Lapdogs of War: A Guide to Russia’s Wartime Oligarchs

The photo shows paratroopers in the second row holding assault rifles of the AK-100 family, in which wooden parts were completely replaced by polymer ones. The co-owners of the Kalashnikov concern until the end of 2017 were Iskandar Makhmudov (No. 19 on the Forbes list), Andrei Bokarev (No. 59) and Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko. Obviously, the manufacturing of assault rifles requires steel. It is supplied to the Kalashnikov Concern by Alexei Mordashov’s Severstal, and pipe products are supplied by Dmitry Pumpyansky’s TMK. The same company supplies these products to the Izhevsk Mechanical Plant, a subsidiary of the Concern. Kalashnikov also buys rolled titanium from Mikhail Shelkov’s VSMPO-AVISMA.

Several servicemen in the foreground clearly hold PKP Pecheneg machine guns. This gun is developed and produced by the state-owned Central Scientific — Research Institute for Precision Machine Engineering (TsNIITochMash) in Podolsk and the private Degtyaryov Plant owned by Igor Kesaev. Ammunition for the machine gun was supplied by the Tula and Ulyanovsk Cartridge Plants during the period when they were openly owned by Igor Rotenberg.

Voluntary medical insurance services for employees of TsNIITochMash, as well as property insurance services for the Kalashnikov Concern, are provided by the AlfaStrakhovanie company owned by Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Alexey Kuzmichev, Petr Aven and Andrei Kosogov. It also insured cars of 65 military units and other organizations associated with the National Guard and the Ministry of Defense.

Fridman and other Alfa shareholders have an even closer relationship with the Tula Cartridge Plant, which supplies cartridges and cartridge cases to the manufacturers of all the small arms mentioned in this chapter. This is worth mentioning separately. Alfa Bank actively provided loans to defense companies after the first invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops in 2014, but in 2018 the bank announced that it would not serve the defense industry due to sanctions risk. Like other banks, it transferred its remaining “defense” loans to Promsvyazbank. However, in mid-2020, Alfa once again extended a credit line, presumably in the amount of 1.8 billion rubles, to Igor Rotenberg’s cartridge factory . Alfa Bank kept the credit line for the cartridge plant open even after the outbreak of the full-scale war; it was only closed in December 2022. In response to an inquiry from Proekt, Alfa Bank itself said that it only financed the production of sporting and hunting cartridges intended for delivery to the United States. It is possible the bank really did intend to finance export production . However, we should note that the subject of pledge under the Alfa Bank loan was 27 pieces of various equipment, of which 26 are presumably universal, i.e., can be used for the production of a wide range of products.

It is also important to understand that recently — after receiving loans from Alfa Bank and other banks — the Tula Cartridge Plant has started to actively expand. In particular, in late 2022, a new production facility with new equipment was added to the plant, and now it is clearly loaded with defense orders, as instead of the planned dismissal of over 600 idle employees, the plant is expanding its staff to the maximum extent possible.

Since 2014, the Pskov-based 76th Guards Air Assault Division has been using the Ratnik gear, which the Defense Ministry calls “the gear of a future soldier”. Among the protection elements of this gear is the 6B47 helmet produced by the already mentioned TsNIITochMash. The latter has contracts with the companies of Makhmudov, Bokarev, Kesaev and Igor Rotenberg.

What makes Ratnik unique is, of course, not the body armor, but the equipment that comes with it. For instance, the kit is equipped with the Strelets reconnaissance, control and communications system. It includes, for example, a PDU-4 laser rangefinder designed for target designation. A Bucha resident found a box from such a device in his looted house. He put it up for auction and also posted photos showing that the rangefinder was ordered by the Defense Ministry for the Pskov-based 76th Guards Air Assault Division, and was supplied by Radioavionica, a company owned by the family of Andrei Turchak, the second man in the Federation Council and the United Russia party . Proekt has already reported on how the Turchak family profits from Soviet defense enterprises.

The crimes in Bucha had to be somehow justified to the Russian audience. Before the introduction of the toughest possible repressive measures against anyone who questioned the official Russian point of view, this task was handled by propagandists. They labeled the videos and photographs that surfaced immediately after the liberation of the town as fakes.

