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Health

Six Exercises to Help Avoid Slipping and Falling Down

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We typically train to go faster. But mastering how to slow down and stop is just as important.

Training deceleration—a series of movements that help you slow down, change direction, or stop—teaches the body how to control and safely absorb forces. For athletes like rugby players and soccer players who are constantly accelerating from zero to 100 then stopping on a dime, proper deceleration enhances performance and is key to mitigating injury. 

Being able to decelerate with control is just as valuable for nonathletes, says

Sylvia Braaten,

physical performance coach for USA Rugby women’s national team. 

“As we age, there is a tendency to lose our coordination, athleticism and body control,” says Ms. Braaten, who also serves as the assistant coach for Harvard University’s women’s rugby team. “If you can’t slow down with proper body mechanics while chasing your grandchildren in the yard or playing a pickup basketball game, injuries are more likely to occur. But, if we continue to train these qualities, we can remain athletic and that can have a lasting impact on our overall quality of life.” 

Being able to slow down to regain our balance is extremely helpful in the winter, when sidewalks and driveways are icy. “Improving coordination and deceleration mechanics can help us catch ourselves when we start to fall,” she says. And more than one out of four people ages 65 and older falls each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The following drills will reinforce deceleration mechanics, such as dropping the hips and shoulders as you slow down and keeping weight predominantly over the planted foot when you change direction. They are also a fun way to mix up your workout with multiplanar movements and balance and agility challenges, she says. 

Start slow and focus on proper technique and landing in a controlled and stable position, she says. “It is better to perform fewer reps and sets with proper form.” 

Reverse Eccentric Lunge

Why: Eccentric strength training, where the lowering phase of an exercise is slowed down to keep the muscles under tension for a longer period of time, is a great way to build strength, says Ms. Braaten. This lunge variation forces us to control the lowering motion while working the glutes and hamstrings.

How: Stand with your feet hip-width apart. Step your left foot backward and slowly lower your body for a count of 3 to 5 seconds, until the right thigh is parallel to the floor, knee over your shoe laces. Your torso and shin of the front leg should be parallel. Pause for 1 second then press into the heel of your front foot to come back up to the starting position for a count of 1 second. Perform 3 sets of 5 reps per leg. Rest 1 to 2 minutes per set.

Option: Hold weights for an added challenge. 

Ms. Braaten performs a reverse eccentric lunge.

Drop Lunge Snap Down

Why: The additional speed component of this exercise increases the intensity of the lunge and more closely mimics the demands of movements in a rugby match and real life, she says.

How: Stand tall on your tiptoes with arms overhead. Rapidly drop into a reverse lunge with your front foot flat and on the ball of the back foot, with your heel raised. Use a quick and sharp arm drive down toward the floor to help increase the speed of the drop. “Think about transitioning from fast to freezing like a statue,” she says. Slowly rise to the starting position. Perform 2 to 3 sets of 3 reps per side. Rest 30 seconds between sets.

Options: If your balance is difficult, start on flat feet and progress to tip toes. Add weights for more difficulty. 

Ms. Braaten does a drop lunge snap down.

Two-Step Falling Deceleration

Why: Being able to safely stop a fall is key to mitigating injury. This drill teaches the body to decelerate while building single-leg strength.

How: Stand tall, with feet hip-width apart. Begin to fall forward with a tall spine. Use two steps to stop. The first step is used to break and the second step is the stick or the leg to decelerate on. Landing on the full foot will help increase balance and allow for a quicker, more efficient deceleration. As you step to break, avoid any inward collapse of the knee. Perform 2 to 3 sets of 3 reps per side. Rest 30 to 45 seconds between sets.

Options: Have a friend stand in front of you as a spot or perform this exercise near a wall.

Ms. Braaten demonstrates how to perform a two-step falling deceleration.

Lateral Rebound Skater Jump

Why: Our body moves in different planes of motion. This drill trains single-leg deceleration in the frontal or side-to-side plane and improves our ability to absorb force.

How: Stand tall, balanced on your left foot. Sink your hips back to load your weight then push and powerfully jump off of that foot to the right. Swing the arms across the body for momentum as you jump. Land balanced on the right foot with a slight bend in the knees and hips.

“The emphasis should initially be on sticking the landing rather than on the distance of the jump,” she says. Reset for the next rep by hopping back to the left leg and repeating the movement. Perform 2 to 3 sets of 4 reps per side. Rest 30 to 45 seconds between sets.

Option: After you are able to consistently stick the landing, you can speed up the tempo to increase the difficulty and intensity for added cardio benefits. 

Ms. Braaten does a lateral rebound skater jump.

Deceleration With a Half Turn

Why: This exercise trains agility, coordination and balance. Great for weekend warriors playing cutting sports like basketball or soccer, the deceleration-with-a-half-turn drill reinforces getting into good deceleration positions from a run, she says.

How: Jog forward and after 10 to 15 feet, decelerate by dropping your shoulders slightly to the right and over the inside of your hips. As your right foot plants, complete a half turn to the right. Stop in an athletic ready stance with soft knees and torso and shins parallel. Stick and hold the position before jogging forward 10 to 15 feet again and decelerate in half-turn position to face the left. Alternate half turns to each direction for a total of 3 half-turn decelerations on each side. Perform 3 to 4 sets. Rest 30 to 60 seconds between sets. Increase the pace of the jog to a run to progress.

Ms. Braaten demonstrates the deceleration-with-a-half-turn drill.

Zigzag Tempos

Why: After the above exercises helped strengthen your deceleration positions, this drill will help improve your ability to get in and out of those positions and make you more agile, she says.

How: Place 6 to 8 cones or markers each about 10 to 15 feet apart in a zigzag pattern to get in 3 to 4 decelerations per side. Start at one cone and run at a controlled pace to the next. Decelerate by bending into the knee and flexing at the hip of the planted foot while maintaining a tall spine. Push down into the planted leg to push away from the cone and run to the next one. Decelerate as you reach each cone. Keep the shoulders facing square up field through the entire drill. Try to become a statue at each cone before running to the next. As you increase speed you will need to absorb more force to decelerate efficiently. Perform 3 to 4 sets resting 30 to 60 seconds in between.

Ms. Braaten performs zigzag tempos.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How do you implement agility into your exercise routine? Join the conversation below.

Write to Jen Murphy at workout@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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Business

Scott Minerd, Guggenheim Partners’ Investment Chief, Dies at Age 63

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Scott Minerd,

an outspoken and influential fund manager who was chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, died Wednesday of a heart attack.

Mr. Minerd, 63 years old and a committed weightlifter known to bench press more than 400 pounds, died during his daily workout, the firm said.

Mr. Minerd joined Guggenheim shortly after the firm was founded in 1998.

Guggenheim Chief Executive

Mark Walter

credited him with designing the organization, systems and procedures that helped Guggenheim rise from a startup to a manager of more than $218 billion in total assets and 900 employees.

