During a press conference on March 1, EU Minister Hans Dahlgren demanded "tougher and broader" sanctions against the Russian upper echelons.

On Thursday and Friday, he was in Arle, France, to meet his ministerial colleagues in the EU.

High on the agenda were sanctions against Russian oligarchs.

But when SVT gets hold of Dahlgren after the meeting, he says he does not know Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg, two of the three oligarchs who control Sundsvall's aluminum plant and who are on the US sanctions list - but not on the EU's.

- I do not know the details of the individual case.

And if it is a case that is being put on a list, I can not comment, he says.

How come the two are on sanction lists in the US but not in the EU?

- It is not enough to be an oligarch in the sense that you have a lot of money and maybe you know Vladimir Putin.

But there must be a link to support the work of the Russian government or their invasion of Ukraine.

It must be legally certain, he says.

Dahlgren on golden passports: "Scandalous"

A large number of Russian billionaires have passports and citizenship in Cyprus, Malta and Portugal, among others, all of which have offered so-called golden passports.

That is, you can in principle buy a passport by investing money in the country.

One of them is Oleg Deripaska.

- It's very bad, very bad.

I myself have raised this now that we had a meeting with all the EU ministers and said that this is scandalous.

That you can buy your citizenship in the European Union and thus travel freely and exercise all four freedoms within the EU.

I then spoke separately with a couple of those countries' representatives and they have promised that they will not give any such passports to Russians in the future, he says.

Several oligarchs have managed to move their large boats to countries that do not have extradition agreements with the United States or the European Union.

Is the sanction work too slow?

- We will talk to the countries that have not joined the sanctions regimes, says Hans Dahlgren.