Igor Chasnyk, for whom Ukraine is proposing sanctions for managing the companies of an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, is one of several dozen Russians who registered at least 30 companies in Sarajevo after the beginning of the Russian invasion.

Most of them are registered at only three addresses and with the help of a company that promises to provide BiH citizenship for money. But in reality, the companies face the refusal of domestic banks to open an account for them for fear of international sanctions.

Business boomed for Kemal Muratovic from Sarajevo, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For years, this private individual has been offering foreigners to establish companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and for a certain price get BiH citizenship. At the address of his intermediary company in a three-story building in Sarajevo’s Hrasno neighbourhood, he has registered at least 15 companies owned by Russians over the past year.

In the fall of 2022, he had a special client.

He helped Igor Chasnyk to register the company “Chasnik” with a wide range of activities.

The entrance of the residential and commercial building in Sarajevo’s Hrasno neighbourhood has no indication that there are several companies with Russian capital inside. One of the boards is from “Express Invest,” Kemal Muratovic’s company. He says he has his own concept of checking clients.

“There is a husband and a wife in the structure of the company. These people have provided us with original documents that they have never been criminally punished, that no criminal proceedings are being conducted against them,” Muratovic explains.

When he hears about Chasnyk’s role in Russia, he says that he is not comfortable with it and that he knows nothing about him and his ties to Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Chasnyk has not yet started his business in Sarajevo, and his mediator Muratovic says that he is being held back by banks that do not want to open an account for him, as are most other Russian citizens.

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