For instance, on April 3, Channel One anchor Ekaterina Berezovskaya described the event as follows: “Here is another accusation from the Ukrainian fake news factory. Our military allegedly massacred civilians in the town of Bucha. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided a commentary to this lie: Bucha is supposedly ‘the second Srebrenica’”. On April 9, REN-TV channel showed its viewers footage of Ukrainian military personnel in Bucha pulling bodies by ropes. The anchor explained that in this video the AFU soldiers were placing the corpses on the roads so that “as many dead civilians as possible would get into the frame, in accordance with the director’s intention”. According to her, the footage was shot while preparing the “movie set,” it leaked due to the rush, and now proves a “cynical staging.” In fact, the original video was published on April 2 by Associated Press, with the comment “Soldiers pull a body with a cable for fear it’s booby-trapped.” Both ChannelOne and REN-TV are part of National Media Group (NMG), which at the start of the war was owned by Yuri Kovalchuk (No. 47), Vladimir Bogdanov (No. 76) and Alexei Mordashov . As Proekt previously reported, Vladimir Putin himself also secretly owned a stake in NMG.

While television creates crude fake news, newspapers and Internet media are engaged in more sophisticated propaganda for the intellectual audience. For example, most of the news about Bucha in the RBC media outlet owned by Grigory Berezkin (No. 157) looked something like this: a couple of sentences saying that “a number of media outlets” and “the Ukrainian authorities” had published images of corpses of civilians from Bucha, followed by several paragraphs with official statements from the Russian side claiming that the events in Bucha were a provocation and a staging.

However, the main role in Russian propaganda is, of course, played not by individual media outlets, but by Yandex. Internet media get most of the traffic to their websites if their story appears on the search engine’s home page in the section with the five top news stories. Yandex management has always claimed that this “top news” section is formed automatically. However, as journalists have repeatedly proved, the news list is formed in coordination with the Kremlin . That is why on April 4, the search engine’s audience saw the news about Bucha reported by RIA Novosti under the headline “The Foreign Ministry named disruption of peace talks as the purpose of the crime of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha”. At that time, Yandex was owned by Arkady Volozh (No. 64) and Vladimir Ivanov (No. 159).

That day, three missiles at once struck a busy intersection in the city center between the House of Officers and the nine-story building of the Yubileiny consumer services center, where there were public transport stops, taxi parking, many offices, stores, a large bank branch and a medical center. The next day, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that a “high-precision” strike had destroyed “participants in a meeting of the Ukrainian Air Force command with representatives of foreign arms suppliers” held at the House of Officers.

Like in many other Ukrainian cities, the House of Officers of the Vinnytsia military garrison had been used as a venue for cultural events, including concerts and children’s hobby groups, for many years. That morning there was also a sound check for an upcomig concert going on — sound engineer Yevgeniy Kovalenko, who was conducting it, was killed and his crew members were wounded. Nevertheless, three AFU officers are indeed listed among the victims of the strike, along with 21 other adults and three children. Along with Kirill Pyakhin, other child ictims were 4-year-old Liza Dmitrieva, whose mother was taking her to a speech therapist, and 7-year-old Maxim Zharyi, who was in the medical center destroyed by the missile. 202 people were injured. 55 detached houses and apartment buildings, 40 cars and two tramcars were destroyed or damaged.

That morning, Vinnitsa was shelled with sea-based Kalibr missiles.

According to Yuri Ignat, commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, the shooting was carried out from a submarine operating in the Black Sea. Another version suggests that Vinnytsia was shelled from the Admiral Makarov frigate or another ship of this type. Russian propaganda — Channel One and Rossiya-1 — accompanied the stories about the shelling of Vinnytsia with footage of a small Buyan-M-class corvette firing missiles. Although “canned footage” (i.e. pre-recorded videos) is often used for such stories, this version cannot be ruled out either.

Missiles and warships are among the most expensive products of Russia’s military-industrial complex. Dozens of enterprises, not all of which are state-owned, work to build, repair and maintain them. In recent years, Russia’s shipbuilding and ship repair plants have signed contracts with at least 25 private companies owned by people from Forbes list. At least seven other companies owned by the Forbes billionaires have contributed to the development of the Kalibr missiles.

