Rosfinmonitoring has added former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov to its official list of “terrorists and extremists,” reports The Moscow Times.
He is joined by economist Sergei Guriev and Novaya Gazeta Europe’s editor-in-chief Kirill Martynov. Under Russian law, the inclusion means that banks must immediately freeze their assets and halt all financial services.
Kasyanov, Guriev, and Martynov — all designated as “foreign agents” — live abroad and are members of the Anti-War Committee of Russia, a group the Kremlin labels dangerous, but which openly opposes the war in Ukraine.
On October 14, the FSB launched criminal proceedings accusing the committee’s members of “forcible seizure of power” and “organizing a terrorist community.”
These charges fall under some of the heaviest articles of the Russian Criminal Code — a convenient tool for silencing anyone who escapes Putin’s grip.
But in Kasyanov’s case, the irony is staggering.
This is a man who served as Putin’s Prime Minister from 2000 to 2004, helping shape the very authoritarian architecture that now hunts him down. Before that, he controlled the Ministry of Finance — fully embedded in the machinery he now calls oppressive.
In 2010, Kasyanov attempted to reinvent himself as an opposition figure, co-founding the coalition For Russia Without Arbitrariness and Corruption with Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Rizhkov, and Vladimir Milov. This later became the People’s Freedom Party (PARNAS), dissolved by Russia’s Supreme Court in May 2023.
A political comeback was impossible — but Moscow still ensures that no former insider walks away clean.
Just days ago, three more Anti-War Committee members were added to the extremist list: political scientist Ekaterina Shulman, and businessmen Boris Zimin and Mikhail Kokorich.
In total, 22 individuals — plus unspecified others — are now entangled in the FSB’s sprawling case. Authorities claim the committee finances “Ukrainian paramilitary nationalist units” and seeks the “liquidation of the current Russian government.”
The Anti-War Committee, in stark contrast, says it supports those who oppose the war unleashed by the Kremlin — a war Kasyanov himself once enabled by helping consolidate the power structure that drives it today.
The regime now turns its own architects into enemies.
And Kasyanov, once a pillar of Putin’s early rule, finds himself crushed by the machinery he helped build.
