During the war with Ukraine, the number of billionaires in Russia reached a record high, but in the 25 years that Vladimir Putin has been in power, Russia's rich and powerful - known as oligarchs - have lost almost all of their political influence, the British television network BBC reported today.
"This is all good news for the Russian president. Western sanctions have failed to turn the ultra-rich into his opponents, and his carrot-and-stick policy has turned them into silent supporters," the British television station reported.
Former banking billionaire Oleg Tinkov knows exactly how these sticks work.
The day after he criticized the war in Ukraine in an Instagram post, Tinkoff's associates were contacted by the Kremlin. They were told that his Tinkoff Bank, the second largest in Russia at the time, would be nationalized unless all ties with its founder were severed.
Tinkov later said that he felt like a hostage because he could not negotiate.
Within a week, a company linked to Vladimir Potanin - currently the fifth richest businessman in Russia - which supplies nickel for fighter jet engines, announced it was buying the bank. It was sold for just 3 percent of its true value, Tinkov said.
In the end, Tinkov lost about $9 billion (£6,5 billion) of the wealth he once had, and left Russia.
This is a far cry from how things worked before Putin became president.
In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Russians became fabulously wealthy by taking ownership of huge enterprises that had previously been state-owned and exploiting the opportunities offered by the country's nascent capitalism.
Their newfound wealth brought them influence and power during periods of political turmoil, and they became known as oligarchs.
Russia's most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, admitted to orchestrating Putin's political rise in 2000, and a few years later asked for forgiveness for it.
"I did not see in him (Putin) a future greedy tyrant and usurper, a man who would trample on freedom and stop the development of Russia," he wrote in 2012.
Berezovsky may have exaggerated his role, but Russian oligarchs were certainly capable of pulling the strings at the highest levels of government.
A little over a year after the apology, Berezovsky was found dead, under mysterious circumstances, in exile in the UK.
By then, the Russian oligarchy had also remained completely without influence.
When Putin gathered the richest Russians in the Kremlin, hours after ordering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, few of them could say anything, even though they knew they would suffer a major blow.
"I hope that in these new conditions we will cooperate just as well and no less effectively," Putin told them.
One journalist present at the meeting described the gathered billionaires as "pale and sleep-deprived individuals."
The preparations for the invasion were very bad for Russian billionaires, as were its immediate consequences.
According to Forbes magazine, in the year to April 2022, their number fell from 117 to 83 due to war, sanctions and a weakening ruble. Together, they lost $263 billion - or, on average, 27 percent of their wealth.
But the years that followed showed that enormous benefits would accrue from participating in Putin's war economy.
Lavish war spending fueled economic growth of more than four percent a year in Russia in 2023 and 2024. That was good even for those among Russia's ultra-rich who didn't earn billions directly from defense contracts.
In 2024, more than half of Russia's billionaires either played some role in supplying the military or benefited from the invasion, Forbes reporters reported.
The exodus of foreign companies after the invasion of Ukraine created a vacuum that was quickly filled by Kremlin-friendly businessmen, who were allowed to buy up highly profitable assets cheaply.
This has created a new "army of influential and active loyalists," said Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center.
"Their future well-being depends on the continued confrontation between Russia and the West," while their greatest fear is the return of the previous owner, she added.
In 2024 alone, 11 new billionaires appeared in Russia in this way, the BBC reports, adding that Putin has maintained firm control over the country's key drivers, despite the war and Western sanctions, and in some respects thanks to them.
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