23 May, 10:20
There is a short list of surnames in Russia that are pronounced alongside Putin's so often that they have effectively merged into a single lower-case word: kovalchuks, timchenkos, rotenbergs. Everything seems to be known about these people.
Their yachts have been counted, their villas described, their sanctions lists compiled, their biographies broken down episode by episode. And yet every time investigative reporters open the next file, a new layer is uncovered. Sometimes it is the Arctic, where the family is not supposed to be at all. Sometimes it is an airport that has just been confiscated from its previous owner. Sometimes it is the mother-in-law of the Prosecutor General, who has somehow ended up on the payroll of exactly the right company.
The Rotenberg family is not merely a group of Putin's old friends. It is a functioning mechanism for redistributing property in wartime Russia. And the scale of that mechanism deserves another look, especially in light of everything that has come out over the past eighteen months.
The Top Twenty, Not the Top Sixty
Open the Russian Forbes list and Arkady Rotenberg sits somewhere in the lower half of the first hundred. A billionaire, yes, but hardly the loudest name on the page. There are far more spectacular fortunes nearby. This, however, is an optical trap, and one the family finds quite comfortable to hide in. Because the same list also features Boris Rotenberg (Arkady's brother), Igor Rotenberg (Arkady's son), and Liliya Rotenberg. Add the four of them into a single household balance, the way Western rankings habitually do under the label "such-and-such and family", and the Rotenbergs comfortably enter the top twenty of Russia's wealthiest households. That is no longer the conversation of one well-connected businessman. That is a clan.
And this clan has one distinguishing talent. It manages to have its ears stick out in places where they are not supposed to, and to tuck them away in places where they obviously do.
An Arctic Where the Rotenbergs Are Not Present
Take a story that the team at Arctida recently brought to its logical end, together with Chronicles.Media. Port Lavna sits on the western shore of the Kola Bay, just outside Murmansk. Twenty years of construction. According to the investigation, total investment has exceeded 87 billion roubles, or roughly 1.15 billion dollars. On paper the project solves two social problems at once. It moves the coal terminal out of central Murmansk, where residents had been choking on coal dust for years, and it redirects exports toward Asian markets.
In practice, it played out differently. The coal industry collapsed under sanctions, prices fell, exporters dropped out one after another. In September 2025 Mikhail Fedyaev's SDS-Coal sold its share to the Port Infrastructure Development Centre. And control of the project, journalists discovered, ended up with one Boris Gutsov, a man with a long career in state-linked companies who suddenly had the cash for harbour infrastructure he could not plausibly have earned.
According to Kommersant and other Russian outlets, the figure standing behind Gutsov is the Rotenberg brothers themselves. The trade publication Vgudok puts it plainly: "the location is close to Rotenberg-linked structures". And Alexei Krapivin, the chief executive of Natsproyektstroy, a company firmly inside the Rotenberg perimeter, confirmed it to RBC almost as an aside: "We have prepared the coal transhipment complex at Port Lavna for opening". The ears are visible across the entire bay.
But the Rotenbergs did not, of course, enter the coal business. They entered the construction business. These are entirely different things. Coal is risk. State-financed construction is guaranteed earnings. When the private coal companies bolted, the project was kept alive through loans, subsidies, concessions, and direct injections from state structures. Does anyone need this port? Not really. So why is it being built? Because as long as it is being built, money can be made on the building. And when the construction ends and the port turns out to be a stranded asset, the family can quietly walk away. This is the signature genre of the Rotenberg group, not the industry itself, but its construction shell.
There is also a bonus. As Arctida's environmental analysts have noted, four and a half kilometres from the new terminal lies a specially protected nature reserve, which will now receive its own share of coal dust. The social problem of Murmansk has not been solved. It has merely been relocated four kilometres west, closer to the tundra.
The Ideologues of "Soft Nationalisation"
If the Arctic story illustrates how the Rotenbergs feed on state construction money, their principal role in the war economy lies elsewhere: the redistribution of other people's property. Since 2022, prosecutors' lawsuits have transferred roughly 4 trillion roubles in assets, around 53 billion dollars at current rates, away from private owners. About 500 enterprises in total. And the single largest private beneficiary of this wave has been the Roskhim holding, which is widely linked to Arkady Rotenberg.
