A contentious €2bn plan to unlock Strabag stock pits Austria’s push for relief against fears of sanction erosion across the bloc

Vienna/Brussels – European Union officials are weighing an exceptional step: unfreezing around €2 billion worth of shares in Strabag, the Austrian construction giant, to compensate Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) for a Russian court judgment tied to interests once linked to Oleg Deripaska, according to diplomats and people familiar with the discussions.

The proposal, floated in last‑minute talks over the EU’s nineteenth sanctions package against Russia, would carve out a narrow exemption so that assets immobilised under 2022 sanctions could be transferred to the Austrian lender. The assets—shares formerly tied to Rasperia, a vehicle once controlled by Deripaska—were frozen after the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine. In early 2024 a Russian court ordered RBI to pay roughly €2 billion in damages in a case brought by an entity connected to the billionaire and said the bank could recoup that amount by taking the equivalent Strabag shares. That transfer has been impossible while the EU’s freeze remains in place.

Austria argues the workaround prevents a perverse outcome in which a European bank is punished twice: first by a Russian court order and then by EU rules that block lawful recovery. Diplomats sympathetic to Vienna also note that RBI—one of the last major Western lenders still operating in Russia—has been locked in a two‑year effort to disentangle itself from the market, stymied by Moscow’s capital controls and by the political leverage Russia derives from RBI’s critical role processing payments.

“Without a tailored solution, a sanctioned party could benefit from both a Russian judgment and the EU asset freeze,” said one official involved in the talks. “That cannot be the intention of sanctions.”

Pushback builds

But resistance is hardening in several capitals, including those that have driven the bloc’s toughest measures since 2022. Ambassadors from a number of member states are expected to object at a meeting today, arguing the move risks legitimising rulings from Russian courts that have increasingly targeted Western groups in retaliation for sanctions and corporate exits.

For those governments, the precedent is the point. If the EU unlocks assets to satisfy a judgment obtained in Russia by an oligarch‑linked claimant, they argue, others will line up with carefully engineered claims to pry open the sanctions regime. “We would be telling oligarchs: find a friendly court in Russia, obtain an award, and Brussels will help you collect,” a senior diplomat said.

Sceptics also warn the plan could hand Moscow a propaganda victory, casting the EU as divided and vulnerable to legal jujitsu. And they worry about the message to courts in third countries: that the EU’s asset freezes are negotiable.

An intricate corporate knot

Strabag, one of Europe’s largest contractors, has long been a focal point of the dispute. Rasperia, the vehicle formerly associated with Deripaska, amassed roughly a quarter of the company in the 2000s. After the war began, EU sanctions immobilised the stake, and subsequent changes to Rasperia’s ownership left a disputed legal trail that complicated any sale or swap. Attempts to engineer an asset exchange that would see RBI unwind Russian risk while resolving Strabag’s shareholder overhang faltered amid compliance concerns and shifting regulatory guidance.

The Russian judgment against RBI in 2024 added urgency—and complexity. It ordered the bank to pay about €2 billion and indicated recovery could come via acquiring the Strabag shares. In Brussels, that created a paradox: the EU’s own sanctions stood in the way of a remedy ostensibly designed to prevent an oligarch‑linked entity from profiting. The Austrian‑sponsored proposal now under discussion would temporarily lift—or more precisely, narrowly waive—the freeze to permit a single, supervised transfer of the shares to RBI, after which the sanctions would remain fully in force for any other Deripaska‑linked property.

Stakes for policy—and politics

The debate reaches beyond a single bank. Since 2022, the EU has crafted an intricate web of restrictions targeting hundreds of individuals and entities supporting Russia’s war effort. The measures include asset freezes, travel bans, export controls and price caps. Carve‑outs exist—for humanitarian goods, legal services, and wind‑down arrangements—but Brussels has resisted exceptions that could be read as capitulating to Russian court pressure.

