Even co-investing alongside a Russian investor has become a red flag. Index Ventures said it would not co-invest alongside any groups or individuals with ties to the Kremlin. And in late February a Russian investor was asked to bow out of an undisclosed seed investment being led by London-based Hoxton Ventures into a British startup, said Hoxton partner Hussein Kanji.

“I don’t ever want to take the risk of ending up on a cap table with someone who could be sanctioned,” Kanji said. “There are sides now, and you need to be on the right side.”

Some prominent Russian investors have recently worked to distance themselves from the country. For example, venture firm RTP Global was founded by entrepreneur Leonid Boguslavsky, who showed up on a controversial U.S. Treasury list of oligarchs identified as allies of Vladimir Putin in 2018. The firm, originally founded as ru-Net in 2000, is now based in London, a spokeswoman said, where it focuses on Europe, North America, India and Southeast Asia. 

“Neither RTP funds, nor its beneficiaries, are under any sanctions/restrictions, so our business is not adversely affected,” the spokeswoman wrote in an email. 

Perhaps the most prominent U.S. investor with ties to Russia is Yuri Milner, a Russian-Israeli billionaire. Milner’s firm, DST Global, was an early investor in some of the largest internet companies, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. Milner is not facing any action from the U.S. or other Western governments, and is not on the U.S. list of oligarchs. 

DST has taken funding from Russian state-owned VTB Bank, according to documents revealed in the Paradise Papers. After Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula in 2014, VTB faced sanctions. However, DST had already fully returned the capital from VTB before that point, a DST representative said. Less than 3% of the total capital ever raised by DST Global was from VTB Bank, all prior to 2011, the representative said.

Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch who was recently added to sanctions lists, was also a DST investor. But Usmanov has not put in money since 2011, the spokesperson said. 

Meanwhile, Milner has appeared to offer a kind of rebuke to the country of his birth. This month, Milner’s foundation donated millions to a GoFundMe campaign for refugee relief run by Ashton Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis, who is Ukrainian American.

Individual startups are also affected by shifting international rules. Israeli battery startup StoreDot Ltd. and New York-based transportation platform Via Transportation Inc. have both taken cash from funds backed by Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch who is now sanctioned in the U.K. Representatives for StoreDot and Via declined to comment. Earlier this month, New York delivery startup Buyk, partly owned by Sberbank, furloughed its chief executive officer, along with 900 employees. Moscow’s limits on fund transfers prohibited Buyk's Russian founders, which had been funding the company until its next financing, from wiring cash out of the country to the company. 

In the case of Menlo Park-based Fort Ross Ventures, the firm with Sberbank as a major investor, it manages about $500 million and is actively working to ensure it complies with the latest rules. Orlovski, the managing partner, spent more than seven years at Sberbank prior to founding Fort Ross in 2015, and said the firm is analyzing the new measures put in place against Russia and Sberbank. “We’re not hiding Russian oligarchs’ money here,” Orlovski said. “We’re going to do what it takes to follow the law.”