LONDON: On the day Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the early hours of 24 February 2022, he summoned Russia’s business elite to the Kremlin. The message was clear and unmistakable: the country was entering a new phase, and its richest citizens were expected to fall into line. Those present recall a tense scene, one describing the room as filled with billionaires who were “pale and sleep-deprived”, fully aware that sanctions, war and international isolation were about to tear through their fortunes. Putin offered no room for debate: “I hope that in these new conditions, we’ll work together just as well and no less effectively,” he told them. Nearly four years on, that meeting looks like a turning point not only in Russia’s war, but in the relationship between the Kremlin and the country’s ultra-rich. Despite unprecedented Western sanctions Russia now has more billionaires than ever before, and their collective wealth is close to an all-time high. Yet politically, they are quieter, weaker and more dependent on the Kremlin than at any point since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This paradox, rising wealth combined with near-total political silence, is one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest domestic successes.
In the chaotic 1990s when I lived in Russia, the country’s richest men were not only wealthy, they were powerful. As state assets were sold off at fire-sale prices following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a small group of businessmen amassed enormous fortunes in oil, gas, metals and banking.
Their method was simple and inventive. In 1992, when Boris Yeltsin’s government decided to transfer the state-owned assets directly to the people, some 98 percent of Russian citizens received a paper “voucher”, representing their share of the country’s economy. Having lived their whole lives in a state-owned economy with no private business, the vast majority of the population failed to understand the value of their voucher and were happy to trade it for a few dollars. The ruble was too weak and depreciating fast to attract any interest, so the US dollar did the persuasion. I witnessed the streets in Moscow full of traders trying to persuade people to sell their vouchers, which were then traded upwards, eventually landing into the hands of the “oligarchs”. In this way, a few far-sighted individuals were able to purchase state industries worth billions for a few million dollars.
The oligarch’s money translated directly into political influence. They funded political parties, controlled media outlets and, in some cases, openly shaped who governed the country. Boris Berezovsky, once considered Russia’s most influential oligarch, later claimed to have played a decisive role in bringing Putin to power in 2000. Years later, he bitterly regretted it. “I didn’t see the future greedy tyrant and usurper in him,” Berezovsky wrote in 2012 the year before his sudden death, describing a leader who would “trample freedom and stop Russia’s development”.
Berezovsky may have overstated his role, but there is little doubt that oligarchs once pulled strings at the very top of Russian politics. But that era didn’t last long as Putin moved swiftly to break their power. Those who challenged him were crushed. The most famous example is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man worth more than $15 billion, according to Forbes. Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 after funding opposition groups and speaking openly, condemning corruption. Many recall him famously arguing with Putin during a televised meeting in the Kremlin, implying that major government officials were accepting millions in bribes. For this, Khodorkovsky spent 10 years in a Siberian prison before being freed by Putin in 2013, just before the Sochi Olympics. Observers believe that Putin was attempting to ease Western growing criticism of Russia’s human rights, as well as demonstrating his absolute power and control over the elite. The lesson was clear: wealth was acceptable, political ambition was not.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was later allowed to emigrate to London, where he now lives. Boris Berezovsky had also earlier moved to the UK, but by the time he was found dead in 2013, in circumstances that remain disputed, the age of the oligarch as a political actor was effectively over.
When Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in 2022, the immediate impact on Russia’s billionaires was severe. According to Forbes, their number fell from 117 to 83 in the year to April 2022. Sanctions, asset freezes and a collapsing ruble wiped out an estimated $263bn, roughly 27% of their collective wealth. For a brief moment, it looked as though Western pressure might succeed in turning the ultra-rich against the Kremlin, but that hope proved short-lived.
Russia’s wartime economy, turbocharged by vast state spending on defence, soon began to deliver growth of more than 4% a year in 2023 and 2024. Entire industries were reoriented towards military needs, and even those not directly supplying the armed forces benefited from state contracts, import substitution and protection from foreign competition. By 2025, Russia had 140 billionaires, the highest number ever recorded. Their combined wealth reached $580bn, just $3bn short of the all-time high seen before the invasion.
According to Giacomo Tognini of Forbes’s Wealth team, more than half of Russia’s billionaires now either play a role in supplying the military or have benefitted directly from the war. “That’s not even counting those who aren’t directly involved, but do need a relationship of sorts with the Kremlin,” he says. “Anyone running a business in Russia needs to have a relationship with the government to survive.”
The cost of defiance is equally clear. Few cases illustrate this better than that of Oleg Tinkov, once a flamboyant banking billionaire and founder of Tinkoff Bank. In March 2022, Tinkov broke ranks, calling the war “crazy” in an Instagram post. The response was swift. The next day, his executives were contacted by the Kremlin and told the bank would be nationalised unless all ties to its founder were severed. “I couldn’t discuss the price,” Tinkov later told the New York Times. “It was like being a hostage, you take what you are offered.” Within a week a company linked to Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s fifth-richest man and a close friend of Vladimir Putin, announced it was buying the bank. Tinkov says it was sold for just 3% of its true value and in total he lost almost $9bn before leaving Russia. In October 2022 Tinkov renounced his Russian citizenship, citing the Russo-Ukraine war and the “Putin fascism” as the reason.
Since the invasion, nearly all of Russia’s mega-rich have stayed silent. Those who spoke out have followed Tinkov into exile, leaving behind both their country and much of their wealth. Many of the 37 business figures summoned to the Kremlin in February 2022 were swiftly targeted by Western sanctions. Yachts were seized, bank accounts frozen and properties impounded. The aim was twofold: to punish those close to the Kremlin and to encourage them to pressure Putin from within.
It didn’t work. “If any of them had considered defecting to the West with their billions, the sanctions made that impossible,” says Alexander Kolyandr of the Centre for European Policy Analysis. “Paradoxically, the actions of the West ensured that Russian billionaires rallied around the flag.” By freezing assets and closing escape routes, sanctions effectively bound the ultra-rich even tighter to the Russian state. Their wealth, businesses and future now depend almost entirely on staying in Putin’s “good books”.
The departure of hundreds of Western companies from Russia after the invasion also created another unexpected windfall for Kremlin-friendly business figures. Foreign assets were sold off at knock-down prices or placed under state control, only to be transferred to loyal insiders. This process has given rise to what Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre calls a new “army of influential and active loyalists”. Their prosperity depends on continued confrontation with the West, she argues, and their greatest fear is the return of former foreign owners. Put simply, they want the war to continue indefinitely. In 2024 alone, new billionaires emerged in Russia through these wartime deals.
The result is a class of billionaires richer than ever, yet politically neutered: they do not challenge the Kremlin; they do not shape policy; they adapt, comply and profit, so long as they remain silent. For Vladimir Putin, this is the ideal arrangement. The oligarchs of the 1990s were a threat, the billionaires of today are mere instruments. Western sanctions were meant to fracture Russia’s elite; instead, they have helped consolidate it under Kremlin control. As long as the war economy continues to deliver profits, and as long as dissent is punished swiftly and ruthlessly, Russia’s richest citizens will remain what they have become: wealthy, indispensable and fully under the control of Vladimir Putin.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