Mr. Minerd served as the public face of Guggenheim. In that role, he was among Wall Street’s more prominent personalities, making frequent appearances on television and maintaining an active presence on social media to discuss markets and investments, often in blunt terms.

“That sound you hear is the Fed breaking something,” he wrote in October in a message to clients, warning that the central bank’s campaign to raise interest rates was causing dislocations in fixed-income and foreign-exchange markets.

Mr. Minerd was a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets and an adviser to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Mr. Minerd is survived by his husband Eloy Mendez.

“As an asset manager, I’ve come to view conventional wisdom as the surest path to investment underperformance,” Mr. Minerd wrote in a biographical summary.

Mr. Minerd grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He also took courses at the University of Chicago and described himself as a monetarist.

He worked as a dealer in currencies, bonds and structured securities at Merrill Lynch,

Morgan Stanley

and CS First Boston in the 1980s and 1990s.

At age 37, feeling burned out, he left Wall Street and moved to Los Angeles. “I walked away from extremely large offers on Wall Street,” he told Bloomberg in 2017. “I realized this wasn’t a dress rehearsal for life, this was it.” After joining what became Guggenheim Partners, he worked in a Santa Monica, Calif., office overlooking the ocean.

Mr. Minerd was a conservative willing to embrace some ideas from the left and seek middle ground.

In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he took aim at elite universities, including the University of Pennsylvania. “These schools have huge endowments, and why are they not focusing their endowment on advancing a cause of essentially free education or at least education that provides complete support for people below certain income levels?” he asked. Mr. Minerd said he wouldn’t make donations going to “bricks and mortar and making the place look better when people who would be qualified to come there can’t afford to do it. And, of course, if we had more equal access to education, it would help address some of the issues around race and poverty.”

Referring to his bulky bodybuilder’s physique, he once told a Wall Street Journal reporter that when people asked about “key man” risk at Guggenheim and wondered what would happen if Mr. Minerd was hit by a truck, his staff members would respond, “Do you mean what would happen to the truck?”

One of his favorite charities was Union Rescue Mission, which provides food, shelter, training and other services to homeless people in Los Angeles County.

Andy Bales,

chief executive of Union Rescue Mission, recalled meeting Mr. Minerd around 2008, when the mission was in poor financial shape and in danger of having to sell one of its sites. “He told me that God was tapping him on the shoulder, telling him to do more for others,” the Rev. Bales said. Mr. Minerd ended up donating more than $5 million to the mission to allow it to expand services.

Mr. Minerd was often seen with a rescue dog he called Grace, who accompanied him to the office and on trips.

His work schedule was punishing. “He was up early for East Coast customers and went late for his West Coast customers,” the Rev. Bales said.

Write to Charley Grant at charles.grant@wsj.com and James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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Health

How I’m Staying in Shape by Turning My Daily Stroll Into Hard Exercise

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If I read one more time that walking is the best exercise, I’m going to take a few steps and scream.

This article is about how to make walking a better exercise.

True, walking is the most practicable exercise. You can pretty much do it anywhere anytime. That is no small thing.

The problem is that ordinary walking won’t push your heartbeat rate into the same zone as running or a fast bicycle ride or even a game of pickleball, one study found.

Why does intensity matter? Vigorous workouts are a more efficient way of getting fit, says cardiologist Matthew Nayor, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, who tested the fitness of more than 3,000 participants in the Framingham Heart Study. He found that a minute of moderate to vigorous exercise had the same benefit as two or three minutes of light exercise.

How do you know if the exercise is vigorous enough? If you can carry on a conversation easily, it is probably moderate exercise, Nayor says. “If the sentences get shorter, and it is harder to carry on a conversation, you’re headed toward vigorous exercise.”

There are simple tricks you can use to transform leisurely walks into intense exercise. That includes walking up hills, carrying a weighted backpack, or working a few sprints into your daily perambulation. Perhaps the best trick of all is to walk really fast.

I have done all these things since Aug. 14, the day I turned my bicycle too sharply onto a gravel road near my New Jersey home and was slammed down, breaking two bones in my right wrist and partially tearing a tendon. That hurt.

At the time, I was training roughly 12 hours a week in preparation for an October bike ride across Italy with high school friends.

I saw a hand surgeon the next day and he told me I probably wouldn’t need surgery but that I could forget about biking in Italy. He put my wrist in a splint and said I couldn’t drive a car, much less get on a bike for a good while.

That hurt even more. Not only was I forgoing the trip to Italy, but I had spent months getting in the best shape in years. Now I was going to lose it all.

I started walking the next day to avoid that fate. Am I in biking shape? No way. But I have kept relatively fit by going on a hard daily walk. I passed a previously scheduled heart stress test a couple of weeks after my bike crash, and my resting pulse rate—one way to measure how healthy your heart is-—is about the same as when I was riding 12 hours a week.

Like any exercise regime, you should talk to your doctor before doing intense walking. This is particularly true if you’re older.

Here are the tactics I used to step up my daily walking routine. Anybody with a pair of walking shoes can use these.

Sprint Once in Awhile

Short bursts of intense workout woven into your daily walk will greatly improve its cardiovascular benefits.

“High-intensity interval training is basically doing an activity ‘as hard as you can’ for about 30 seconds, whether it be walking, running, cycling, swimming, then taking one to two minutes of recovery at a more easy pace,” explains Edward Laskowski, a doctor of sports medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,

Walking in a hilly area is a natural sort of interval training. When you walk up the hill, that is the high intensity part. When you walk down, that is the recovery.

If you live in a flat area, try doing a few short sprints during your walk. Take your time to recover after each sprint. I prefer sprinting on grass, which I do at a local park.

Carry Weights

A weighted rucksack or vest can turn your stroll into a taxing workout. When I don’t feel like walking fast, I put on a 30-pound backpack and walk through a nearby forest with some hills. I’m exhausted by the time I get back to my house.

You can buy rucksacks with secured weight plates so things won’t bounce around. I’m a cheapskate, so I just took a weight set we had sitting around and used duct tape and cardboard to construct a stable weight that I could secure inside a backpack.

Pick Up Your Pace

This is the most tiring workout of all.

If you want to walk faster than 4 or perhaps 4.5 miles an hour, a brisk pace for most walkers, you have to bend your arms and swing them like a racewalker. Here’s a demonstration. The more you swing your arms like this, the faster you’ll step. Trained race walkers can walk at 9 or 10 miles an hour. You read that right. Here’s a video of Tom Bosworth of England walking a mile in 5 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s difficult to run a mile that fast.

The fastest I’ve managed recently isn’t quite 5 miles an hour—less than half the pace of Bosworth!—and a 4 mile walk at that pace left me completely thrashed. It was absolutely as hard as a run or a hard bike ride. My legs were almost quivering by the end because—I can’t believe I’m writing this—walking can be the best exercise if done right.

Write to Neal Templin at neal.templin@barrons.com

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Sports

Hans Niemann Files $100 Million Lawsuit Against Magnus Carlsen, Chess.com Over Cheating Allegations

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Hans Moke Niemann, the 19-year-old American grandmaster at the center of an alleged cheating scandal that has pulsed drama through the chess world, has made his next move: He sued world champion Magnus Carlsen and others seeking $100 million in damages. 

