What relevance supposes that the oligarchs who condemn the war?

Only a handful of Russian oligarchs have spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine since February 2022. Has their public condemnation of the war reached Russian public opinion and the Kremlin?

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine is outrageous and I am categorically against it,” Arkady Volozh, co-founder of Russia-based search engine Yandex, said last week.

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He is one of the many oligarchs who were affected by the EU sanctions in June 2022.

“I am horrified by the fate of the people in Ukraine – many of them personal friends and relatives – whose houses are being shelled every day,” Volozh added in a statement released on Thursday.

It was a strong, headline-filled statement that unequivocally condemned Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, putting Volozh on the short list of Russian oligarchs who have spoken out against the invasion since February 2022.

Volozh, who co-founded Yandex in 1997 and moved to Israel in 2014, resigned as the company’s chief executive and left its board last year after the EU placed Yandex on a list of sanctioned Russian companies.

At the time, the EU wrote that the search engine was “responsible for promoting media and state narratives in its search results, and for declassifying and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as those related to Russia’s war of aggression.” against Ukraine”.

He also accused Volozh of “materially or financially” supporting the invasion. He called the decision “wrong.”

Do Russian oligarchs crumble under Western pressure?

Volozh’s recent public condemnation of the war might seem like an example that EU-imposed sanctions have worked as intended, breaking Volozh’s supposed loyalty to Putin.

But think otherwise Emily Ferris, a researcher on security in Russia and Eurasia at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British security and defense think tank.

“It’s very easy to speak out against the regime when you’re not in the country and when most of your assets are no longer in the country,” Ferris told Euronews.

“Most of the oligarchs, frankly, have not spoken out against the war,” he adds. “And that’s because most of them are still in Russia, and they still have their assets there. I haven’t seen many oligarchs move their assets out of Russia, and that’s partly because it’s actually very hard to do it,” he says. .

Among the few prominent Russian oligarchs who have publicly condemned the war is Oleg Tinkov, founder of Tinkoff Bank, one of Russia’s biggest lenders, who renounced Russian citizenship last year to condemn “Putin’s fascism.”

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Before Tinkov, Russian-Israeli investor Yuri Milner – who left Russia for the United States in 2014 – had done the same.

What all these oligarchs have in common is that they are outside of Russia.

“If you are in Russia, it is very difficult to speak out against the war, as you can end up being prosecuted,” David Lewis, Professor of Global Politics at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom), explains to Euronews.

“Those who want to maintain commercial ties with Russia are silent, and only those who are outside the country and have severed their commercial relations with Russia feel able and willing to speak. And even among those, there are not many,” he says.

Lewis added that the idea that sanctions will turn the oligarchs against Putin was always “quite naive.”

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“Politics and business are so closely intertwined in Russia that it’s almost impossible to keep your business if you speak out against government policies,” he says.

Members of the Russian elite at home who have wanted to distance themselves from the Kremlin’s position on Ukraine have had a muted reaction to the war, choosing to avoid publicly supporting the invasion rather than speak out against it, Ferris says.

This is partly why, in Russia, Volozh’s harsh condemnation of the war caused little stir.

“I think it had very little practical impact,” Ferris stresses. “People in Russia do not see the oligarchs and those local businessmen as some kind of moral compass for the nation,” he continues.

Statements by oligarchs condemning the war also receive very little coverage in the Russian media, “if at all,” Ferris stresses.

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What would it take to turn the oligarchs against Putin and would this make any difference?

“These kinds of individual cases aren’t really enough to change the terms of the debate or to change that discourse very soon,” Lewis says.

“The oligarchs have very little influence on decision-making, especially on decisions about the war itself. They are much more dependent on Putin than he is on them,” he added. “They’re a pretty weak bunch in Russian politics, and have been for some time,” she remarks.

Ferris agrees that the few acts of rebellion by Russian oligarchs abroad cannot even scratch Putin’s image at home.

“His hold on power is not really dictated by these minor oligarchs, it’s dictated by the military leaders, the armed forces, the people who are close to him – and there hasn’t been any sort of rift in this group in their consensus on war. ” Ferris points out.

If the oligarchs speaking out against the war were the ones with a significant presence in the country, running companies that employ thousands of people who could lose their jobs due to their insubordination, then that would make a difference to Putin and the Russian society. But that is unlikely to happen.

“Everyone who makes a significant amount of money in that country owns a lot of it because of Putin, because he has created the conditions to allow them to become so powerful,” Ferris says. “It would be incredibly foolish to go against him,” he ditch.

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