Oleg Tinkov is 54 years old and he’s not just anyone. In 2006, he founded Tinkoff Bank, which quickly became Russia’s third largest with 20 million customers, and the country’s largest credit card issuer. He chose the social network Instagram to express the strongest criticism against the war in Ukraine ever expressed since the beginning by a Russian oligarch.
The words are straightforward: “I don’t see any benefit from this crazy war“, writes Tinkov. Then, the Russian oligarch continues in the same vein: “Innocent people and soldiers are dying. The Russian generals have realized that they have a shitty army. This country is mired in nepotism and servility (…) 90% of Russians are against the war”. Tinkov is a colorful character, quite iconoclastic, and suffering from leukemia. If he allows himself such freedom of speech, it is because he lives abroad. He is also targeted by British financial sanctions, because he is often in London. He had criticized the invasion from the start, but this time the charge is much sharper. He also calls on the West to “give Putin a way out to save face and stop the slaughter”.
Not many Russian billionaires have openly expressed their opposition to the conflict. They did it less vehemently than Tinkov. We can cite Mikhail Fridmann, another billionaire, holder of the Letter One financial fund. As early as the end of February, he wrote to his employees to express his opposition to the war: “This bloodshed must end, writes Fridmanthis crisis will ravage two sister nations.” Others simply called for peace or criticized the economic situation. For example, Oleg Deripaska, also a billionaire, founder of the aluminum giant Rusal, denounced “state capitalism in Russia”. He called for a change in economic policy. And then there is the particular case of Roman Abramovich, the former boss of the Chelsea football club, for a time approached by Ukraine to play mediator. But the Russian oligarchs, for the most part, remain discreet or express their solidarity with the Kremlin.
As for the sanctions against all these Russian oligarchs, they are increasing over the weeks. Between the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, more than 2,000 names have been identified and are subject to various sanctions. But as a recent investigation by Radio France’s Cellule Investigation demonstrated, sanctions regimes are a bit troubling. Westerners are attacking the most conspicuous such as villas and yachts which are seized or immobilized. We saw it with the yacht of Igor Setchine in La Ciotat in France or that of the extremely wealthy Alicher Ousmanov in Hamburg in Germany. Their private property is therefore targeted. On the other hand, their companies are often spared, perhaps for fear of chain effects on certain markets, such as those for iron or aluminium. And then, there are obviously all the cases of circumvention or flight: capital moved to tax havens, exile to the Persian Gulf, in particular the United Arab Emirates, which have become the favorite refuge of the oligarchs.