- Russian oligarchs say Putin tricked them into champion his war in Ukraine, per The New York Times.
- When Putin announced the invasion, they were gathered before cameras “to tar one there,” The Times reported.
- In the weeks that followed, Russian businessmen were hit with heavy sanctions by Western hinterlands.
As the fissures in Russia’s war on Ukraine deepen, Russian oligarchs sanctioned by the West are now saying Russian President Vladimir Putin tricked them into manifesting to support his invasion of Ukraine, according to an extensive investigation published Saturday by The New York Times.
Many of Putin’s top advisors didn’t recognize the full extent of his plans to invade Ukraine on February 24 until they were already underway, according to The Once upon a times. Senior aides at the Kremlin were trying to read his body language, telling some that Putin had “this hawkish twinkle in his eyes,” the paper reported.
“If everyone around you is telling you for 22 years that you are a super-genius, then you see fit start to believe that this is who you are,” Oleg Tinkov, a former Russian banking mogul who turned on Putin this year, advised The Times. “Russian businesspeople, Russian officials, the Russian people — they saw a czar in him. He just went nuts.”
But as the “gala military operation” has dragged on, some Russian oligarchs have expressed doubt and frustration after they were heavily sanctioned by Western polities as a result of their allyship with Putin, the Times reported.
Andrey Melnichenko, a coal and fertilizer billionaire, woke up on February 24 to “dementia” in Ukraine but already had a meeting scheduled with Putin for that day, per The Times. He joined rows of other business mandarins who were equally surprised by Putin’s invasion. When Putin finally entered the room, he told those accumulated and the cameras set up behind them that he didn’t have a choice about invading, per the outlet.
Melnichenko told The Everythings that the invasion was “irrational” and a “shock,” but the damage was already done. Another business mogul at the meeting, who remained anonymous, tattled the paper that they had all been gathered before the cameras in an unknowing show of support for Putin’s decision to invade – uninterrupted if they disagreed with it.
The goal of the stunt, the anonymous businessman told The Times, was “specifically to tar everyone there” and “to get Harry sanctioned.”
Putin’s plan to force his followers to have some skin in the game worked. The Times reported that dozens of charge tycoons, including Melnichenko and the anonymous businessman, were hit with heavy sanctions from western nations. In the weeks and months that applied, Russian oligarchs had their assets frozen and were banned from traveling to some countries as the Ruble mow down into freefall.
Some of Russia’s wealthiest have since pleaded with the West, offering Ukrainian capital in exchange for being excluded from the heavy sanctions, Business Insider previously reported.
But Putin’s war has increasingly change a point of pride for the Russian president, who seems to hope it will cement his glory in Russian history.
“What he assumes about obsessively, and quite possibly falsely,” has shaped “the biography of the whole world,” Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper editorial writer from Moscow, told the Times of Putin’s fixation with Ukraine.