The federal lawsuit, filed in the Eastern Missouri District Court, says that Carlsen, Chess.com and others, including grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, are “colluding to blacklist” Niemann from the chess world and have made defamatory statements accusing Niemann of cheating. Niemann is seeking damages of no less than $100 million in the suit, which said that tournament organizers have shunned him since the allegations emerged. 

“This is not a game,” Niemann’s lawyers, Terrence Oved and Darren Oved, said in a statement. “Defendants have destroyed Niemann’s life simply because he had the talent, dedication and audacity to defeat the so-called ‘King of Chess.’ We will hold defendants fully accountable and expose the truth.”

Chess.com chief chess officer Danny Rensch didn’t have an immediate comment. Chess.com has previously said that it did not communicate with Carlsen about its decisions relating to Niemann. A spokesman for Carlsen didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nakamura, while streaming on Twitch, said he didn’t have a comment.

At the heart of Niemann’s suit are the financial relationships between Chess.com, Carlsen and other power players in the industry. The complaint alleged that Chess.com colluded with Carlsen because the company is buying Carlsen’s “Play Magnus” app for nearly $83 million in a merger that will “monopolize the chess world.” The planned acquisition was first announced in August. 

Niemann accused the defendants, which also include Play Magnus and Rensch, of slander, libel, an unlawful boycott and tortious interference with Niemann’s business. 

‘This is not a game,’ Niemann’s lawyers, Terrence Oved and Darren Oved, said in a statement.



Photo:

Oved & Oved LLP

Niemann’s legal action is his most aggressive maneuver since the controversy first erupted in early September at a prestigious tournament in St. Louis when Niemann stunningly upset Carlsen. After the game, Carlsen abruptly withdrew from the tournament—an action that was widely interpreted as a sign of protest. In another event a few weeks later, Carlsen resigned a game against Niemann after making just one move. 

Shortly thereafter, the five-time world champion from Norway confirmed everyone’s suspicions. In a statement, Carlsen said that he believes “Niemann has cheated more—and more recently—than he has publicly admitted.”

As the scandal engulfed the Sinquefield Cup, the tournament in St. Louis, Niemann offered a defense. He admitted to cheating in limited circumstances online when he was 12 and 16 years old, and said they were the biggest mistakes of his life. He said the only instance he cheated when there was money on the line was when he was 12, and that he never cheated during in-person games. 

A report from Chess.com alleging that grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online games upended the chess world in October. WSJ explains how a player might bypass security measures to win a game. Illustration: Adele Morgan

However, an investigation by Chess.com, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, contradicted Niemann and indicated the breadth of his fairplay violations was greater then he had let on. The report said Niemann had likely cheated in more than 100 games, including as a 17-year-old and in other events with money on the line, and that Niemann had privately admitted to violating the rules when he was banned from the site in 2020. 

The report didn’t make any conclusions about whether Niemann has cheated in person, as the platform doesn’t police over-the-board events, but it flagged certain events where it said his play merited further investigation. 

Niemann’s lawsuit takes aim at that report, which it said Chess.com “maliciously leaked to The Wall Street Journal to fuel the spectacle of Carlsen’s cheating allegations” before Niemann’s participation in the U.S. Chess Championship. The lawsuit denied that Niemann ever confessed to the cheating allegations and said that its findings about the extent of Niemann’s cheating is false.

After Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup, Chess.com removed Niemann from its Chess.com Global Championship, a tournament with $1 million in prize money. 

Chess.com said in the report that while Carlsen’s actions at the Sinquefield Cup prompted it to reassess Niemann’s behavior, Carlsen “didn’t talk with, ask for, or directly influence Chess.com’s decisions at all.” 

The lawsuit further alleged that the parties worked with powerful influencers to amplify the allegations against Niemann. In particular, it names Hikaru Nakamura, a top American grandmaster who has gained extraordinary popularity by streaming chess content. The suit calls Nakamura “Chess.com’s most influential streaming partner” and accused him of “acting in collusion with Carlsen and Chess.com, published hours of video content amplifying and attempting to bolster Carlsen’s false cheating allegations against Niemann.” 

Because of the cheating allegations, the complaint said, one tournament that Niemann was making arrangements to play in ceased communications with him. It also said that another grandmaster canceled an upcoming match against him and that Niemann can’t obtain employment as a chess teacher at a reputable school. 

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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Business

Elon Musk says he’s buying Manchester United — but if it’s a joke, the SEC is unlikely to laugh

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Last Updated: Aug. 16, 2022 at 9:27 p.m. ET

First Published: Aug. 16, 2022 at 9:09 p.m. ET

Elon Musk is either getting into international soccer or else may have scored an own goal and teed up more trouble from the SEC.

In a tweet late Tuesday, the Tesla Inc. TSLA chief executive said: “Also, I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome,” referring to the iconic English soccer club that may be up for sale.

It was unclear if Musk was…

Elon Musk is either getting into international soccer or else may have scored an own goal and teed up more trouble from the SEC.

In a tweet late Tuesday, the Tesla Inc.

TSLA

chief executive said: “Also, I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome,” referring to the iconic English soccer club that may be up for sale.

It was unclear if Musk was serious, as he’s well-known for tweeting jokes and frivolous statements.

Neither Manchester United nor the SEC immediately replied to requests for further information.

But if it was a joke, it may not be funny to the Securities and Exchange Commission, since Manchester United

MANU

is a publicly traded company. Musk’s tweet came at 8:01 p.m., just after the end of after-hours trading, so Man U’s stock was unaffected.

Musk is no stranger to tweets coming back to bite him. His 2018 tweet that he had “funding secured” to consider taking Tesla private at $420 a share became the subject of regulatory action by the SEC, ultimately resulting in $20 million fines each against Musk and Tesla.

Musk has sparred with the SEC on a number of other occasions over the years. He’s also embroiled in a bitter legal battle as he’s trying to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Inc.

TWTR

.

On the other hand, if the tweet is true, it would be a seismic deal for one of the most valuable sports brands on the planet. Manchester United’s current owners, the Glazer family, have been under pressure to sell the team after years of underperformance, mismanagement and a revolt by some fans. The team is currently in last place in the English Premier League, after their second straight loss to start the season, an embarrassing 4-0 defeat to Brentford on Saturday.

Last week, reports said British businessman Michael Knighton planned a formal bid to buy the team. The club has an estimated value of $4.6 billion, according to Forbes.

That price tag would be doable for Musk, who is the world’s wealthiest individual, with a fortune estimated around $267 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Manchester United went public in a 2012 IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shares are down 10% year to date, in line with the S&P 500’s


SPX

10% loss this year.



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Sports

Phil Mickelson and 10 Other LIV Golfers File Antitrust Lawsuit Against PGA Tour

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Eleven golfers on the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit—including Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau—filed an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour Wednesday challenging their suspensions, the opening salvo in a legal fight that could reverberate across professional sports. 

