Since early July, the Russian “press” has been claiming that Serhiy Arbuzov, former First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine and former head of the National Bank of Ukraine during the Yanukovych era, will be elected to the aggressor’s State Duma in September as a member of the “A Just Russia” party, and will “lead a party group uniting” occupied Crimea, Sevastopol, and the southern mainland regions of Ukraine.
In February 2014, Acting Prime Minister of Ukraine Arbuzov fled the country, and since May of that year, he has been wanted in connection with embezzlement from the National Bank of Ukraine during the creation of the “Banking Television” TV channel. It was reported that $50 million in his Latvian accounts were frozen, likely transferred to Ukraine a year later.
In May 2015, Arbuzov was allegedly involved in financing the provocations that led to the deaths of people at the Trade Union House in Odessa on May 2, 2014. In 2015, Arbuzov was sanctioned by the European Union and the United States, but in 2018, he secured the unfreezing of his frozen assets in the EU Court of Justice. Since 2021, the EU has not renewed the sanctions regime against him. In April 2025, Ukraine imposed sanctions against Arbuzov.
Since 2015, the aggressor has used Arbuzov for propaganda purposes as the formal “chairman” of the St. Petersburg-based “Center for Research on Economic and Sociocultural Development of the CIS, Central and Eastern Europe,” whose activities were overseen by top-level Russian intelligence officer Alexander Bessmertnykh.
For the past decade, Arbuzov has led a low-profile life. It has been reported, in particular, that he frequently visits Crimea and that, on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was considered by Russian intelligence services to be one of the gauleiters after the capture of Kyiv.
In 2024, an investigation was published revealing that Arbuzov is one of the beneficiaries of the Cypriot company “BS Chukchi Investments Limited”, which received income from coal mining at a deposit in Chukotka developed since 2016 by the Australian group “Tigers Realm Coal Limited”.
