#Canada must get serious about targeting Putin’s circle with Magnitsky sanctions

Six years after Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated, Ottawa has made scant use of the laws he desperately wanted this country to pass

Marcus Kolga is a human rights activist and expert on foreign disinformation and influence operations. He is part of the global Magnitsky campaign and is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Six years ago, just before midnight on a February night in Moscow, eight shots pierced the darkness along the Moskva River. Just steps from the Kremlin, on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, lay the motionless body of the leader of Russia’s pro-democracy opposition movement, Boris Nemtsov.

I saw Nemtsov for the last time the previous Spring, when we had breakfast in a Tallinn hotel. Boris told me that he was counting on Canada to help hold the Putin regime to account with Magnitsky sanctions—allowing the government to place targeted asset freezes and visa bans on corrupt foreign officials and human rights abusers. The deterrent effect of sanctions, he believed, would help protect Russian activists from Putin’s efforts to silence them.

Canada would not adopt Magnitsky human rights sanctions until 2017, nearly three years after Nemtsov was killed. And not a single name has been added to Canada’s Magnitsky list since 2018—greatly diminishing the law’s effectiveness.

LISTEN: Sergei Magnitsky’s heroic sacrifice (The Power of One podcast)

Boris Nemtsov was not the first or last activist targeted for elimination by the Kremlin. Earlier this month, the British open-source investigative website Bellingcat published a detailed report outlining how Nemtsov’s close friend and colleague, Vladimir Kara-Murza, had been tailed by a Russian FSB hit squad in 2015 and 2017. These Kremlin hitmen succeeded in poisoning him twice, both times to within a hair of his life.

In August, anti-corruption activist, Alexei Navalny, fell suddenly ill on a flight to Moscow from Siberia. Navalny’s flight made an emergency landing in Omsk—to the chagrin, we can be sure, of Vladimir Putin—where he received quick medical attention and was later flown to Berlin. Navalny returned to Moscow in January and was quickly arrested and imprisoned, facing an uncertain future.

Where Canada failed Boris Nemtsov, we now have an opportunity to help Navalny, Kara-Murza and their fellow activists. They are calling for the application of Magnitsky sanctions against those officials and oligarchs who act as Putin’s caretakers and keepers of billions in assets pilfered by the regime.

Among those topping Alexey Navalny’s list are Putin associates with significant business interests and assets in Canada, including Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska.

In 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department placed Oleg Deripaska on the U.S. sanctions list “for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation.” Deripaska had owned a significant stake in Canada’s Magna International, when in 2007 he purchased a $1.5 billion stake in the auto parts manufacturer, before his shares were dumped a year later in the midst of the financial crisis.  According to Catherine Belton, the British author of “Putin’s People,” Deripaska had told her in an interview, “I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.” If Deripaska has any current financial interests in Canada, they are unknown. He and his company En+ remain members of a pro-Kremlin Russian-Canadian trade promotion organization.

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Roman Abramovich, whose estimated wealth exceeds $10 billion, is also identified as a top target for western sanctions by Russian activists. Belton writes that Abramovich’s charitable organization contributed hundreds of millions to a fund controlled by a company created by Putin’s inner circle called “Petromed.” In a recent exposé about Putin’s US$1.37 billion Black Sea palace, Alexey Navalny found that “35 percent of these [Petromed] funds were funneled through a special offshore firm owned (de facto) mostly by Putin, in part to finance the construction of a fabulous mansion on the Black Sea coast.”

Abramovich’s association with Putin goes much deeper. His 2003 acquisition of the Chelsea football club was, according to one of Belton’s sources, in fact directed by Vladimir Putin, while another source told her that Abramovich “is Putin’s representative.” The leading Russian oligarch, writes Belton, “had become part of the Putin machine, one of the Kremlin’s trusted custodians.”

Abramovich is the largest shareholder of Russian steel producer, Evraz, which operates four large Canadian steel processing facilities that produce pipes for the oil industry. Abramovich’s company is a leading supplier of pipes for the Canadian government owned Trans Mountain Pipeline. As such, the transparency of Evraz’s ownership structure and their possible links to Vladimir Putin require much greater scrutiny

In addition to Deripaska and Abramovich, many other Russian officials have been added to the sanctions lists of Canada’s allies, but remain missing from Canada’s. Among them are Yevgeni Prigozhin, the head of the Russian “troll factory” and the Wagner mercenary group. Furthermore, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugavoi, the notorious killers of whistleblower, Alexander Litvenenko, are on allied sanction lists but not on our own.

Canada has the tools to limit the impunity with which corrupt Russian human rights abusers are allowed to operate but have chosen not to use them since 2018 – despite growing repression by authoritarian regimes around the world. On February 22, EU foreign ministers agreed to apply sanctions on Russian officials responsible for human rights violations and the jailing of
Alexey Navalny. If we wish to support activists like Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, and honour the memory of Boris Nemtsov, we must act now and use the Sergei Magnitsky Law to protect them and hold their tormentors to account.