4 July, 21:05
Some men are supposed to be untouchable. Arkady Rotenberg is one of them. A childhood friend of putin, a sparring partner on the judo mat since the Leningrad years, a man who was handed not the odd contract but entire industries.
It is hard to think of anyone who stood closer to the body of the first man in the state. And yet it is precisely around him that the ring is now tightening. Not around him personally, of course, he will stay a free man, but around everyone within reach. One by one his people are being led away in handcuffs, and he watches it happen and can do nothing.
What does this tell us? That in the kremlin system there are no longer any figures too big to touch. If the entourage of a childhood friend can be gutted, then nothing can be guaranteed to anyone. putin has started making war on his own, and his own, if you look closely, are no longer there.
Three Days That Brought Down an Empire
Moscow's Khoroshevsky court arrested Arkady Rotenberg's "right hand," Konstantin Makhov. The charge is the theft of 800 million rubles during his time as deputy head of rosaviatsiya, russia's federal air transport agency. The money had been allocated for a new runway at Domodedovo. On the morning of the same day, and in the same case, they arrested the former head of rosaviatsiya, Alexander Neradko.
The Neradko story alone reads like a novel. Barely three days had passed since the funeral of Sergei Ivanov before the man Ivanov had protected for years was sent to pre-trial detention. They had been friends to the end, they met, and Neradko attended the closed farewell ceremony. Three days later they came for him. Another of Neradko's close friends is the head of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin, but in matters like this Naryshkin is no help, no one can shield you here.
Neradko ran rosaviatsiya for more than twenty years. At one point he somehow kept his chair even as nine separate criminal cases were opened against his inner circle all at once. Friendship with Ivanov kept him both in office and out of a cell. He only fell after the crash of Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane. He behaved too nervously then, floating his own versions, insisting it was not a bomb but an ordinary accident, then drinking himself into a stupor and running his mouth. As long as Ivanov was alive, it all held together. Ivanov was buried, and the margin of safety vanished with him.
But the real target in the 800-million case is not Neradko at all. The real target is his former deputy, now Rotenberg's "right hand," Konstantin Makhov. Neradko is closer to a demonstrative victim, a link in the chain. The actual addressee of the message is sitting in the same detention block.
The "Rotenberg Team" as a Cartel
Joining Arkady Rotenberg's team is roughly like joining a drug cartel. In a cartel everyone is tied, one way or another, to the drug trade. In the Rotenberg team everyone is tied, one way or another, to the theft of state funds. And from there the script runs one of two ways.
Either at some point "don Arkady" himself summons you and says, more or less: I have established that you stole a billion, and only 500 million reached me, so where is the rest? At that moment the consigliere steps in, Andrei Khorev, former deputy chief of the economic security department of the interior ministry, now working inside Rotenberg's structures. Khorev fits the offender with a "colombian necktie," meaning he organizes a criminal case with a long sentence (assuming the man does not manage to flee first) and the seizure of every asset.
Or putin grows displeased with Rotenberg himself. And lately he is displeased constantly, because vast budget money dissolves instantly inside the oligarch's structures while results have long since stopped appearing. Then someone from Arkady Rotenberg's circle goes behind bars, while the man himself remains untouchable.
It happened this way with Chuyan, the former head of the federal alcohol market regulator. It happened with Taicher, the former owner of Transfin-M and SG-Trans. Now Kostyuk is under the gun, the deputy transport minister and head of the federal road agency, and it looks like they will come for him too. Makhov was taken by exactly the same logic.
A Port That Never Became a Port
While the Makhov case was unfolding, moscow arrested another man from the same batch. Stanislav Multakh, general director of the Lavna Sea Trade Port and director of the investment-projects office at GTLK. The charge is embezzlement on an especially large scale, article 160 of the criminal code. Multakh, too, comes from Arkady Rotenberg's team.
Lavna was supposed to become one of the largest hubs for exporting russian coal. The general contractors were Rotenberg structures, TEK Mosenergo and NPS Engineering. The port was headed by Multakh, who had previously worked in the structures of former transport minister Maxim Sokolov, another Rotenberg man. The rest of the port's leadership, too, is made up entirely of people who came out of companies tied to the oligarch. By 2025 the owner of 95 percent of the port was CRPI, the Center for the Development of Port Infrastructure, behind which stands Boris Gutsov, yet another man from the same team. The remaining 5 percent belongs to the state-owned GTLK.
