The B4Ukraine conference, held in Kyiv on 26 April, highlighted a strategic shift in the coalition’s focus — from tracking, documentation, reputational pressure, and advocacy toward more targeted efforts to strengthen legal, financial, and political accountability for Russia’s war economy and the international actors enabling it.
Opening the conference, B4Ukraine co-founder Nataliia Popovych highlighted the scale of Russia’s atrocities documented in Ukraine.
These crimes “were enabled by thousands of international corporations and intermediaries that chose to close their eyes to complicity, to human rights violations in Ukraine, and to war crimes committed with the help of the revenues, technologies, services, and legitimacy they continued to provide,” she said.
Ambassador of Canada to Ukraine Natalka Cmoc thanked the members of B4Ukraine for “moving the conversation from simple sanctions compliance to geopolitical corporate responsibility.” Ambassador Cmoc noted that Canada believes the solution to the war is to “choke Russia’s war machine”, adding that “we need to do more.”
Ukrainian MP Tamila Tasheva stressed that the Russian economy is struggling as a result of the sanctions. “Coordinated international action can make a difference. But it must continue. It must deepen,” she said.
The conference was opened by a redefinition of what “responsible exit” means. In the context of Russia’s crime of aggression, a delayed withdrawal can no longer be considered neutral or responsible. Companies that remained after 2022 — and arguably after 2014 — are considered to have made a conscious decision to continue operating in an aggressor state. They can therefore be held responsible for complicity and their conduct is inconsistent with obligations under the UN Charter and human rights due diligence (HRDD) standards. Concerns about Russian consumer comfort or the welfare of local employees cannot be allowed to outweigh the loss of Ukrainian lives or the role played by business operations in sustaining Russia’s capacity to wage war.
Across thematic sessions — sanctions enforcement, corporate accountability, financial crime, and the Rosatom threat — participants repeatedly highlighted a persistent gap between policy ambition and real-world implementation. Russia continues to adapt through China-linked trade channels, shadow financial networks, energy loopholes, opaque asset structures, and ongoing Western corporate and technical involvement.
One message stood out across the discussions: the tools to increase pressure on Russia already exist, but they are not yet being applied with the necessary political will, consistency, or urgency.
Several priorities emerged clearly. Sanctions enforcement, participants argued, must move beyond technical discussions towards decisive political action, including closing loopholes exploited by the shadow fleet, addressing continued LNG imports, and treating Rosatom as a central sanctions and energy-security issue rather than a technical niche.
Companies that continue to operate in Russia or enable its economy must also face greater pressure, including through reputational, legal, investor and consumer channels. Participants stressed that corporate involvement in Russia should increasingly be treated not simply as a question of sanctions compliance, but as an issue of responsibility for the broader consequences of sustaining Russia’s war economy.
Financial crime efforts, meanwhile, need to focus more sharply on tracing assets, testing legal pathways for confiscation, and establishing clearer links between illicit wealth, criminal conduct and mechanisms for compensating victims. This includes renewed attention to frozen Russian sovereign assets, which participants argued should be mobilised more decisively to support Ukraine.
The discussion also challenged the assumption that simply holding frozen Russian assets is sufficient to deter further aggression. Participants called for exploring better asset-management and trust-fund models that could preserve and potentially grow the value of those assets for Ukraine, while strengthening the legal and political foundations for their eventual use.
A further conclusion was the importance of civil society as an independent and persistent voice for Ukraine — at times loud and confrontational, at times quieter but effective — while also serving as a partner to the Ukrainian state and its civil servants. The central obstacle to greater action, participants argued, remains political will, and civil society has a role in finding different ways to build it.
A major strategic conclusion of the conference was that Ukraine’s partners still do not have a coherent strategy to cause the collapse of Russia’s economy, military and financial system. B4Ukraine members broadly agreed that Russia’s financial sector collapse is essential.
The conference’s core message was clear: Russia’s aggression is sustained by interconnected corporate, financial, technological, logistical and legal ecosystems. B4Ukraine’s next challenge is to expose and disrupt these systems with greater precision, coordination and impact — while turning political commitments into measures capable of materially weakening Russia’s capacity to wage war.