The Financial Times and Novaya Gazeta Europa independently described the brothers as the "ideologues" of this scheme. "The concept of this kind of soft nationalisation, that is the Rotenbergs", a source close to the Russian government told the FT. And the list of what the family has scooped up is impressive: Volzhsky Orgsintez, Kuchuksulfat, Metafrax Chemicals (Europe's largest methanol producer, acquired at auction in 2024 for 25.4 billion roubles, about 340 million dollars), and most recently, in June 2025, a controlling 57.43 percent stake in Bashkir Soda Company. The very same factory whose mismanagement Putin had publicly fumed about four years earlier.
The system does not run on its own. To function it requires three cogs: the Prosecutor General's Office to file the lawsuits, the courts to rubber-stamp the rulings, and Rosimushchestvo (the federal property agency) to redistribute the assets. And it is here that the story becomes most instructive.
A Mother-in-law, a Mistress, a Daughter, a Wife
According to reporting by IStories, Vadim Yakovenko, the head of Rosimushchestvo, is a Rotenberg man through several channels at once. Yakovenko's wife is listed as deputy chief accountant of TPS Real Estate, a Rotenberg-perimeter company. The federal property chief himself has flown on Rotenberg business jets; so has his personal assistant. The conflict of interest is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.
On the prosecutorial side the loop closes even more elegantly. Igor Krasnov, the former Prosecutor General nominated in August 2025 to chair Russia's Supreme Court, turned out to have an unusually entrepreneurial mother-in-law. As Proekt revealed, in 2023 the 59-year-old Irina Komleva founded a company called Verkhaus Complex, which promptly became a contractor to subsidiaries of the Bashkir Soda Company and walked away with a five-year, 751-million-rouble contract (roughly 10 million dollars) with the Berezniki Soda Plant. Within eighteen months Verkhaus Complex had grossed about 1.4 billion roubles, or close to 19 million dollars. The circle is now complete: the mother-in-law of the Prosecutor General who oversees the seizure of assets is doing business with the very holding that ends up owning them.
This is far from the only example of what the family calls "personal services". The most famous one is known to everyone. In January 2021, a few days after the publication of Alexei Navalny's Foundation investigation "A Palace for Putin", Arkady Rotenberg unexpectedly went on camera for the Telegram channel Mash and announced that the palace at Gelendzhik was, in fact, his. He said he had bought it a few years earlier and intended to convert it into an aparthotel. At the time it looked like an isolated outburst. Today rather more is known. According to a February 2026 investigation by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the actual transaction was registered on 31 March 2021: Rotenberg acquired 100 percent of the shares in Binom, the company that holds the palace, for 800,000 roubles, or about 10,700 dollars. The construction had been financed by a separate firm, Investment Solutions. Once the work was finished, the "leftover" 6.5 billion roubles (around 87 million dollars) were transferred to Alina Kabaeva's foundation and to her rhythmic gymnastics association "Heavenly Grace". Roughly three billion roubles to one, three and a half to the other. The interest income alone from these deposits, 435 million roubles in 2024 (about 5.8 million dollars), already exceeds the entire annual budget of Russia's official Gymnastics Federation.
The same line of "services" includes the financing of an Austrian chalet for Putin's daughter Maria Vorontsova, which only became public through a documents leak, and the persistent presence of Rotenberg companies on every flagship Putin construction site: sanatoriums in occupied Crimea, the Artek pioneer camp, and above all the Crimean Bridge (built by Stroygazmontazh, which the family later sold to Gazprom in 2019 for 75 billion roubles, around one billion dollars, before re-entering the same business through Natsproyektstroy).
An Airport That Was "Of No Interest"
The logic of "soft nationalisation" is on its clearest display in the most recent case, the takeover of Domodedovo Airport. In January 2025, when the Prosecutor General's Office had only just filed its claim to confiscate the asset from Dmitry Kamenshchik, Rotenberg publicly stated that the airport was of no interest to him. A year later, on 29 January 2026, a subsidiary of Sheremetyevo International Airport called Perspektiva (incorporated in December 2025 with a registered capital of 10,000 roubles, about 130 dollars) bought Domodedovo at a "Dutch" auction for 66 billion roubles, around 880 million dollars, against an opening price of 132.2 billion roubles or 1.76 billion dollars. Sheremetyevo's co-owner Arkady Rotenberg, who holds 34.8 percent of the management company, suddenly found the asset extremely interesting after all.
By happy coincidence, Domodedovo's 70 billion rouble (roughly 930 million dollars) debt came with the purchase. The family thus acquired the country's largest airport complex by passenger traffic, Sheremetyevo plus Domodedovo combined, at half the asking price, and with a debt burden that, in all probability, the state will help to service. "The 'wartime nationalisation' in Russia is being conducted to enrich Putin's friends, not to fill the budget", as Novaya Gazeta Europa put it in a single phrase.
