The world’s smallest violins are playing for Russia’s oligarchs. Or perhaps cellos, given that the European Union on Monday froze the assets of Sergei Roldugin, the Russian cellist, businessman and close friend of Vladimir Putin. Like billionaire oligarchs Alexei Mordashov, Mikhail Fridman, and a string of others, Roldugin has been blacklisted in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine for their links to the Russian president. That raises the question of what counterparties of their associated companies should do.

The likes of Fridman and his business partner in 20 billion pound investment fund LetterOne, Petr Aven, have something to cling to. Had they been placed on the United States’ specially designated nationals list, as pro-Putin oligarch Oleg Deripaska was in 2018, it would be game over. Because Deripaska controlled holding company En+ and aluminium group Rusal, the corporate entities were also sanctioned, causing their customers to flee and their shares to collapse.

Targets of the new EU sanctions are ostensibly in a better position. Fridman may have used a press conference on Tuesday to protest that the war should stop, and to brand EU sanctions as unfair and discriminatory to Russians doing business. But while LetterOne is registered in EU member Luxembourg, the corporate entity doesn’t automatically get sanctioned as a result of the pair having their personal European assets frozen and their movements restricted. Fridman and Aven also haven’t been sanctioned in Britain, where they own assets, or placed on the U.S. SDN list. One other crumb of comfort is that even En+ and Rusal were de-sanctioned by reducing Deripaska’s stake when he was blacklisted.

But a lot has happened since then. In 2022, some Russian banks are being kicked off the SWIFT payments system. Foreign exchange in Russia’s central bank reserves and national wealth fund has been blocked, and even Putin himself faces sanctions. Russian assets, especially those associated with oligarchs, are all now under a cloud.

For Fridman and peers, the fine print of their sanctions therefore no longer matters. What does is that customers and investors may think twice before engaging with LetterOne, with $14 billion Severstal, Mordashov’s steel group, or with freshly sanctioned oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s Metalloinvest, which he had wanted to value at $20 billion in a listing, according to Bloomberg. It’s not impossible that British sanctions will yet be toughened. If so, their London playground would disappear as well.