In response to the prelude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, specifically the recognition of the Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic as independent from Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 21, 2022, Promsvyazbank has been the target of sanctions from multiple countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In 2024, the head of the Moldovan Police, Viorel Cernăuțeanu, stated that Promsvyazbank was involved in a vote buying scheme in Moldova.

At about the same time, Promsvyazbank began to actively finance projects of its owners, which in the end became one of the reasons for its nationalization.

[14] In December 2017, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) introduced a temporary administration at Promsvyazbank, and then announced that it had found signs of illegal transactions, including the disappearance of credit folders worth more than 100 billion rubles.

Later, the Ananyevs were charged with multi-million-dollar embezzlement, were arrested in absentia and subsequently added to Interpol’s wanted list.

[16] In December 2020, Interpol removed the brothers from its list, finding the Russian prosecution to be politically motivated.

[17] Three years later, Dmitry Ananyev, one of the co-founders of PSB, said that the plan to nationalize the bank and use it for the needs of the defense industry originated from the CBR back in 2015.

This prompted several countries to ready and impose economic sanctions on companies and individuals deemed close to the Russian government.

On February 22, 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced sanctions against five banks, including Promsvyazbank.

[24] United States President Joe Biden also imposed sanctions against multiple Russian individuals and companies, including Promsvyazbank.

As he stated, this system would have started in late spring, and was carried out through applications that people downloaded with instructions from interactive chatbots on Telegram.

Cernăuțeanu stated that in October up until that moment, Moldovan police had documented and stopped the activity of such bots in 97 Telegram groups.

[28] This happened in the context of the first round of the 2024 Moldovan presidential election, in which President of Moldova and pro-European candidate Maia Sandu did not obtain an outright majority of votes; and in that of the 2024 Moldovan European Union membership referendum, which narrowly passed with slightly over 50% of votes.