Millions of Russian citizens who invested in foreign stocks and bonds before the war in Ukraine remain locked out of their assets, three years after sweeping Western sanctions froze Russian-linked holdings across global financial markets, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports.

These are were small investments by Russia’s middle-class, usually of a bit more than a $1,000, into foreign shares like Apple and Tesla that they believed were safer than investing into Russian stocks as they would be protected by Western property rights. They were wrong.

While much of the attention has focused on the $280–300bn in sovereign Russian reserves frozen by the West in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a lesser-known and unresolved consequence has been the seizure of private assets held by ordinary Russian investors. These include not only the $58bn in high-profile assets like yachts, villas, and aircraft belonging to sanctioned individuals, but also a further $70bn in assets belonging to Russians with no direct connection to sanctions.

“These investors have no formal restrictions against them,” Yulia Starostina, writing for Carnegie, reported. “They lost access to their money simply because their investments were handled through institutions that were later blacklisted.”

The trend of diversifying investments to include international shares appeared a few years before the war started after bank deposits interest rates fell to next to nothing. It was driven by the SPB Exchange (SPBX) based in St Petersburg and hyped by the new fintech companies. BPBX built a unique system that allows punters to register an account in a minute and immediately buy and sell US, and other international stock, even when those markets are closed for trading.

The whole system came crashing down after February 2022. Among the sanctioned entities were key parts of Russia’s financial infrastructure, including the National Settlement Depository, major brokers like Sberbank and VTB, and the SPBX which had become the primary venue for trading foreign stocks.

The sanctions led to a chain reaction: foreign securities, including American, European, and even Chinese assets, were frozen in European depositories Euroclear and Clearstream. These depositories do not track individual ownership and had no idea these accounts belong to regular Russian middle-class investors. Instead, they could only see sanctioned Russian financial institutions as custodians and so froze their accounts.

The result was some $14bn in assets held by Russian retail investors were frozen. While the amount may seem modest compared with sovereign reserves, it represents the savings of over 5mn individuals who had been encouraged by the Russian state to invest abroad. Many of them were retail clients advised to diversify into foreign stocks such through tax-incentivised individual investment accounts.

“The freeze shattered confidence not only in foreign markets but in the very idea of private property,” Starostina said.

A limited recovery programme launched in 2024 has allowed 1.5mn investors to regain some access to their holdings through a mutual asset unblocking scheme. But eligibility is capped at RUB100,000 (about $1,200), leaving the majority of affected investors—some 3.5mn people—without recourse.

According to 2021 Central Bank research, 40% of male retail investors’ assets and 36% of female investors’ assets were in foreign securities. Yet most held modest portfolios. Among investors with over 10,000 rubles in their accounts, 80% had portfolios worth under 1mn rubles, and over one-third had less than 100,000 rubles invested.

“Just 1% of clients had more than RUB3mn ($40,000) in assets,” Carnegie reported, citing data from the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. “These were largely middle-class, economically engaged Russians with higher education.”

A legal route exists to petition for asset unblocking, but it remains slow and prohibitively expensive. Investors must secure licences from finance ministries in Belgium and Luxembourg and provide documentation proving ownership and compliance with sanctions laws.

Despite this, no comprehensive political or financial solution has yet emerged. “Three years on, these savings remain stranded,” Carnegie noted.