Russia has seven submarines in the Black Sea, all carrying Kalibr missiles. The oldest of them, Alrosa, was commissioned in 1989. After the 1997 partition of the fleet and until the seizure of Crimea, it was the only combat-ready submarine in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. After the annexation of the peninsula, Alrosa was immediately sent for repairs to the 13th shipyard of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, which she left in the summer of 2022. It was during this modernization that the boat was armed with Kalibr missiles.

During the repair of Alrosa, the 13th shipyard purchased materials from Viktor Rashnikov’s Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, and electrical equipment from Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s companies. The plant was issued loans by Rossiya Bank, which is controlled by Putin’s best friend, billionaire Yuri Kovalchuk. Other shareholders of this bank include Putin’s former mistress Svetlana Krivonogikh, although her current net worth is not enough to be included in the Forbes ranking.

Neither Rashnikov, nor Yevtushenkov, let alone Kovalchuk, have spoken out about the war in Ukraine and the missile strikes on civilian targets, although all three have lost over $3 billion over the course of the war.

Whereas Rashnikov and Kovalchuk have long been under all sorts of sanctions, Yevtushenkov has only been sanctioned by the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ukraine. The authorities of the latter seized assets belonging to the oligarch in September 2022 . However, Yevtushenkov still has real estate in France, and his company AFK Sistema owns hotels in the Czech Republic. The oligarch even increased his capital within Russia by buying out the Radisson and Olympia Garden hotel chains from the Norwegian Wenaasgruppen, which left the country after the outbreak of war.

The other six Russian submarines appeared in the Black Sea after the annexation of Crimea. All of them were built under the same Varshavyanka project at the Admiralty Shipyards in St. Petersburg.

This shipyard is a major buyer of components from the private sector. Shipbuilding steels are supplied to the Admiralty Shipyards by Alexei Mordashov’s Severstal and Viktor Rashnikov’s Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. Titanium products are supplied by Mikhail Shelkov’s VSMPO-AVISMA. Billionaire Evgeny Zubitsky’s company Polema supplies nickel anodes, which are used in nickel-plating parts. Diesel generators come from the Kolomna plant, part of Transmashholding, which is owned by Iskander Makhmudov and Andrei Bokarev. Electrical and radar equipment comes from the enterprises of Yevtushenkov’s AFK Sistema. The plant is insured by Sogaz, whose shareholders include Yuri Kovalchuk and Putin’s nephew Mikhail Shelomov.

Of all those named, only one — Alexei Mordashov — has spoken out about the war, and even then only after he was sanctioned by the European Union. In his commentary from February 28, 2022, relayed to Forbes through a spokesman, Mordashov called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a tragedy of two brotherly peoples” and assured that he kept away from politics and “spent his entire life building up economic value for the companies he worked for in Russia and abroad.” “I have absolutely nothing to do with the emergence of the current geopolitical tensions. I do not understand why sanctions have been imposed on me,” the oligarch said.

In the past, Mordashov eagerly supported all of Putin’s important projects with money , but his attempts to distance himself from the war are understandable, as the sanctions have caused the businessman to lose a record $8.2 billion in net worth , a villa in Sardinia and his favorite 65-meter yacht Lady M worth $27 million.

However, by the summer of 2022, Mordashov “came to his senses” and said at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum that “it is necessary to take advantage of the impetus to start developing the economy”. Putin noted that and encouraged the return of the “prodigal son”: in August 2022, the president awarded Mordashov with the Order of Friendship. Another prominent defense industry supplier, billionaire Viktor Rashnikov, received the title of Hero of Labor from Putin in 2022.

In truth, both Mordashov, Rashnikov, and the other people listed above have long been closely cooperating with the military-industrial complex in various industries and in the production of a very wide range of weapons, which you can find in all the criminal episodes cited in this article.

Now let’s talk about the ships. The Admiral Makarov frigate, as well as the similar Admiral Grigorovich and Admiral Essen frigates, appeared in the Black Sea after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. They were manufactured by the Yantar shipyard in Kaliningrad. It mostly has the same suppliers as Admiralty Shipyards, with only Andrei Komarov and Dmitry Pumpyansky’s Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant added to the above-mentioned list.

Buyan-M small missile ships are produced by the Zelenodolsk Shipyard. Construction of all four units in the Black Sea Fleet — Graivoron, Ingushetia, Orekhovo-Zuevo and Vyshny Volochek — began in 2013-2015. Power units for the ships are supplied by the Kolomna plant, which is part of Transmashholding owned by Makhmudov and Bokarev. Both businessmen have not been sanctioned by the EU, their business in Latvia continues to operate.

