Putin Strips Metro AG of Control Over Its Russian Business, Handing It to a Company Registered Three Weeks Earlier

Vladimir Putin has added a fifth major Western retailer to the list of companies he has effectively taken off the hands of their foreign owners since Russia's 2023 decree targeting businesses from "unfriendly countries" — and this time the target is Germany's Metro AG.

The decree, signed Monday, September 28, and posted on a Russian government website, places Metro Cash & Carry LLC, along with Metro Warehouse Noginsk LLC and Retail Property 5 LLC, under "temporary administration." The new manager is JSC UK Torg RUS, a company that public registry data shows was created on September 8, exactly three weeks before Putin signed the order, according to The Bell and reporting confirmed by the Kyiv Independent and United24 Media.

Torg RUS has one owner: Johannes Tolay, who runs Metro Cash & Carry in Russia. Metro said in a statement that it "still formally owns" its Russian subsidiary but "no longer has operational control of it," and that the company is "analysing the decree's consequences." Metro also noted it has been trying to cut ties with the Russian business since the 2022 invasion began.

The scale of what's changing hands is not small. Metro runs 91 wholesale stores in Russia and employs roughly 9,000 people there, according to Metro's own figures, though ua.news put the employee count above 10,000. Russia is not a footnote in Metro's books: sales there hit €2.14 billion for the first nine months of fiscal year 2025/26, up 10.3% in euro terms, or about 8.7% of Metro AG's total group sales, according to Euronews and retail-insight-network.

Why now, and what Russia says

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov gave a one-line justification to The Moscow Times: "One of the factors taken into account when making this decision was that this is an unfriendly country." That's the official Russian framing — this is presented as a reciprocal, legally grounded response under the 2023 decree, tied to the West's own freezing of Russian state assets abroad, not as an outright confiscation of private property. Russia has used that same legal mechanism against dozens of Western firms since 2022, and more than 1,000 companies have exited the Russian market entirely over that period, per United24 Media.

That framing deserves to be stated plainly, because it's the argument Moscow is actually making. Whether an outside observer finds it persuasive is a separate question from whether it's the stated rationale.

The timing lines up with a sharp deterioration in German-Russian relations. Germany has blamed Russia for an attempted drone incursion at Leipzig airport over the summer and responded by shutting a Russian consulate in Bonn and a Russian cultural center in Berlin. Moscow retaliated by closing Germany's consulate in St. Petersburg and denying involvement in the drone incident. When German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul met Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on September 26, Lavrov dismissed the encounter afterward, saying Wadephul "simply reiterated his official public position condemning Russia."

Not the first, and not likely the last

Metro joins a growing list. On September 17, Putin signed a separate decree putting Nestlé, Auchan, the former Leroy Merlin business Lemana PRO, and logistics firm FM Logistic under the temporary management of a Moscow entity called L.E.V. Management. A company registered in 2024 with roughly $177 in charter capital and a single employee, according to registry data cited by Bloomberg and reported by United24 Media, L.E.V. Management now oversees these operations. Nestlé said it is weighing its options; Auchan requested official clarification.

The pattern set by earlier seizures is not encouraging for Metro shareholders. Danone's Russian assets were seized under the same 2023 decree, then sold off in 2024 at a €1.2 billion loss, according to retail-insight-network. Carlsberg's stake in Baltika Breweries met a similar fate. In both cases, temporary administration became a stepping stone to a forced sale at a steep discount to local buyers.

Meduza also flagged a separate decree signed the same day authorizing the sale of Western Union's Russian subsidiary to a company called Softeks LLC, with the price undisclosed. This is another sign the Kremlin is accelerating its restructuring of Western corporate assets as the war grinds on.

Metro says it is still "analysing" the decree's consequences. The open question is whether "temporary administration" ends the way it did for Danone and Carlsberg: with Metro's Russian operation sold to Tolay or another local buyer at a fraction of its value, and Metro booking a loss on a business that was, until Monday, generating nearly €2.2 billion a year.