It’s a scene they won’t soon forget. On February 24, 2022, around forty oligarchs were urgently summoned by Vladimir Putin. Sitting wisely at a good distance from the master of the Kremlin, they discover, dumbfounded, this war in which they are drawn: the Russian president has just launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine. They don’t know it yet, but the solidarity that is asked of them to support the Russian economy is going to cost them dearly.
A few days later, these industrialists will be practically all sanctioned by the European Union. Suspected of participating in the financing of the war in Ukraine, they are among the 900 Russians registered on a “black list”. They are prohibited from traveling on European soil, and in France, their villas, yachts, planes and bank accounts are in the sights of the Bercy “task force” put forward by Bruno Le Maire on March 1, 2022.
Can this response change the course of the war?
“All these sanctions put us under personal pressurelamented Mikhail Fridman, one of the only oligarchs to have publicly protested against this war, but we have no impact on political decisions!“Indeed, the Russian President”has no personal relationship with them” and “don’t visit them“, abounds Sergei Pugachev, a Russian businessman exiled in France, in this extract from “Special Envoy”. This does not prevent this former close friend of Vladimir Putin who has become his sworn enemy from considering that these sanctions remain relevant.
“Sure, [les sanctions] will not encourage these oligarchs to oust Putin from power, but it is their money that has been financing Putin’s regime for twenty years. It’s their money that’s funding this war!”
Sergei Pugachev, former oligarchin “Special Envoy”
In Russia, the mix between public money and private companies as well as the appearance of a class of oligarchs date back to the 1990s. After the collapse of the USSR, under the era of Yeltsin, then Putin, the waves of privatization enabled a handful of industrialists to make a fortune. Banks, minerals, gas, oil… in thirty years, they have monopolized all the strategic resources of the country and have made tens of billions.
Extract from “Oligarchs: the pariahs of Europe”, a report to see in “Correspondent” May 5, 2002.
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