Kalibr missiles are also carried by patrol ships. In total, 18 combat units of the Black Sea Fleet are armed with these missiles. Since February 24, 2022, Russia has carried out at least 50 missile attacks with the use of Kalibr missiles . In 1/3 of the cases, the missiles hit residential buildings and civilian infrastructure. The worst in terms of the number of casualties were the already discussed attack on Vinnytsia and the attack on Kharkiv on March 1, 2022, when a missile hit the city administration building, killing 29 people and injuring dozens.

Kalibr missiles are manufactured by the Novator Experimental Design Bureau in Yekaterinburg, while their warheads are made by the Snegirev Research Technological Institute in Balashikha near Moscow.

Both enterprises actively cooperate not only with other state companies, but also with private businesses. Rocket manufacturers buy titanium from Shelkov’s VSMPO-AVISMA, aluminum from Vekselberg’s Kamensk-Uralsky Metallurgical Works, rolled metal from one of the plants that is part of Rashnikov’s Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant, and fuel from one of the subsidiaries of Vagit Alekperov’s Lukoil.

Like Mordashov, Alekperov indirectly spoke out about the war at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For this he received… an order from Putin’s hands. In March 2022, a press release appeared on Lukoil’s website, in which the board of directors, which at the time included Alekperov, expressed “concern over the ongoing tragic events in Ukraine and deepest sympathy to all those affected by this tragedy,” and called for an end to the “armed conflict” and negotiations. In April, Alekperov left all his posts at Lukoil because of the UK’s personal sanctions. A month later, Putin awarded him the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” I class.

Technodinamika Holding, which includes the Snegirev Research Technological Institute producing Kalibr warheads, also uses the services of Kaspersky Lab, owned by Eugene Kaspersky (No. 101 on the Forbes list). For example, in 2017, Kaspersky’s company conducted a study of the “unauthorized hacking threat model” commissioned by Technodinamika. At the very beginning of the war, Eugene Kaspersky made a pacifist statement on social media: “War has never done anyone any good. We are as shocked as the rest of the world.” Only Ukraine has imposed personal sanctions against Kaspersky.

Communications to the defense companies producing the Kalibras are provided by Yevtushenkov’s MTS and Megafon, which is part of Usmanov’s USM Holdings, whose shareholders also include Forbes list members Ivan Streshinsky and Andrei Skoch. USM is engaged not only in communications, but also in metal. Metalloinvest, which is part of the holding, supplies rolled steel and metal billets to the defense industry.

Interestingly, all three USM shareholders reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in different ways. Streshinsky did not make any public statements about the war, and after being sanctioned, left the boards of directors of USM Holding, Metalloinvest, Megafon, and Udokan Copper. Skoch didn’t speak about the war either, but as a State Duma member, he voted for pro-war and repressive laws, and helped the Union of Afghanistan Veterans publish a brochure for mobilized soldiers with the “rules of life in war”.

Usmanov, sitting in Tashkent, is trying to challenge the sanctions imposed on him by the European Union. In February 2023, he gave a big interview to an Italian TV channel, where he said that “the war will not benefit anyone”, but then immediately noted: “This is none of my business, I’m not a politician, I don’t want to get involved in politics”. However, the businessman does use politics to his advantage: the authorities of Uzbekistan and Hungary asked the EU to lift the restrictions on Usmanov. In January 2023, Usmanov left the board of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists, saying that this was due to his retirement.

However, military censorship continues to flourish in the Kommersant newspaper owned by Usmanov. The newspaper refers to the war in Ukraine as “the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine,” and on the day of the missile strike on Vinnytsia and in the days that followed, it did not mention civilian casualties, only reporting, with reference to Margarita Simonyan’s post, that the target of the attack was the House of Officers. The attack on Vinnytsia was described in the same way in the previously mentioned RBC owned by Grigory Berezkin, but the journalists of this media outlet did add that the victims included civilians.

Berezkin was hit hard by the sanctions: he was stripped of his Cypriot “golden passport” , and at least six of his chalets in Courchevel, France, and real estate in Italy were seized. Berezkin attempted to challenge the sanctions imposed against him in European courts. Immediately after the lawsuit was filed, some Western media outlets published articles calling RBC “one of the last independent media outlets in Russia” that “cover the war in an objective and unbiased manner.” The simultaneous appearance of columns containing the same wording suggests that they may have been planted.

