The European Commission's decision to formally put Russia on the blacklist of high-risk countries in the area of anti-money laundering and terrorist financing is 1 of the EU's most crucial regulatory steps towards Moscow from the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to the Politico portal, the geopolitical context – Russia's aggression, further sanctions packages and the increasing threat to the stableness of the European financial strategy – pointed out that specified a decision could have been taken much earlier. However, its implementation has proved to be a multi-annual process, hampered by overlapping political, procedural and systemic factors.