The group includes three players—Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford and

Matt Jones

—who are seeking a temporary restraining order that would allow them to play in the Tour’s

FedEx

Cup Playoffs, which begin next week. Each had qualified for the playoffs before signing on to play for LIV, before being told by the PGA Tour they were being excluded from the event because of their participation in the LIV series.

The PGA Tour has suspended players lured to its rival by extraordinary appearance fees and record prize funds, pointing to Tour bylaws that bar members from appearing in other events without the permission of the commissioner. Many of the LIV golfers, such as Dustin Johnson, resigned their PGA Tour memberships.  

The PGA Tour has said it believes those rules are appropriate, and legal. People familiar with the Tour’s thinking expect the Tour will say that its arrangement with players is akin to similar agreements that are ubiquitous across the economy.

In a memo Wednesday to players, PGA Tour commissioner

Jay Monahan

defended the suspensions. He wrote that the Tour has been preparing for this attempt to “disrupt” the Tour and that the players should be confident in the legal merits of the Tour’s position. 

“Fundamentally, these suspended players – who are now Saudi Golf League employees – have walked away from the TOUR and now want back in,” Monahan’s memo said. “With the Saudi Golf League on hiatus, they’re trying to use lawyers to force their way into competition alongside our members in good standing.”

LIV Golf had been readying to bring an antitrust challenge against the PGA Tour, even before it launched, arguing that the PGA Tour has monopoly power in the golf market and is using that power to try to exclude an upstart challenger, by trying to restrict or drive up the price of LIV’s access to players.

The complaint and application for a temporary restraining order were filed in ​​the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Ian Poulter, Abraham Ancer, Carlos Ortiz, Pat Perez, Jason Kokrak and Peter Uihlein round out the golfers putting their names to the suit, arguing that the PGA Tour is trying to hurt their careers.

“The Tour’s conduct serves no purpose other than to cause harm to players and foreclose the entry of the first meaningful competitive threat the Tour has faced in decades,” they say.

Talor Gooch acknowledges the crowd during a LIV Golf event in Bedminster, N.J.



Photo:

Seth Wenig/Associated Press

LIV Golf and the extraordinary money behind it has plunged the sport into tumult and financial upheaval. LIV is offering $25 million in prize money at its tournaments—far more than is currently offered on the PGA Tour—and top pros appear to have been offered hundreds of millions of dollars as sign-up inducements alone. The PGA Tour has responded by upping its purses at select tournaments and creating alternate routes, including new proposed international events, but has said it cannot compete with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. 

The result has been a schism inside the sport that is upending the business unlike ever before. LIV is a richly funded startup. The PGA Tour has historical cache and billions of dollars in television deals—and now has to fend off an unprecedented challenge, on and off the golf course. 

In their motion for a temporary restraining order, Gooch, Swafford and Jones say they appealed to the PGA Tour to be allowed to play in the playoffs, and that under Tour rules they should be allowed to play in the playoffs while their appeals are heard. It adds that the Tour violated its own disciplinary process when it told the players this week they wouldn’t be permitted to play while the appeals are pending. 

“The purpose of this action is to strike down the PGA Tour’s anti-competitive rules and practices that prevent these independent-contractor golfers from playing when and where they choose,” that motion says. 

The LIV players’ lawyers also cite the Tour’s efforts with the European tour and the PGA Tour’s alleged efforts to coordinate with the major championships as evidence that the body is acting unlawfully to cut off the players’ access to the golf ecosystem.

The lawsuit also provides new details about Mickelson’s status on Tour, which had been the subject of significant intrigue after he ceased playing in the wake of controversial comments regarding Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights that were published earlier this year. The lawsuit says Mickelson was suspended by the PGA Tour back in March for allegedly recruiting players to play for LIV, among other reasons, and that his appeal was denied. When he applied for reinstatement in June, the suit says, the Tour denied it based on his participation in the first LIV event that month outside London. It said he was forbidden from applying for reinstatement until March 2023, which was extended until March 2024 after he played the second LIV event. 

The FedEx Cup Playoffs caps the PGA Tour’s season with a series of events that feature increasing hype—and increasingly small fields—culminating with the Tour Championship. The FedEx Cup is also a season-long event in which players accumulate points based on their play, and the top points-getters land lucrative payouts. The top finisher in the FedEx Cup, currently world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, is in line for an $18 million prize. 

The perks of playing in the playoffs are significant. The prizes and bonus money are large. Strong performances can qualify players for major championships. They are also some of the Tour’s highest-profile events that draw attention to the golfers and, along with that, big branding opportunities.  

Under the current rules, the top 125 players are invited to the first event of the FedEx Cup playoffs, the St. Jude Championship that begins next week. Then 70 make the BMW Championship before a slim field of 30 competes for the Tour Championship. 

But the LIV Golf defections led to questions about how those fields would be managed when players in the top 125 included LIV defectors who had been suspended. To address the issue, the PGA Tour modified its protocols recently to allow players from outside the top-125 to move up and take the spots of the players who had departed. 

The lawsuit filed by the golfers means that the PGA Tour is now facing legal battles over its practices on multiple fronts. In addition to this lawsuit, the Justice Department has launched an antitrust investigation into whether the Tour has engaged in anticompetitive behavior, The Wall Street Journal first reported. 

The Tour, however, has already begun fighting back, commanding support on Capitol Hill from lawmakers in both parties suspicious of LIV’s Saudi backers. It has previously said that it expects to prevail in the Justice Department inquiry, noting that it faced a similar inquiry in the mid-1990s from the Federal Trade Commission and quashed that with striking political backing.

The PGA Tour is expected to respond to the LIV golfers’ pursuit of an injunction by arguing that the players do not face a real emergency; have known about the situation for some time; should not be rewarded for filing at the last minute; and that letting them in would mean other players lose out, according to people familiar with the Tour’s thinking. 

Monahan’s memo to players emphasized that point, saying that Gooch, Jones and Swafford had filed now “despite knowing they would be ineligible for tournament play as early as June.”

The Tour will also say that they don’t have the right to play the FedEx Cup under the rules that they had previously agreed to after violating those bylaws by playing for LIV. 

The lawsuit says Phil Mickelson was suspended by the PGA Tour back in March for allegedly recruiting players to play for LIV.



Photo:

Seth Wenig/Associated Press

On the antitrust arguments more broadly, it is likely to argue that LIV and its golfers are seeking to “free ride” on value created by the collective efforts of participants in the Tour and that the Tour does not have to cooperate with a competitor, the people said.

That argument was also previewed in Monahan’s memo, when he described LIV players’ desire to compete in PGA Tour events as “an attempt to use the TOUR platform to promote themselves and to freeride on your benefits and efforts.”

“To allow reentry into our events compromises the TOUR and the competition, to the detriment of our organization, our players, our partners and our fans.”