Supporters of the Strabag transfer frame it as a defensive, one‑off fix to shield a systemically important European bank from an extraterritorial squeeze. Opponents see it as the thin end of the wedge. If the EU can bend the rules here, they ask, why not when other firms are hit by similar judgments? Several diplomats pointed to recent Russian actions against Western assets as evidence of an escalating pattern—one that requires steadier sanctions enforcement, not flexibility.

The politics are delicate. Austria has faced criticism over the depth of its financial ties to Russia and the length of time RBI has remained in the country. Vienna replies that any exit must be orderly, lawful and—above all—feasible under Russian restrictions. The longer the stalemate persists, the more RBI’s presence becomes a vulnerability for both the bank and the EU’s broader Russia policy.

Market tremors and compliance questions

News of the possible exemption has already reverberated through markets, with RBI shares climbing on reports that a draft proposal would allow the bank to take control of the Strabag stake. For compliance officers across Europe, however, the more consequential issue is interpretive: how Brussels writes any waiver will set a template for future edge cases. Legal scholars say the Commission would need to draft unusually tight language to confine the exception to the precise facts—deriving from a pre‑existing Russian judgment tied to assets already frozen; a single identified beneficiary; and supervisory safeguards to prevent value leakage to sanctioned parties.

Another thorny question is valuation. Sanctions immobilise, rather than confiscate, assets. If RBI were to receive shares, the transfer must ensure that no economic benefit flows to any sanctioned person—directly or indirectly. That could imply escrow arrangements, trustee structures, or staged unwinds, and would likely require explicit prohibitions on voting rights and dividends until authorities certify that sanctions compliance is airtight.

The battle over precedent

For hawkish capitals, any such guardrails miss the point. What matters is the signal: that securing a judgment in Russia can, under pressure, pry open the EU’s sanctions regime. They warn of a “moral hazard” where oligarch‑linked entities sue European firms in Russian courts not only to extract damages but to force asset transfers out of sanctions. The fear is not academic. Over the past year, Russian authorities and courts have stepped up seizures and coercive fines targeting Western companies over stalled exits and contract disputes.

Advocates of the Austrian plan counter that rejecting the waiver would also create perverse incentives—inviting more Russian judgments designed to trap EU companies in an impossible bind and undermining European financial stability. In their telling, a strictly tailored carve‑out, approved collectively and policed aggressively, would blunt Russia’s leverage while denying oligarchs monetary gain.

What happens next

Ambassadors are due to hash out the issue today as part of broader negotiations over the latest Russia sanctions package. Even if they agree, the legal drafting could take days and would likely be accompanied by a public statement underscoring the “exceptional and non‑precedential” nature of any waiver. Several officials insisted that, absent a robust consensus, the item could be kicked to ministers—an outcome that would prolong uncertainty for RBI and for Strabag’s shareholder structure.

Whatever the final decision, the episode underlines a new phase in the EU’s sanctions policy. After two and a half years of near‑continuous tightening, the challenge is less about adding names to a list and more about defending the architecture against adversarial lawfare. The Deripaska‑Strabag‑Raiffeisen triangle has become a case study in how sanctions collide with cross‑border litigation, legacy shareholdings and the practical realities of exiting Russia.

The view from Vienna—and Kyiv

In Vienna, business groups warn that uncertainty over Strabag’s ownership and RBI’s Russian exposure clouds investment and deal‑making. In Kyiv and in many EU capitals closest to the war, officials say the lesson is simpler: sanctions are only as strong as their enforcement and their insulation from political bargaining. “If exceptions become the rule, deterrence erodes,” one eastern European envoy said. “Russia watches these signals.”

For now, the calculus in Brussels is brutally narrow: transfer a frozen stake to protect a European bank’s balance sheet, or hold the line and risk deepening the perception that Russian courts can weaponise Europe’s own rules against it. Either choice will echo far beyond Vienna’s Ringstrasse—and will be read closely in Moscow.