Natalia and Mikhail Grebenetsky were born in Volnovakha, a Donbass town that had been considered frontline and troubled since 2014. When the Russian army began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Grebenetskys left to join their son Yevgeny in Mariupol. It seemed to them that it would be safer in a big city.

At first the family lived in Yevgeny’s apartment in the Left Bank district , on the seventh floor of an ordinary apartment building with a view of the city. Every day Natalia and Yevgeniy could see from their window how neighboring buildings were exploding and Russian warplanes were flying over the rooftop.

March 5 was a quiet day. The Grebenetskys decided to leave the city and got into a car, but it broke down. They only managed to get to the Drama Theater, where the local authorities offered civilians to take shelter from the bombing while waiting for an organized evacuation. The family lived in the Drama Theater for 11 days.

All this time the residents of Mariupol were flowing to the theater in a continuous stream — dozens and hundreds of people a day. As one of the refugees, Maria Kutnyakova, who came to the theater with her mother and sister in the early morning of March 16, recalled , there were so many people that they only managed to find a couple of square meters to sit down on the balcony of the third floor. Associated Press journalists estimated that in total, about a thousand civilians, including pregnant women , which had been bombed the day before) and children, were inside the building. To warn the Russian pilots, a few days before the tragedy, two huge “CHILDREN” signs were painted on the asphalt outside the theater, which were visible even from a satellite.

At about 10 a.m. on March 16, two FAB-500 bombs were dropped on the theater. The explosions killed from 300 to 600 people .

Natalia and Yevgeny Grebenetsky were lucky: they survived the explosion because the ceiling in the room they were in did not collapse. Wounded and concussed, but alive, they rushed to look for Mikhail. Seeing his hands under the rubble in one of the corridors, Yevgeny began to dig out his father, but was only able to free his face — pieces of plaster began to fall from the ceiling, threatening to bury everyone. The Grebenetskys rushed out of the theater in panic along with other survivors. They were just in time — a fire soon broke out in the building, killing those who were still alive but injured or trapped under the rubble. That day, no more than 200 people made it out of the theater alive.

The FAB-500 is a very old aerial bomb with a high-explosive warhead, introduced into service back in the 1950s. Its main “advantage” is its enormous killing power; its disadvantage is its uncontrollability. Nevertheless, Russian pilots are professional enough to drop these bombs in clusters on large ground targets , so two such bombs could well have hit the theater at once.

Stocks of FABs have remained in army warehouses since Soviet times. But even now, Russia continues to produce them, and does so at an increased rate. In 2017, the Sverdlov Plant in the city of Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, built a 500-million-ruble automatic line for equipping FAB-500 bombs with explosives. Prior to that, such munitions were filled manually in the old-fashioned way . At the time, the opening of the assembly line was explained by the fact that significant stocks of FAB-500 bombs had been used up in Syria, and “[Russia’s] army is preparing for war.”

Components for producing explosives for the shells are supplied to the Sverdlov Plant by subsidiaries of Uralchem owned by Dmitry Mazepin and oil and gas chemical giant Sibur, whose owners include one of Putin’s best friends Gennady Timchenko (No. 6 on the Forbes list), his long-time business partner Leonid Mikhelson (No. 5), Putin’s former son-in-law Kirill Shamalov (No. 151), and, since the fall of 2021, representatives of the Tatarstan elites: Airat (No. 91) and Radik (No. 98) Shaimiev, Rustem Sulteev (No. 19), Albert Shigabutdinov (No. 110) (Shaimievs, Sulteev and Shigabutdinov are shareholders of the Sibur-RT holding company, formerly known as TAIF — Russia’s largest private company created in post-Soviet times in Tatarstan from privatized state enterprises. In the fall of 2021, before the war, part of TAIF was absorbed by Sibur, and its owners received shares in the petrochemical giant).