The PGA Tour could also argue that LIV is acting in a predatory fashion, seeking to harm the Tour to the detriment of all the players who don’t get big contracts with LIV, maybe with the ultimate goal of hobbling the Tour so that it could be taken over by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. 

This lawsuit is the first in the U.S. that has pitted the two sides against one another, but LIV players had previously secured a favorable outcome in Europe. 

A handful of players successfully won a stay on their suspensions from the Genesis Scottish Open, which is co-sanctioned by the PGA and European tours. Days before the event, a judge hearing the golfers’ complaint through a dispute resolution service said those bans should be temporarily enjoined.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com

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World

Russia’s Wartime Crackdown Widens as Kremlin Demands Full Loyalty

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In late June, Russian security agents took physicist Dmitry Kolker from his hospital bed in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where he was being treated for stage-four pancreatic cancer, and whisked him on a four-hour flight to a Moscow prison on charges of treason.

Mr. Kolker, who at that point was being fed through a tube, died behind bars three days later.

Russian prosecutors say he was working in the interests of a foreign power. His lawyer, Alexander Fedulov, who said he hadn’t seen the charges before his client’s death, believes Russian authorities sought to demonstrate that no one’s loyalty is beyond suspicion in the Kremlin’s broadening crackdown.

The message, Mr. Fedulov said, is simple. “Wherever you are, whatever condition you may be in, we’ll do with you what we want just to make sure you stay loyal,” he said. “The criminal case against Kolker—it isn’t about Kolker, it’s for everyone else.”

Mr. Kolker’s arrest was part of a flurry of detentions in recent weeks that have targeted a swath of society, including scientists, a top economist and a professional hockey player.

Dozens have been arrested for speaking out against the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, including some of those arrested in recent weeks.

But in the case of others, the Kremlin appears to have targeted figures solely for appearing insufficiently patriotic at a time when the government of President Vladimir Putin is demanding unflinching support, say rights lawyers and political analysts. The harshness of some of the arrests is meant to put people on notice, they say.

Neither the Kremlin, the Prosecutor General’s Office nor the Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes in Russia, responded to requests for comment on the recent wave of arrests.

Dmitry Kolker, a prominent physicist shown at a concert in 2018, died from late-stage cancer after he was jailed on charges of treason.



Photo:

ALEXANDER FEFELOV/REUTERS

Mr. Kolker’s son Maxim said the last time he saw his father, who was a doctor of physics and mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, was when security agents were taking him away from his hospital room. He said it took the family more than two weeks after the scientist died to retrieve his body from a state hospital morgue.

The morgue of Moscow’s City Clinical Hospital No. 29 didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters earlier this month that the Kremlin couldn’t comment on the case because it was “the prerogative of law enforcement agencies and the court.”

The arrests come months after Mr. Putin gave a speech on state television promising that patriotic Russian society would purify itself of “scum and traitors,” and “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.” The Kremlin has cast its war in Ukraine as a “special military operation” to free the country from the West’s control and prevent an assault on Russia.

Russian analysts and the country’s dwindling number of human-rights advocates say Moscow’s security services are taking a cue from Mr. Putin to root out anyone deemed disloyal to the Kremlin, and that the arrests suggest Russia is slipping into the kind of paranoia that gripped it during the Cold War, as the government seeks to squelch the smallest hint of resistance to Kremlin policies.

“Russia of course has every opportunity to return to Stalinist hell but it seems that for now Putin is content to tighten the screws just enough to dissuade would-be protesters and dissenters,” said Sergey Radchenko, a historian who specializes in the Cold War and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Russia’s lawmakers, meanwhile, are passing a raft of new wartime bills. On July 14, Mr. Putin signed into law bills that punish people who have access to government secrets and leave the country without permission with up to seven years in prison. Those found guilty of violating a new treason law that punishes Russians who “join the side of the enemy” risk 20 years behind bars.

The same day Mr. Kolker was arrested, police arrested

Vladimir Mau,

a prominent economist and rector of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, a university that produces cadres of officials in the Russian government. He was charged with two counts of fraud, including stealing 21 million rubles, equivalent to about $360,000, from the university, Russian state news agencies reported from the court hearing at the end of June.

Vladimir Mau, an economist shown during an interview with TASS last December, was charged with fraud in June. He denies the charges and is being held under pretrial house arrest.



Photo:

Sergei Karpukhin/Zuma Press

Mr. Mau, according to the news agencies, denied he was guilty. Mr. Mau’s lawyer, Alexei Dudnik, said he couldn’t comment further on the case because he and his client had been asked by the authorities to sign nondisclosure agreements. The website for Moscow’s Tverskoy district court says Mr. Mau is being held under pretrial house arrest.

Mr. Peskov told reporters earlier this month that the Kremlin wouldn’t comment on the case.

Mr. Mau had a stellar career as an economic adviser to the Russian government and was an adviser to former acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar when the latter was leading efforts to privatize Russian state industry following the fall of the Soviet Union.

By most accounts, Mr. Mau was in the Kremlin’s good books. Even on the eve of his detention he had been re-elected to the board of directors at state-owned energy giant Gazprom PJSC. And Mr. Putin in 2020 had personally praised Mr. Mau, who signed an open letter earlier this year from university rectors across the country supporting his invasion of Ukraine.

Critics have widely interpreted his arrest as punishment for less-than-unwavering loyalty to Mr. Putin. They cited reports by independent Russian media that he signed the public letter later than others and that first versions of the letter lacked his name, which appeared later. Those reports couldn’t be confirmed.

Mr. Mau had built a reputation as a so-called systemic liberal, someone who tried to constructively criticize the system from behind closed doors, according to former colleagues.

“The fact that a systemic liberal continued overseeing the country’s most important university for producing government elite was inconsistent with Putin’s regime,” said Dmitry Nekrasov, an economist who worked in the Kremlin until 2010 and with Mr. Mau. He said Mr. Mau’s arrest was inevitable.

Russian opposition figure Ilya Yashin, charged with ‘knowingly spreading false information’ about Russia’s army, flashes the V sign during a hearing on his detention.



Photo:

Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R. Politik, an independent political consulting firm, said Russia’s siloviki, a collective term for the security services and law-enforcement agencies, are pursuing a clampdown on free thought in academia and education, leaving academics like Mr. Mau especially vulnerable to perceptions of disloyalty and being caught up in the dragnet.

“The time of systemic liberals is over,” she said. “This is the time of the siloviki. Right now everything is founded on the issue of security and the demand for dealing with anyone unfavorable.”

Ivan Fedotov, 25, a goalie on Russia’s silver-medal-winning hockey team at the Beijing Olympics this year, recently fell into that net. He was detained on charges of skipping mandatory military service. His detention came days after he quit his Russian hockey team, CSKA Moscow, and signed a contract with the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League. While Russian men must serve a year in the military by the time they turn 27, according to Russian law, professional athletes are typically allowed to bypass service by getting exemptions or playing for CSKA, the military’s club, according to Russian military analyst Pavel Luzin.

