On February 24, Vladimir Putin brought together the fine flower of Russian capitalism. That very morning, Russian troops attacked Ukraine and the bosses are already worried about sanctions. But Alexander Shokhin, president of the Association of Russian Industries, assures that “the Russian economy is solid, but will have to adapt as we did in 2014 during the last international sanctions”. The head of the Kremlin will remind them of what he calls their “duty of solidarity”. To understand their submission, let’s go back 20 years. The scene takes place one evening in July 2000 in Stalin’s dacha. A handful of billionaires are invited by the new master of the Kremlin, just elected, who will explain to them his rules of the game: “you keep your business, but there is no question of getting involved in politics”. Those who do not accept it will pay dearly. Boris Berezovsky had made his fortune in oil. He will be sentenced to 13 years in prison and found dead in a room in 2013. Mikhail Khodorkovsky will also be arrested and sentenced for fraud. He will serve 10 years in prison and now lives in exile in London. Beware of those who resist him like when he arrives at Oleg Deripaska’s factory. The Russian president humiliated him and forced him to sign an agreement in front of the cameras. The businesses of disgraced billionaires are also redistributed early on. A new generation of oligarchs therefore emerges. “Close childhood friends of Vladimir Putin, often from Saint Petersburg, who had been part of his judo club”, Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, researchers at Ifri, specialist in Russia. Among his followers, we find his oldest friend Nikolay Tokarev, today CEO of Transneft, the oil company Gennadi Timtchenko, Alicher Ousmanov, king of new technologies or even Igor Setchin. This former spy is now the head of the biggest ruse oil company Rosneft. His yacht was immobilized last week in La Ciotat. But this is unlikely to be enough to sever his connection with power. “They are afraid of sanctions, but they also risk losing everything if they ever turn their back on their president,” according to Carole Grimaud-Potter, professor of geopolitics at the University of Montpellier. To date, only the oligarch Oleg Deripaska has dared to criticize the war in Ukraine. TF1 | Report M. de Chevigny, S. Deshaies, A. Bourgeois, C. Adriens-Allemand, C. Aragona, Y. Taoufik