Mazepin is one of the Russian oligarchs who, despite the sanctions imposed against them, managed to get even richer during the war. Due to the rise in global fertilizer prices, the valuation of his net worth increased by $2 billion . It’s not surprising that he hasn’t said a word about the invasion of Ukraine. The businessman continues to ostentatiously meet with Putin and participate in Kremlin business events. At the same time, the USA and Japan have not imposed any restrictions against the oligarch at all, while Europe has eased the sanctions against Uralchem and other fertilizer producers in order to facilitate the supply of agricultural inputs to poor countries.

Sibur shareholders have said nothing about the war either. Only the website of Mikhelson-owned Novatek issued a press release in early March 2022, in which the company expressed “sincere sympathy to all those affected by these events.” At the same time, only Timchenko, whom the U.S. and Canada blacklisted back in 2014, and Shamalov, Putin’s former son-in-law, have been placed under all possible sanctions. Only certain countries imposed restrictions against the other owners of Sibur from the Forbes list, and only Ukraine sanctioned Radik Shaimiev and Rustem Sulteev.

Novatek, like Sibur, also has contracts with the Sverdlov Plant: it supplies the company with large volumes of natural gas. Apart from Mikhelson and Timchenko, Novatek’s shareholders are Leonid Simanovsky (No. 85) and Farkhad Akhmedov (No. 88).

To top it all off, Simanovsky sits in the State Duma and votes for pro-war and repressive laws. Meanwhile, his daughter lives in Switzerland and works for a subsidiary of Novatek.

The Sverdlov plant also buys aluminum powder from Rusal owned by Oleg Deripaska (No. 37) and Viktor Vekselberg (No. 20), and components from the Scientific Research Institute of Steel, which is partly owned by the structures of Vladimir Yevtushenkov (No. 41).

In early March 2022, Deripaska wrote: “Peace is very important! Dragging out the negotiations is madness.” After that, he made many other public statements mentioning the war, but it is impossible to understand his attitude towards the conflict from these words. In the summer of 2022, he said that “to destroy Ukraine would be a colossal mistake,” but then immediately doubted the possibility of a change of power in Russia because there were “no economic prerequisites for it.” Following the assassination of propagandist Daria Dugina in 2022, Deripaska accused the world of an “outrageous level of lies and provocations.”

Finally, another supplier of the manufacturer of the FAB aerial bombs is the Degtyarev Weapons Factory owned by Igor Kesaev (No. 35), which we have mentioned several times in the previous episodes.

The FAB-500 bombs produced by the Sverdlov Plant are widely used in Ukraine and have already caused the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. They are compatible with virtually all types of Russian military aircraft, but experts consider Sukhoi Su-25, Su-30, and Su-34 attack aircraft to be the most likely means of delivering the bombs to the place where they were dropped over the Mariupol Drama Theater. Although the Ukrainian army repeatedly shot down these planes and captured their pilots, they felt at ease in the skies above Ukraine, because a significant part of the Ukrainian air defense was destroyed or disoriented in the first days of the war.

By the spring of 2023, thanks in part to Western arms supplies, it had become much more dangerous for Russian aircraft to fly over Ukraine. That’s when Russian designers learned how to turn the FAB-500 from an unguided bomb into a guided one. They developed special control and gliding modules for it, making it possible to launch FABs from a distance of 40-50 kilometers from the target, beyond the reach of Ukrainian air defenses.

In fact, such modules started to be developed in Russia back in the mid-noughties. This is being done by the Moscow-based NPO Bazalt, which is part of Rostec State Corporation. This enterprise also buys the necessary materials from people on the Forbes list. Steel pipes are supplied to it by the Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant, whose major shareholder until 2021 was Andrei Komarov.

Bazalt’s government procurement portfolio also includes contracts with the Technonicol company of Sergei Kolesnikov (No. 69) and Igor Rybakov (No. 70). They supplied the company with waterproofing film, most likely for the repair of production facilities. Judging by the financial statements, Technonicol’s business in Russia has only benefited from the sanctions, because after the withdrawal of Western suppliers of building materials from the market, the company’s net profit increased by 55 times in 2022.

Kolesnikov and Rybakov are only sanctioned by Ukraine, and their international business in Belarus, Lithuania, Italy, Poland and the UK continues to operate, albeit with some difficulties.

Kolesnikov and Rybakov did not speak out about the war. Only at the very beginning of the invasion, Rybakov posted a video on his Youtube channel in which he noted that “the point of no return has been passed and it will be a big story that will affect the lives of millions of people.” The video was later deleted.