Mr. Fedotov’s whereabouts couldn’t be determined, but his lawyer, Alexei Ponomarev, told Russian state news agency TASS in early July that he was likely being held in Severomorsk, a town in the Arctic that requires official authorization to enter. Several days later, TASS reported that he would likely be sent to serve on the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Mr. Ponomarev didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ivan Fedotov, shown during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, was detained on charges of failing to undertake his military service.



Photo:

Antonin Thuillier/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Ruslan Shaveddinov, an ally of jailed opposition leader

Alexei Navalny,

was sent to Novaya Zemlya in 2019 on charges of skipping military service and spent a year serving there in what he calls punishment for his political activities. Mr. Shaveddinov said he believes the Russian authorities targeted Mr. Fedotov to send a message.

“It’s a clear signal to a wide audience that in this new confrontation with the West, these kinds of attempts to progress in America are viewed as treason,” Mr. Shaveddinov said.

Kremlin spokesman Mr. Peskov told reporters in early July that the case was about the law. “Our legislation dictates military duty,” he said.

Russia’s crackdown against critics of the war is likewise continuing. According to Damir Gainutdinov, head of the Net Freedoms Project, a Russian rights group, at least 72 people are now facing up to 10 years in prison on charges of disseminating false information about activities of the armed forces.

Pavel Chikov,

head of the

Agora

human-rights group, said that in total more than 200 people are facing prison sentences on various charges related to criticizing the war.

Earlier this month, Moscow city councilor Alexei Gorinov became the first to receive a prison sentence for disseminating false information about the Russian military when a court handed him a seven-year prison sentence. The judge said he committed the offense when he spoke out against a local council’s decision to hold children’s dancing and drawing competitions in Russia while children were dying in Ukraine.

Mr. Chikov said the sentence was so severe because Mr. Gorinov was the first person to plead not guilty to the charges. In three earlier cases, judges had handed out guilty verdicts, but the defendants were given a fine, correctional labor or a suspended sentence, after they had pleaded guilty, according to Mr. Chikov.

“It’s a strong message both to the public and to regional authorities,” said Mr. Chikov. “In Moscow’s view, seven years is the correct punishment.”

Ruslan Shaveddinov, an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sent to a remote Arctic Ocean archipelago in 2019 on charges of skipping military service and spent a year there in what he calls punishment for his political activities.



Photo:

Handout/Shutterstock

The latest opposition politician to face the charge of disseminating false information about the activities of Russia’s armed forces is

Ilya Yashin,

one of few anti-Kremlin activists who hadn’t fled Russia. He pleaded not guilty on July 13 to charges of spreading false information about alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces in the town of Bucha outside Kyiv on his YouTube channel in April.

One of his lawyers, Maria Eismont, said she has little hope he will avoid an extended sentence. “A lawyer now can only hold your hand while you are locked up,” she said.

In a handwritten letter passed through Ms. Eismont to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Yashin said he had shown and cited a British Broadcasting Corp. report from Bucha on his YouTube channel and described his indictment as one that would “amaze the imagination of any civilized person.”

“I was locked up for a report by the BBC,” he wrote. “This is the new reality in my country.”

Write to Evan Gershkovich at evan.gershkovich@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com

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US

Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says

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A Chinese spy hired a private investigator to use violence if necessary to end a candidate’s run for Congress, instructing him to “beat him until he cannot run for election,” prosecutors alleged as they unsealed a series of complaints accusing Chinese agents of harassing dissidents living in the U.S.

A man working as an agent of the Chinese government also plotted to appear at another dissident’s house pretending to represent an international sports committee in a bid to get his passport and that of a family member, prosecutors said. The dissident isn’t named but was confirmed by a person familiar with the investigation as Arthur Liu, the father of American figure-skating Olympian Alysa Liu, who has said he fled China after organizing student protests in 1989.

Altogether, prosecutors presented three cases in Brooklyn charging five people, three of whom are in custody and two of whom are at large.

While U.S. authorities have long accused the Chinese government of using illegal tactics to threaten political rivals and dissidents world-wide, law-enforcement officials said Wednesday the efforts had grown more brazen in recent years, reaching even into the U.S. political process.

“Authoritarian states around the world feel emboldened to reach beyond their borders to intimidate or exact reprisals against individuals who dare to speak out against oppression and corruption,” Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security, said at a press briefing on the cases.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Qiming Lin, the alleged Ministry of State Security agent who targeted the candidate, told the investigator: “Whatever price is fine. As long as you can do it.” According to a transcript of their conversation that prosecutors included in charging documents, Mr. Lin, who is in China, said: “We don’t want him to be elected,” adding, “we will have a lot more—more of this [work] in the future…Including right now [a] New York State legislator.”

The candidate, who is running for a New York seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, isn’t named in the complaint but matches the description of

Yan Xiong,

a student leader in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989 who later fled China, served in the U.S. military and became a citizen.

Mr. Lin suggested a variety of ways the investigator could end the would-be congressman’s candidacy, including by manufacturing derogatory information about him or arranging for him to be in a car accident, prosecutors said. “Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right?” Mr. Lin said, according to prosecutors. In another conversation, the agent allegedly said: “You go find a girl for him, see if he would take the bait.”

The private investigator, who wasn’t identified, reported the efforts to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the charging document.

Mr. Yan, a Democrat, is among several candidates vying to succeed Rep.

Lee Zeldin

in Long Island’s First Congressional District. Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, isn’t seeking re-election and is running in New York’s gubernatorial primary later this year.

Representatives for Mr. Yan didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Representatives for Alysa and Arthur Liu also didn’t respond to a request for comment. The complaint alleges that the surveillance and harassment campaign against Mr. Liu included looking to pay a reporter to let an agent tag along on an interview and ask his own questions, put a GPS tracker on his car, and get his Social Security number.

The complaint said investigators had also secured an international sports committee ID card bearing the name of an actual representative and an image of one of the agents. The plan to get Mr. Liu’s passport and that of a family member, the complaint said, was discussed in November 2021 and involved going to the Lius’ house with the identification card under the guise of checking if they were prepared to travel.

The 16-year-old Alysa Liu competed at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, finishing seventh in the women’s competition.

The three men accused of targeting Mr. Liu are two New Yorkers, Fan Liu and Matthew Ziburis, as well as a Chinese national they allegedly worked for, Qiang “Jason” Sun. The three allegedly engaged in other operations against several dissidents, including trying to bribe an Internal Revenue Service employee for access to one of their tax returns. They are also accused of stalking and surveilling an artist who made a sculpture depicting Chinese President

Xi Jinping

as a coronavirus molecule.

In a third case, a former Chinese dissident living in Queens, Shujun Wang, was accused of using his status within the Chinese community to report to the Ministry of State Security on people the Chinese government considers threatening, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, advocates for Taiwanese independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists—both in the U.S. and abroad. At least one high-profile Hong Kong democracy activist on whom the defendant reported was subsequently arrested by Chinese officials, prosecutors said.

“The Chinese Communist Party is not the only entity engaged in these practices, but their level of aggressiveness is unique,” said FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Alan Kohler Jr., who added that the actions often targeted Chinese Americans.

