Kremlin spokesman says Mikhail Fridman can come and go as he pleases, like any other Russian
When asked to comment on the Alfa Group co-founder Mikhail Fridman’s abrupt return to Russia days after having moved to Israel, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he doesn’t see anything odd about the oligarch’s decision to come back to his home country.
The sanctioned Russian tycoon quit the U.K. and moved to Israel just a week before Hamas militants launched an attack on the country, which prompted him to flee to Moscow.
According to Peskov, as a Russian national, Fridman “can come back, live here, and leave the country again, like any other citizen of the Russian Federation.”
Fridman was sanctioned in the E.U. and Great Britain shortly after Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In August 2023, he was also added to the U.S. sanction list. He is now trying to dispute the sanctions in court.
Ukraine has frozen the assets of Alfa Group, a multinational conglomerate co-founded by Fridman, alleging that the tycoon had been financing the Russian invasion.
