Kathrine Frich
The list of people close to Putin who did this, goes well beyond the Kremlin leader’s family.
When Western nations slap sanctions on foreign elites, the goal is to lock them out of international life.
Bank accounts freeze, travel stops, and doors slam shut across Europe and America. Yet in one prestigious corner of the Western world, the welcome mat is still out.
Business as usual
According to United24 Media and a November 3 report by Ukrainian outlet ZN.UA, eight blacklisted Russian figures have published 76 scientific papers in Western journals since 2022. Among the authors are Vladimir Putin’s two daughters, Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, who remain under sanctions from the US, the EU, and Switzerland.
Researchers at the Center for Researching Fakes and Propaganda in Russian Science at Ukraine’s Sumy State University uncovered the trend, United24 Media reported.
Their study found that US publishers handled 57 percent of these post-2022 articles, while Swiss outlets published 19 percent and British companies accounted for 15 percent.
Vorontsova works as a geneticist and hormone specialist leading state-backed anti-aging and genetics programs, according to ZN.UA. Even with sanctions in place, she has published papers through Springer Nature and the Swiss open-access publisher MDPI.
Her sister Tikhonova runs the Innopraktika fund and an artificial intelligence center at Moscow State University that gets state money for military tech like drone software and electronic warfare.
The US Treasury blacklisted her in April 2022 for aiding Russia’s defense sector, yet the American company Allerton Press still released her studies, ZN.UA reported.
Deep ties to defense
The list goes well beyond the Kremlin leader’s family. According to United24 Media, UK-sanctioned Mikhail Kovalchuk, who leads the Kurchatov Institute, still edits two journals distributed by Springer Nature and has published studies through Britain’s IOP Publishing and the International Union of Crystallography.
Other blacklisted authors have ties to military hardware, energy, and occupied Ukrainian land. The Sumy State University team reported that US-sanctioned Saint Petersburg Mining University head Vladimir Litvinenko published a paper with Cambridge University Press in 2025, while military microelectronics chief Vladimir Bespalov used Pleiades Publishing and MDPI.
Meanwhile, Nature Communications published a July 2026 study by Andrei Polyakov, an institute director sanctioned by the EU for backing the occupation of Ukrainian territory, United24 Media noted.
Major outlets like Elsevier and the American Physical Society also hosted work by aviation chief Kirill Sipalo and Moscow academic Nikolai Rogalev.
Following the money
Publishing in open-access journals often costs at least $2,500 per article in processing fees, according to ZN.UA.
If those payments came from blacklisted Russians or state grants and moved through Western banks, the publishers may have broken financial sanctions, while providing peer review could also cross legal lines.
Now, the Ukrainian researchers and Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science are questioning the publishers and filing complaints with watchdogs in the US, the UK, Switzerland, and the EU, U24 Media reported.
The findings follow an earlier Trap Aggressor probe showing that relatives of Russian defense figures, including drone maker Alexander Zakharov and billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, kept luxury homes in London and France while supplying Moscow’s military.
