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Topic: Human Rights, and Trade Blog Brand: Silk Road Rivalries Region: Eurasia Tags: Central Asia, China, FATF, Kazakhstan, Money Laundering, Russia, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Turkmenistan How Russia Distorts Global Anti-Money Laundering Efforts December 11, 2025 By: Jarett Decker
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The election of a Russian official to an international financial watchdog body underscores the abuse of regulations to prop up authoritarian governments in Central Asia.
Minsk is a surreal city locked in a Soviet time warp. Belarus’s longtime ruler unveiled a monument dedicated to Vladimir Lenin in 2016, a quarter century after Lenin statues were torn down almost everywhere else in the former USSR.
Perhaps fittingly, Minsk was the setting last month for one of the stranger international gatherings in recent memory, as a former KGB agent and sanctioned Russian official was reelected as chair of a globally recognized anti-money laundering body. That decision tightened Moscow’s grip on a key area of international policy and handed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) a quiet strategic win in Eurasia.
The Paris-based organization that spearheads international anti-money laundering—the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF—suspended Russia’s membership in February of 2023 in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Yet FATF left in place its regional affiliate, the Eurasian Group on Combating Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (EAG). The EAG is based in Moscow and chaired by Yury Chikhanchin, a veteran of Soviet and Russian security services who heads Russia’s anti-money laundering agency. The European Union and several countries have imposed travel bans and financial sanctions on Chikhanchin for assisting in financial coordination for Putin’s war and using his agency against dissidents and journalists.
Since 2010, FATF has recognized the Russian-dominated EAG as an Associate Member authorized to evaluate whether its member countries have appropriately applied FATF standards, which require countries to implement systems of surveillance and criminal enforcement to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. That’s a problem, because most of EAG’s nine member countries are ruled by illiberal regimes, and some have been credibly accused of using FATF’s standards as a pretext to shut down or prosecute opponents. Among the EAG members so accused are Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia itself. Indeed, Putin used Russia’s money laundering laws as part of his campaign against dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
The EAG’s most recent evaluation of Turkmenistan in 2023 shows why Russia’s role matters. Human rights organizations peg Turkmenistan as one of the most repressive countries on earth. The evaluation of Turkmenistan was sensitive because authoritarian regimes often invoke FATF’s requirement to monitor non-profit organizations for potential terrorist financing as an excuse to smother dissenting groups. According to the human rights watchdog Freedom House, independent non-governmental organizations “cannot operate in Turkmenistan and remain in exile abroad.”
Under EAG procedures, its secretariat in Moscow, led by Russian national Sergey Teterukov, was charged with selecting the team to perform the evaluation. The team came from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan—all classified by Freedom House as having “consolidated authoritarian regimes” and most of them facing credible accusations of misusing FATF standards against political opponents.
In its evaluation and report, the team offered no criticism of Turkmenistan’s virtually absolute suppression of independent groups. Even though Turkmenistan had noted “no instances of NPOs [non-profit organizations] being used for TF [terrorism financing],” the team asserted that the “country has insufficient measures to ensure transparency of NPO [non-profit organization] activities.”
In other words, the team invoked FATF standards to urge the Turkmenistan regime to squeeze whatever remains of civil society even harder. Although FATF has professed concern about possible “unintended consequences” of its standards—including misuse to suppress human rights—it endorsed the EAG team’s 303-page evaluation of Turkmenistan without exception.
FATF—whose plenary meetings are closed to the media—has never explained why it tolerates the continuing Russian domination of its Associate Member, the EAG. In its February 2023 announcement suspending Russia’s membership in FATF, the organization stated without further elaboration that the “Russian Federation will remain a member of the Global Network as an active member of the Eurasian Group on Combating Money Laundering (EAG) and retain its rights as an EAG member,” not mentioning Russia’s leadership in both the chair position and the secretariat or its hosting of the EAG in Moscow. Remarkably, the EAG announced on November 28 that its nine member countries reelected the Putin-aligned Chikhanchin as their chair, the second time they have done so since their accreditor, FATF, suspended Russia’s membership.
Why? The decision to defy FATF is likely a geopolitical one. The membership of the EAG—which includes China and India—largely overlaps with that of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with eight common members between them. The SCO seeks to promote multipolarity and reduce the West’s power in global governance. In its Tianjin Declaration of September 1, 2025, the SCO emphasized its support for the “sovereignty” and “independence” of its members, criticized “confrontational approaches” to international issues, and pledged to “oppose the application of ‘double standards’ on human rights and interference in internal affairs of other states under the pretext of protecting them.”
Set against this, FATF is often seen as Western or US-dominated and sometimes accused of being a tool of geopolitical coercion against the Global South. Entrenching a sanctioned Russian official as EAG’s leader signals a push by SCO-aligned states to defy Western sanctions, weaken FATF’s authority, and undercut Western influence over global financial governance. Chikhanchin’s reelection is a small but significant early success in the SCO members’ commitment, through the Tianjin Declaration, to deepen their coordination.
Control over anti-money-laundering evaluations may be particularly important because the SCO links anti-money laundering and terrorist financing to its “joint fight against terrorism, separatism, and extremism,” a consistent theme of the organization since its founding. It also helps assure that anti-money laundering evaluations do not become a vehicle for “interfering in the internal affairs” of SCO members, including through criticism of their misuse of FATF standards to suppress opponents.
But regardless of the geopolitics, the EAG members have left FATF with a stark choice. Russia’s continued dominance of the EAG makes a farce of FATF’s suspension and discredits FATF’s mission to fight financial crime. Unless FATF intervenes, it will appear to have lost control over its own standards and enforcement mechanisms and enable authoritarianism in Eurasia.
About the Author: Jarett Decker
Jarett Decker is the former head of the World Bank’s Centre for Financial Reporting Reform in Vienna, Austria, where he led projects to improve financial transparency in the former Soviet space and elsewhere. He has written articles for The New York Times, Regulation Asia, and Reason magazine. He currently holds the Jacobs Chair of Excellence in Accounting at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches international anti-money laundering.
Image: Catarina Belova / Shutterstock.com.
The post How Russia Distorts Global Anti-Money Laundering Efforts appeared first on The National Interest.
Источник: nationalinterest.org