The transfer of the Russian assets of Swiss food giant Nestle SA and French supermarket chain Auchan to temporary management, which the Kremlin announced on Thursday evening, will be one of the largest cases of seizure of business from European companies during the entire Ukrainian war.

According to a decree by Russian President Vladimir Putin, assets worth billions of euros will be transferred to the company L. E. V. Management, which has just one employee and a charter capital of 15,000 rubles.

The company, headed by Russian interior ministry Major General Andrey Krayushkin who was appointed a week before Putin's aforementioned decree, will receive six Nestle factories in Russia with 7,000 employees and annual revenue of $2.5 billion, as well as the Auchan supermarket chain, which has been operating in Russia for more than 20 years, has more than 200 outlets and 30,000 employees.

According to Bloomberg, the seizure of assets of Nestle, which has been operating in Russia since the 1990s, and Auchan, which opened its business in the early 2000s, will be the largest seizure of property of European investors in Russia since at least 2024. At that time, the breweries of Belgian AB InBev and Turkish Anadolu Efes were transferred to temporary management. In the same year, the Kremlin also seized and transferred to Gazprom the Ariston and Bosch household appliance factories in Russia, where refrigerators and washing machines were produced before the Ukrainian war, with annual sales of about 50 billion rubles.

“We are talking about companies, European companies from unfriendly countries,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday. “One of the factors taken into account when making this decision was that this is an unfriendly country, and that this is an unfriendly country that is currently most actively involved in military actions against our country.”