Lavna never became the largest anything. Coal transshipment volumes keep falling. In March 2025 putin personally gave the order, at the International Arctic Forum, to launch coal transshipment at the port, and even that did not save it: in the first quarter of 2026, transshipment fell 39 percent against the 2025 level. There you have the family's entire style in a single storyline, not an industry but the construction shell around it, the kind you can quietly walk out of once the money is spent.
Domodedovo, Vnukovo, and the Vanished "Resource"
The most telling thing about the Domodedovo runway case is its mirror image from the past. Makhov was taken for stealing 800 million allocated for a new runway at Domodedovo. But back in 2018, the moscow interregional investigative directorate for transport had already opened a case into the large-scale theft of funds during the reconstruction of Vnukovo airport, including that airport's runway. The main figures then were the top managers of OOO Transstroymekhanizatsiya and PAO Mostotrest. Both structures belonged, at the time, to Arkady Rotenberg.
Transstroymekhanizatsiya, which, incidentally, also built the runways at Sheremetyevo, is a subsidiary of Mostotrest, which in its day received a state contract worth 7.451 billion rubles for the reconstruction of Vnukovo. In the course of the investigation, documents surfaced showing that Mostotrest controlled a firm called Tristan, which hauled construction waste out of the capital on moscow city-government money, and there too enormous thefts turned up. The materials were passed to the main investigative directorate of the moscow police, a separate case was opened, and searches and seizures were carried out at Mostotrest and a number of other Rotenberg organizations.
How did it end? The investigators, with profuse apologies, returned every seized document to Mostotrest. The "Rotenberg resource" had worked. That was the very resource that made the oligarch invulnerable. Now there is no such resource. The gap between 2018 and today is the whole story of where the untouchability went.
Raids on the Bank and a Whole Cluster of Titles
Makhov was not the only one taken in this operation. Searches were carried out on a number of top managers of SMP-Bank, after which they were hauled in for questioning. The bank, naturally, also belongs to Arkady Rotenberg. One of Makhov's deputies was detained as well.
And Makhov himself is not simply a "right hand," he is a one-man holding company. Chairman of the board of directors of OOO RusKhimAlyans, general director of the Ust-Luga special economic zone management company, of the National Gas Group, of the Baltic Chemical Complex, and so on, and so on. When a man like that is taken into detention, it is not the arrest of a single official, it is a blow to an entire layer of the Rotenberg economy.
The Shoigu Path
It looks as though putin has decided to send Rotenberg down the Shoigu route. The oligarch will stay free, but the public humiliation, the stripping of influence, and the cutting-off from big money are beginning. Like Shoigu, Rotenberg watches as his placemen, trusted people, and team members leave for detention one after another, and he can do nothing about it. The only question is how long it lasts. With Shoigu the punishment began in 2024 and drags on to this day.
And Rotenberg was handed whole industries, and he ran into the ground everything that could be run into the ground. In the alcohol projects, total catastrophe. He was given RZD, the railways, and there is nothing there now but ruins. Every project with Gazprom ended in failure. Road construction is in a dreadful state. And for all of this the Rotenberg structures received astronomical sums, which were plainly plundered.
The financial picture of the empire today reads like a bankruptcy chronicle. It emerged only recently that nearly 20,000 employees and workers at one of the oligarch's core assets, that same Transstroymekhanizatsiya, were either paid no wages at all or paid up to 60 percent of what they were owed. And no prospects are being painted for them, quite the opposite, the hints are that it will only get worse. The exact same situation holds with the largest RZD contractors under Rotenberg's control: wages go unpaid, subcontractors receive nothing.
The Door That Closed
Arkady Rotenberg tried to reach putin, who has lately simply stopped taking his calls. The oligarch even came in from the flank, through Ilgam Ragimov, one of the president's closest friends, a man who still has access to the body. Ragimov made it clear the task was barely solvable. And then they came for Makhov.
That, in essence, is the whole signal. When the first man's childhood friend cannot secure so much as a phone call while his people are hauled off in batches, this is not a private matter about a runway at Domodedovo. It is about the fact that in the system putin built to fit himself, not a single fireproof figure remains. He is alone now, and he is methodically taking apart, piece by piece, the very people he raised up. Almost no one stood closer to him than Rotenberg. Which makes it all the more telling how easily the men around him are being cut down.