Fan Liu and Messrs. Wang and Ziburis appeared in a federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon. During his appearance, Mr. Liu denied the allegations through a Chinese interpreter. A judge set his release at $1 million bond.

The judge set Mr. Wang’s release at $300,000 bond. Mr. Ziburis’s bond was set at $500,000. The three defendants had their travel restricted, and a judge ordered Messrs. Liu and Wang to not enter the Chinese consulate in New York or other Chinese government facilities in the U.S.

Lawyers for all three defendants didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Friction between Beijing and Washington is running high, including over China’s reluctance to distance itself from Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. U.S. authorities have stepped up efforts in recent years to prosecute a range of allegedly illegal activities by the Chinese government in the U.S. In 2020, the FBI arrested five people on charges of helping Beijing harass and threaten fugitives in the U.S. In a separate case that year, a New York City police officer was arrested for allegedly helping the Chinese consulate spy on the local Tibetan community.

The Justice Department last month ended a Trump-era initiative to counter national-security threats from China after it led to a series of failed prosecutions of academics that sowed broad distrust in the higher-education community. At the time, Justice Department officials had said they planned to continue pursuing other cases involving allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Chinese government, including those that targeted Chinese dissidents living in the U.S.

—Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.

Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com, Kate O’Keeffe at kathryn.okeeffe@wsj.com and James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com

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Sports

Russian Billionaire Roman Abramovich, Owner of Chelsea Soccer Club, Is Sanctioned by U.K.

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LONDON—The British government ratcheted up pressure on Kremlin-linked businesspeople, sanctioning a handful of Russian oligarchs, including

Roman Abramovich,

the billionaire owner of British soccer club Chelsea FC.

It was the first time any Western government has moved on Mr. Abramovich. His trophy assets, including Chelsea, high-end property in London and mega yachts, have helped turn him into one of the highest-profile oligarchs now facing scrutiny from officials in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S., U.K. and European Union have led global efforts to punish and pressure Russian President

Vladimir Putin

for the invasion through a raft of sanctions on banks and the country’s central bank, as well as through restrictions on oil purchases in some cases and by targeting the assets of Putin associates, Russian government officials and business people viewed as close to Moscow.

The U.K. government said Thursday that it was sanctioning Mr. Abramovich due to his “preferential treatment and concessions from Putin” and said that a U.K.-listed steel company he partly owns is supplying steel to the Russian military. A spokeswoman for Mr. Abramovich didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Abramovich has a net worth estimated at 9.4 billion pounds, equivalent to $12.4 billion, the British government said. His U.K. assets will now be frozen, and he will be barred from traveling to Britain, the government said. Mr. Abramovich has already said he is in the process of trying to sell Chelsea, and a person familiar with the matter said he has put his London properties on the market.

The government said that it would provide a special license to allow Chelsea to continue to operate, despite the sanctions. The sales of the club and Mr. Abramovich’s houses are now blocked. The U.K. Treasury must grant a license to allow any sale to proceed. Mr. Abramovich won’t be permitted to receive any proceeds of the sale, according to the government.

The sanctions effectively exile Mr. Abramovich: He can’t pay for electricity to his properties or buy a cup of coffee in the U.K., officials said.

The U.K. also announced a swath of sanctions against several other Russian oligarchs including tycoon Oleg Deripaska;

Igor Sechin,

the chief executive of

Rosneft

;

Andrey Kostin,

chairman of VTB Bank; and

Alexei Miller,

chief executive of Russian energy giant

Gazprom.

The announcement marks the U.K.’s most high-profile sanctions sweep to date. Representatives for these individuals weren’t immediately available to comment.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, the U.S. and allied countries have imposed heavy sanctions on Russia. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday dives into how these sanctions are affecting everyone from President Vladimir Putin to everyday Russian citizens. Photo: Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

U.K. agencies, like those of other governments including the U.S., have powers to temporarily freeze assets of individuals or entities in their jurisdiction, without proving criminality. Owners are typically barred from selling or benefiting from them until sanctions are lifted or successfully contested. Governments typically can’t move to take ownership of the assets, though, except after often-lengthy legal proceedings that would require proof of lawbreaking. The U.K. government, however, is considering laws that would give itself the powers to seize sanctioned assets.

Across the West, Russian oligarchs are facing an unprecedented coordinated assault on businesses they built up in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anger at the invasion of Ukraine—and hope that sanctions can pressure Mr. Putin to change tack—has triggered a hunt for these oligarchs’ assets by U.S., British and European governments. London has become an epicenter of scrutiny.

From the mid-1990s, it was a welcome recipient of Russian investment. But in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, Britain’s Parliament is voting through an emergency law to make it easier to freeze the assets of those with ties to the Kremlin. British Foreign Secretary

Liz Truss

said this would enable the country to sanction hundreds of individuals by March 15.

“There can be no safe havens for those who have supported Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine,” said British Prime Minister

Boris Johnson.

The British government had recently been criticized for failing to sanction enough oligarchs, giving them space, critics said, to sell assets or transfer them to associates. British officials had previously held off sanctioning Messrs. Abramovich and Deripaska, in part over cautiousness about protracted legal battles, officials said. New laws due to come into effect next week will limit the amount of damages the government is liable to pay if people sue over being sanctioned.

Representatives for Mr. Deripaska and for

United Co. Rusal

PLC, the aluminum giant that he partly owns, weren’t immediately available for comment. Mr. Deripaska hasn’t been in London for over two years, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Abramovich once maintained a relatively high profile in London, attending Chelsea games, for instance. He has rarely been seen here though in recent years.

Underlining the difficulties that authorities may have going after oligarchs’ property, many are owned by family or through a complex system of offshore companies. The house that Mr. Deripaska used in London’s exclusive Belgravia is owned by a family member, according to the person familiar with the matter.

Oligarch

Alexey Mordashov,

sanctioned in the European Union but not in the U.K, moved control of his majority stake in British-registered mining company Nord Gold PLC to his wife, according to company filings, days after Mr. Putin ordered troops into Ukraine. Nord Gold declined to comment.

Mr. Mordashov, in a statement, said he has “absolutely nothing to do with the emergence of the current geopolitical tension, and I do not understand why the EU has imposed sanctions on me.” A spokeswoman declined to comment further.

Mr. Abramovich has sold out of many of his early business interests, which used to include an energy giant now owned by natural-gas company Gazprom. Mr. Abramovich, though, still owns around 2% of MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, one of the world’s largest producers of critical minerals, and 29% of

Evraz

PLC, a London-listed steel and mining company with operations in Russia, the U.S. and elsewhere. The U.K. said Thursday Evraz provided steel to the Russian military. Mr. Abramovich has also invested in a number of startup companies, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority said that it has temporarily suspended Evraz from trading pending clarification of the impact of the U.K. sanctions. Later Thursday afternoon, Evraz said that it doesn’t think the sanctions on Mr. Abramovich apply to the company. It said over the last five years, two directors have been appointed by Mr. Abramovich, and that it therefore doesn’t consider him as a person exercising effective control of the company. Evraz said it supplies steel to the infrastructure and construction sectors only.

