A Putin-list oligarch runs Poland’s vape market. The EU won’t sanction him.

Buy a disposable vape at a Polish kiosk, and some of the money may end up in the hands of a Russian oligarch the European Union has chosen not to sanction.

Oleg Boyko is on the US Treasury’s Putin List. Ukraine, Poland, Australia, and Canada all sanctioned him. The EU never did—and on 26 March 2026, its own top court spelled out precisely the standard that would catch him.

That day, the EU Court of Justice upheld sanctions on five other leading Russian businessmen, ruling that a person’s sheer economic weight in Russia is sufficient to justify sanctions—prosecutors need not prove any personal wrongdoing.

Being a major player in the Russian economy is itself enough. Boyko fits that description precisely. Yet the EU has not sanctioned him—not because he fails the test, but because EU sanctions are not automatic. A member state has to put a name forward, and none has done so for Boyko.

Evapify, the dominant distributor of disposable vapes in Poland, is financially and personally tied to Boyko—sanctioned by Poland in December 2024, by Ukraine in October 2022, and by Australia in April 2022.

The bloc whose single market those vapes move through has done nothing.

What the gap costs

The cost lands first in Ukraine. Disposable vapes are transported across the border from Polish and Slovak warehouses into a wartime economy that taxes almost none of them.

The Growford Institute estimates Ukraine lost over 7.6 billion hryvnia ($171 million) to the illegal e-cigarette market in 2025 alone—5.6 billion hryvnia ($126 million) in unpaid excise and another 2 billion ($45 million) in VAT. Ukrainian customs now intercepts smuggled vapes almost weekly. Border officers at Ustyluh recently found vapes worth more than 2 million hryvnia ($45,000), hidden under the floor of a vehicle.

Evapify reached roughly half of Poland’s disposable-vape market within two years of its launch, with marketing aimed at the youngest consumers. The product is not harmless. Nicotine harms the developing brains of children and adolescents, the World Health Organization warns, with long-term consequences that can include learning and anxiety disorders.

The same product, smuggled, now supplies much of Ukraine’s shadow market. Behind both stands the same network.

The man Brussels left off

Boyko built his fortune in 1990s Russia through gambling and lending. The US Treasury named him among 96 oligarchs in its January 2018 report to Congress on the figures closest to the Kremlin—the document widely known as the Putin List. Treasury stressed the report was not itself a sanctions list.

A 2025 academic study of 60 sanctioned Russian oligarchs identified Boyko as the most internationalized of the entire group, the only one whose primary assets sat outside Russia. He is the exact profile an EU-wide listing exists to catch, and the one hardest for any single country to reach alone.

Poland has acted against him, but only halfway. Its December 2024 sanctions decision states that Boyko maintains links to organized crime and Russian intelligence services. The decision covers Boyko personally and his lending entities. It does not cover Evapify, a vape business of analogous structure that Poland has so far left untouched.

The EU is busy taking names off, not adding them

A name reaches the EU list only when a member state proposes it and the measure survives the bloc’s unanimity rule. That is the same process now running in reverse.

A March 2026 investigation by the consortium VSquare and its partners documented Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó telling a Russian official he had removed 72 entities from an EU sanctions package and was seeking Moscow’s help to remove more. In 2025, Brussels lifted sanctions on oligarch Vyacheslav Kantor under pressure from Hungary and Slovakia.

Poland had to convert its national measures to cover what the EU dropped on Kantor—and on Boyko, Poland never had EU cover to begin with, listing him on its own in December 2024. The bloc that struggles to keep names on the list is not about to add a new one, which is exactly how a figure like Boyko stays off it.

Sanctioned oligarchs are also fighting back through the courts. Mikhail Fridman, a sanctioned banking billionaire, is using investor-state arbitration to challenge Western sanctions and seek billions in compensation.

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Boyko has run a quieter version of the same playbook. His lawyers persuaded Canada to de-list him in November 2023. And in March 2025, while still sanctioned in Poland, Ukraine, and Australia, he acquired Serbian citizenship, according to the Balkan outlets Vreme and BIRN. Serbia granted him a passport on 6 March 2025, under then-prime minister Miloš Vučević, the outlets reported; Belgrade did not say what interest the citizenship served.

Unlike most EU naturalization paths, Serbia’s does not require giving up one’s prior citizenship—so Boyko added a passport rather than exchanging one. For a sanctioned Russian national, the reporting notes, a Serbian document can ease movement through European banking and travel channels that would otherwise flag him.

The warning that vanished

Two analysts saw this coming. In November 2023, Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev and Ukrainian journalist Mykola Vorobiov published a piece in Gazeta Wyborcza. Its headline: “Russian criminal business threatens Ukraine and Europe.” It named Boyko, named Evapify, and projected the Ukrainian budget losses that have since materialized.

In 2024, the article was removed from Wyborcza’s website. Euromaidan Press has obtained the original text and screenshots. According to people familiar with the matter, the takedown followed legal pressure tied to the Evapify network. No public explanation was ever given.

This is where our series begins. Over the next two articles, Euromaidan Press will trace how Boyko’s vape empire took root in Poland and now floods wartime Ukraine, and describe in detail how a sanctioned Kremlin oligarch has spent three years using Western courts, friendly governments, and quiet legal pressure to scrub his name from sanctions lists and from the press.

The article that warned about him is gone, and the network it described is bigger than ever. Brussels still hasn’t opened the file.