must take "real, concrete" steps toward peace before the EU even begins discussing sanction relief. None have been taken.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, the broader sanctions package — due to expire imminently — remained unresolved after ambassadors failed to reach consensus. The talks will resume. They always resume.
What makes this moment interesting is not the diplomatic mechanics but the human geography of disagreement. France negotiates from a position of distance and pragmatism; Latvia negotiates from proximity and memory. These are not the same conversation, even when conducted in the same room. The countries that share borders with Russia tend to speak about it differently than those that do not — and in Brussels, that difference keeps surfacing, patient and irresolvable, in meeting after meeting about lists and legal thresholds and the administrative lifecycle of a billionaire's frozen assets.
Zelensky and Donald Trump are scheduled to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Macron, who described his own conversations with Trump as "constructive," said he pressed Washington on the continued supply of defensive weapons systems to Kyiv. An energy truce and a Black Sea moratorium are reportedly on the table. The architecture of a possible ceasefire — if it exists — is being assembled in side rooms, in corridors, in the kind of informal meeting where nothing is official until it is.
Latvia blocked one door in Brussels. Somewhere in New York, others are being opened.
