Vasily Georgievich Aleksanyan was a Russian lawyer and a former Executive Vice President of Yukos oil company. He headed the company's legal department and represented Mikhail Khodorkovsky when the Kremlin accused the oil tycoon and his managers of money laundering and embezzlement in 2006. Aleksanyan was arrested and charged as an accomplice to tax evasion and money laundering. After refusing to allegedly provide false evidence against other Yukos executives, he served two years in prison while suffering from advanced cancer and AIDS. After a decision by European Court of Human Rights, he was released on a bond on 12 January 2009, dying from complications of AIDS on 2 October 2011.

OJSC "Yukos Oil Company" was an oil and gas company based in Moscow, Russia. Yukos was acquired from the Russian government by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Bank Menatep during the controversial "loans for shares" auctions of the mid 1990s. Between 1996 and 2003, Yukos became one of the largest and most successful Russian companies, producing 20% of Russia's oil output. In the 2004 Fortune 500, Yukos was ranked as the 359th largest company in the world. In October 2003, Khodorkovsky—by then the richest person in Russia and 16th richest person in the world—was arrested, and the company was forcibly broken up for alleged unpaid taxes shortly after and declared bankrupt in August 2006. Courts in several countries later ruled that the real intent was to destroy Yukos and obtain its assets for the government, and act politically against Khodorkovsky. In 2014, the largest arbitration award in history, $50 billion (€37.2 billion), was won by Yukos' former owners against Russia. This $50 billion award by the Permanent Court of Arbitration was ruled invalid by the District court in The Hague in 2016, but reinstated by the Court of Appeal of the Hague in 2020.