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The United Kingdom has imposed a new round of sanctions on 18 entities and individuals in Kyrgyzstan and three entities in Georgia, accusing them of serving as a “backdoor” for Russian sanctions evasion and helping finance Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine.
The British government said the Kyrgyzstan designations are aimed specifically at dismantling “crypto and illicit finance networks” that enable Russia to procure goods needed to sustain its military campaign. The Georgian entities were sanctioned separately; London noted that Georgia has distanced itself from the European Union and moved back into Russia’s orbit in recent years.
At the centre of the action is what the UK government describes as the A-7 network — a Kremlin-backed structure designed, in London’s characterisation, to bypass Western sanctions, finance military procurement, and process revenues from Russian oil sales. The network reportedly handled more than $90 billion in transactions in 2025, a figure the British government says represents approximately half of Russia’s total military procurement expenditure for that year.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper framed the move as part of a deliberate effort to keep pace with Moscow’s evolving evasion tactics. “The UK is adapting and strengthening our approach to target the evolving tactics Russia is using to evade restrictions. We are going after the infrastructure that underpins its war economy at the same time as Ukraine is increasing the pressure on Russia on the battlefield,” she said in the government statement. Cooper added: “We are tracking down and shutting off the financial lifelines that sustain Putin’s war machine. There will be no safe havens for those enabling Russia’s aggression.”
The British government also cited the deteriorating state of the Russian economy as evidence that the cumulative pressure of Western sanctions is beginning to take hold. Russian economists, it noted, have cut the country’s growth forecast for 2026 from 1.3 percent to 0.4 percent. London separately estimated that the war is costing Russia approximately 1,000 troops per day.
Kyrgyzstan has become an increasingly prominent focus of Western sanctions enforcement in Central Asia. In April, the European Union imposed “anti-circumvention” sanctions on the Kyrgyz government — a step that preceded the latest British action and signals a coordinated, if not formally joint, Western effort to close off the routes through which restricted goods and finances reach Moscow.
Georgia’s inclusion reflects a different trajectory. Once a candidate for EU membership, the country has under its current government moved away from Brussels and closer to Moscow, making it, in the view of Western governments, a more permissive environment for sanctions circumvention.
The designations do not name specific individuals or entities in the publicly available summary of the British government statement, but the breadth of the action — 21 targets across two countries in a single round — underscores London’s stated intent to disrupt the financial architecture supporting Russian procurement rather than pursue isolated actors.