A St. Petersburg court froze the Russian assets of JPMorgan Chase & Co. pending consideration of a lawsuit from the country’s second-largest bank that seeks to recover about US$440 million.

VTB Bank PJSC filed the suit against JPMorgan and its subsidiaries in the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region on April 17, according to the court’s database. While court documents didn’t detail the main basis for the suit, they said VTB had requested provisional steps because the defendants were “taking measures to withdraw their assets” from Russia while the state-controlled lender was seeking to recover about $440 million from JPMorgan.

The court agreed to freeze the money in JPMorgan’s Russian accounts, its stake in a Russian subsidiary bank and property rights related to some trademarks. It set the next hearing in the case for July 17.

JPMorgan declined to comment. VTB didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment.

Russia has retaliated against sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies over the war in Ukraine by limiting the access of companies from so-called unfriendly states to the assets they hold domestically. 

JPMorgan has previously warned that it faces “actual and threatened litigation in Russia seeking payments on transactions that the firm cannot make, and is contractually excused from paying, under relevant sanctions laws.” The lender said that assets it holds in that country could be seized as a result.