The "Avatar" Minister
Transport infrastructure deserves its own chapter. To control it, owning the contractors is not enough; one needs one's people in the key ministerial chairs. At Russian Railways the Rotenbergs played this hand back in the mid-2010s, when after a scandal involving the 1520 Group of Vladimir Yakunin's adviser, Oleg Belozerov was installed as president of the company. Igor Rotenberg, Arkady's son, soon became vice-president of Russian Railways, and the family acquired effective control over the state monopoly's principal subcontractors.
In the Ministry of Transport, a similar role was played by Roman Starovoit. Sources at Verstka described him point-blank as "Rotenberg's avatar". His appointment to the Transport Ministry in May 2024 was widely credited to Rotenberg patronage, the family being the chief beneficiary of road construction in Russia. On 7 July 2025 Putin signed a decree dismissing Starovoit, who was facing a criminal case over embezzlement in the construction of "dragon's teeth" fortifications in Kursk Oblast. Within hours the former minister was found dead in his car outside Moscow. The official version: suicide. The journalistic version: an inscription that, conveniently, prevented him from giving testimony against his federal patrons. Less than an hour after the death was officially announced, Prime Minister Mishustin already submitted to the State Duma the name of a new minister, Andrei Nikitin, also considered close to the Rotenbergs. The feedlot must not be allowed to cool down.
A Private Army of Football Hooligans
And one last detail in this portrait. A family that already earns billions from state construction contracts and from seized property could, in principle, confine itself to clean business. But wartime Russia plays by different rules. Hence the Rotenbergs, as IStories revealed in March 2024, decided to acquire their own private military company. It was called "Española", a volunteer battalion of Russian football hooligans that took part in the storming of Azovstal in Mariupol and fought on the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia fronts, near Vuhledar and Avdiivka. Its curator, according to IStories sources, was Viktor Shendrik, the head of security at Russian Railways and the former head of personal security for Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. Española was disbanded on 3 October 2025, having by that point been folded into the Russian Ministry of Defence as the 88th Reconnaissance-Assault Brigade.
This needs to be stated clearly. In the stories about assets, villas, and Magritte paintings (acquired through shell companies in defiance of US sanctions, a single canvas, La Poitrine, for 7.5 million dollars, on top of more than a dozen other works for a total above 90 million dollars), the Rotenberg family looks merely very rich and very close to Putin. A glossy magazine image. But behind every glossy image in Putin's Russia what ends up showing through is the same thing. A war in which these people are not spectators but participants. Not just through taxes, but directly. Through their money, their battalions, their contracts, their mothers-in-law.
What It All Means
The Rotenberg case is significant not in itself. It is a working model of how the contemporary Russian economy actually functions. The model has three layers. The outer one is state corporations and formal public procurement, prim and transparent on paper. The middle layer is a network of "friendly" contractors who absorb those budgets. The inner layer is a narrow circle of families that controls both the contractors and the regulators, the line ministers and the heads of state monopolies, as well as the foundations through which money is converted into private comforts for the first person of the state. The Rotenbergs are a textbook example of how the third layer operates through the second to feed off the first.
And when sanctions enter the conversation, one point is worth keeping in mind. Sanctions against the Rotenbergs have been in place for a long time. The Magritte canvases were acquired weeks after the United States imposed restrictions in 2014. The villas in Georgia and on the Côte d'Azur, the Austrian chalet for Putin's daughter, the flats in central Riga, the houses in Berlin and Munich, all of it functioned for years and continues to function in places. In Latvia, for example, Boris Rotenberg's wife Karina was removed from US sanctions in 2024.
The financial system has turned out to be porous. That is not a defeatist conclusion but a technical observation. The lesson it carries is straightforward: targeted sanctions against named individuals do not function effectively when those individuals control a transnational web of shell companies, proxy holders, family members holding convenient passports, and obliging auction houses. What functions are systemic restrictions, not lists. But that is a conversation for a separate piece.
This article draws on the programme "The Rich Are Hiding Too" hosted by Tatyana Felgenhauer with Ilya Shumanov (Arctida, 3DC Investigations), as well as on investigations published by IStories, Novaya Gazeta Europa, Proekt, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), Meduza, Verstka, Forbes Russia, Kommersant, The Moscow Times, the 2020 United States Senate report on Rotenberg sanctions-evasion schemes, and Arctida's reporting on Port Lavna.
Rouble figures have been converted at an indicative rate of approximately 75 RUB/USD, which broadly reflects the average exchange rate over the period covered (2021-2026).