Mr. Abramovich’s acquisition of Chelsea in 2003 was the start of a wider splurge in London. He purchased several luxury properties, including a 15-bedroom mansion on a street in London dubbed “millionaire’s row.” He has also bought numerous pieces of art and one of the world’s largest yachts.

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That 553-foot yacht, called Eclipse, is currently near Philipsburg, in the Dutch Antilles, in the Caribbean, according to ship tracking sites FleetMon and MarineTraffic. Another of his yachts, My Solaris, 460-feet long, set sail earlier this week from Barcelona, where it had been berthed for three months, according to the tracking sites. As of Thursday, the vessel was sailing south of the Sicilian port of Ragusa.

Mr. Abramovich, a college dropout who was orphaned at a young age, made his money in the oil business. He combined forces with Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician turned entrepreneur with tight ties to former President

Boris Yeltsin.

The two merged their oil interests to create OAO Sibneft, which was later privatized.

The deal turned Mr. Abramovich into a multibillionaire. After creating

Sibneft,

he went on to help found Rusal, the world’s second-biggest aluminum group.

The U.K. government said Mr. Abramovich and Mr. Putin had a close relationship for decades and that the tycoon benefited financially from this relationship. That included tax breaks received by companies linked to him, buying and selling shares from and to the Russian state at favorable rates and contracts his companies received in the run-up to the FIFA 2018 World Cup, the government said.

—Benoit Faucon contributed to this article.

Corrections & Amplifications
Roman Abramovich acquired Chelsea in 2003. An earlier version of this article misspelled the soccer club’s name as Chelsa. (Corrected on March 10)

Write to Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com

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Sports

How the Letter Z Became a Russian Pro-War Symbol

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When 20-year-old Russian athlete Ivan Kuliak stepped onto the podium at the Gymnastics World Cup beside event winner Illia Kovtun from Ukraine, a barely discernible symbol on his uniform prompted an official investigation into his conduct and widespread condemnation from the international community.

The letter Z—taped in white over Mr. Kuliak’s white shirt as he received his bronze medal for the parallel bars at a ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on Saturday—has emerged for those supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a symbol of pride in the attacking armed forces. In the West, it is being condemned as a sign of nationalist sentiment.

The International Gymnastics Federation, which on Monday barred Russian and Belarusian athletes from its events, said it had opened disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Kuliak.

The letter first began appearing on Russian tanks and armored vehicles as they massed near Ukraine’s border days before Russian troops crossed the border. Military analysts say the letter, along with other markers, is used by the Russian military as identifiers to distinguish their equipment on the battlefield from that of Ukraine.

Since the invasion, the “Z” iconography has appeared on cars, on banners at pro-Kremlin rallies, and on billboards in the Moscow and St. Petersburg metro systems. At a children’s hospice in the central city of Kazan on Saturday, patients were herded outside to form the letter for a photo shoot.

In recent days, pro-government videos featuring the symbol have been shared widely on social media. One such clip opens with a speech in support of Russia’s armed forces by Anton Demidov, a nationalist activist, after which hundreds of people gathered in what appears to be a warehouse are shown waving Russian flags and chanting “Russia!” and the name of President

Vladimir Putin.

Ukrainian residents were on the run as Russia shelled an evacuation route in a Kyiv suburb. In the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, there were acts of defiance this weekend, including a man standing on a Russian military vehicle waving the Ukrainian flag. Photo: Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

“I don’t know where this symbol came from,” Mr. Demidov said in an interview, adding that pro-Kremlin activists saw it on Russian tanks in Ukraine and started using it. “The symbol is not important. What’s important is what position it represents, and that is that we understand we need to back our president and our army in their difficult task.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry and other government institutions have embraced the easily reproducible symbol to rally the country around the war, which Moscow has characterized as a “special military operation.”

Soon after Russia launched the war, state-backed broadcaster RT began hawking T-shirts with such phrases. Some companies have replaced the Cyrillic version of Z for the Latin letter in their brand logos, while some government officials have swapped the letters in their social-media profiles. In Russian, the word “for” is written as “za,” and the Defense Ministry has flooded Instagram with posts saying “for peace,” “for our guys,” “for victory,” all using the English letter Z.

A Ukrainian serviceman stands near captured Russian tanks, one painted in the color of the Ukrainian national flag and the other marked with the letter Z, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine.



Photo:

IRINA RYBAKOVA/PRESS SERVICE OF/via REUTERS

Local governments around the country have joined in, lighting the windows in their government buildings to form the Latin letter Z at night.

“It is a symbol of the unity of the people,” Ivan Zhernakov, an official in the northern region of Arkhangelsk, who runs its patriotic education department, told a state media outlet there. “It symbolizes the support of our armed forces, support for the president’s decisions, and is designed to unite us in this difficult situation.”

In Ukraine, the symbol has gone down differently.

Oleksii Reznikov,

Ukraine’s defense minister, on Monday compared the symbol to the iconography of Nazi Germany, posting a picture of a Swastikalike logo formed out of two interwoven Zs that has been making the rounds on Ukrainian social media. He also tweeted: “At 1943 near the conccamp Sachsenhausen was a station Z where mass murders were committed,” in reference to a Nazi death camp.

The references to Nazi Germany come against the backdrop of Russia falsely alleging that the Ukrainian government is run by neo-Nazis and that one of the aims of its war is to “de-Nazify” the country. Ukraine’s president,

Volodymyr Zelensky,

is Jewish.

In Russia, the letter Z has received some pushback. A traffic reporter with a state television channel in Moscow went viral on social media on Monday after telling viewers that if they tape the Z symbol to the back windows of their cars they are likely to get into more accidents and have their cars hit with objects. But the letter in recent days has also been graffitied on the property of those opposing the war.

Russia’s most prominent human-rights group, which chronicled rights abuses in the country before a court forced it to shut in December, on Saturday said that security officers had drawn the letter Z in its building after searching the premises.

An activist with the feminist protest punk rock group Pussy Riot, which has for years spoken out against Mr. Putin, tweeted a photo of the letter drawn on what she said was the front door of her apartment.

The assertions couldn’t be independently verified.

And Russia’s best-known film critic, Anton Dolin, found the letter on his door before he left the country. “The message was absolutely clear. The people who did this know I am against war,” Mr. Dolin said by phone from Latvia. “They showed they know where I live and where my family lives. It’s an act of intimidation.”

Mr. Dolin said that for him, the letter is less reminiscent of Nazi iconography and more a popular zombie movie. “It brings to mind World War Z,” he said, referring to the 2013 Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt and based on a book with the same name. “I see it as representing our zombified army and the zombified part of the population that watches state television and supports the operation.”

His children, he says, see another meaning in the symbol: Zlo, or Russian for evil.

Write to Evan Gershkovich at evan.gershkovich@wsj.com and Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com

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