Ukrainian oligarch Vadim Novinski granted Serbian citizenship — decision signed by caretaker PM Đuro Macut

Vadim Vladislavovich Novinski, one of Ukraine’s best-known billionaires, has been granted Serbian citizenship, the Serbian daily Danas reports. The decision was published in Serbia’s Official Gazette and was signed by caretaker Prime Minister Đuro Macut at the Serbian government’s meeting on September 24.

Novinski, born on June 3, 1963 in Staraya Russa, Russia, to an Armenian family, is a Ukrainian citizen — and now also a Serbian citizen. He graduated in 1985 from the Leningrad Civil Aviation and Engineering Academy. After the fall of the Soviet Union he took Russian citizenship, moved to Ukraine in 1996 and became a Ukrainian citizen in 2012.

He is considered one of Ukraine’s oligarchs, having amassed his fortune in the dubious privatizations of the 1990s. Novinski owns the Smart Holding group, which operates in various fields, including natural gas, canned foods, infrastructure projects and shipyards. Forbes magazine valued his wealth at $1.2 billion in July 2026.

Novinski served as an independent MP from Crimea in Ukraine’s parliament from 2013 to 2022 and represented Ukraine in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He opposed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, was a member of the peace delegation with the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists, opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and left for exile in 2023.

In 2018 Russia imposed sanctions on Novinski — which it lifted in 2020 — while Kyiv sanctioned him in late 2022 and early 2023, seizing assets worth over $1 billion. A week before Kyiv imposed the sanctions, he transferred his shares into a trust in Cyprus. In January 2025, Ukrainian authorities opened proceedings against him for treason and spreading religious hatred; Novinski speaks of political and religious persecution and has taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

He is a protodeacon of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its defender and major donor, and has criticized church schisms as well as the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.