Russia's titans of industry are far more politically entwined than their American counterparts. But cjcmichel writes on the problem with the West’s squeeze of Russia’s richest men
The chairman and the board. Photo: Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images Up to this point, it’s clear that Vladimir Putin’s plans to shatter Ukraine have not worked. Not only is the dictator experiencing resistance from Ukrainian forces he severely underestimated, or even from a suddenly unified West launching unprecedented economic warfare against Moscow, he is getting it from a completely unexpected direction: the oligarchs.
We shouldn’t pop the Champagne about the oligarchs turning on Putin just yet — two is hardly a flood. Still, it shouldn’t be undersold how remarkable it is that, just a few days into the Kremlin’s bloody fiasco, those who have profited most from Putin’s decades-long rule have suddenly called for a halt to his adventure.
Enter Putin. Emerging as president in 2000, Putin sought to consolidate state power once more and bring the parasitic oligarchs to heel. The former KGB officer used the Russian security services to crack down on Russia’s richest: opening investigations, removing licenses, and threatening prosecutions against those who had feasted on Yeltsin’s regime.
There was a line of thought at the time that this new pressure on the oligarchs would in turn pressure Putin — to convince him of the error of his ways and to realize there were off-ramps available. Squeeze the underlings and maybe the boss will listen, the thinking went. And there might have been a time when that worked. But by the mid-2010s, as is now clear, Putin was already unreachable.
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