Who Will Own Russia After War

In March 2026, the new Prosecutor General Alexander Gutsan, reporting to Putin at an expanded collegium, delivered the figure with the composure of an accountant: "In total, pursuant to our claims, property worth more than four trillion rubles has been transferred to the state." Two years earlier, in March 2024, his predecessor Igor Krasnov reported one trillion. In March 2025 — already 2.4 trillion. The doubling pace is annual. If this trajectory holds, by 2030 there may be nothing left in private hands worth confiscating.

Independent assessments are even starker. The analytical centre Cedar calculated that the total value of assets against which the Prosecutor General's Office filed seizure claims from early 2022 through end of 2025 exceeds 4.99 trillion rubles — 53.5 billion euros. Law firm NSP documented 102 nationalization cases worth 3.9 trillion rubles, with the caveat that the figure excludes 16 assets placed under temporary management by the Federal Property Agency through presidential decrees — assets whose value the lawyers could not determine. Those will add several more trillion. According to Cedar, nationalization, attempted nationalization, or forced asset sales at non-market prices have struck 30 of 311 participants in Russia's Forbes list — every tenth billionaire in the country — and 17 of them ranked among the 100 richest individuals of the past decade. The scale of the purge: 2–3% of GDP in three years. This is not pickpocketing. This is redrawing the economic map of a country.

Five Grounds to Take Everything

The Prosecutor General's Office — not the courts, not the government — is the primary instrument of redistribution. Prosecutors file the claims; courts merely rubber-stamp them. Fewer than one percent of cases are decided in favour of former owners. The Metafrax case: four hours of hearings on a privatization spanning three decades. Makfa: 150 volumes reviewed in three days behind closed doors. ChEMK: three weeks from claim to ruling. Lawyers at NSP systematized five legal grounds used to seize businesses. Each is elastic enough to swallow almost anything.

The first: the law on strategic enterprises — 16 assets worth 1.5 trillion rubles. "Foreign investor" status now applies to a Russian citizen who holds a residency permit in Turkey or the UAE. It was on this basis that the campaign's biggest prize was taken — Domodedovo Airport, valued at one trillion rubles. The second: anti-corruption legislation — 26 assets worth 1.1 trillion. Former deputies and officials who, in the Prosecutor General's view, continued managing businesses in violation of conflict-of-interest rules. Among them: Rolf car dealership owned by Sergei Petrov, FESCO controlled by Ziyavudin Magomedov, the Makfa pasta empire linked to ex-governor Yurevich. The third: "ineffective management" — 13 assets worth 600 billion rubles. The Prosecutor General's Office is neither auditor nor shareholder, but claims the authority to determine the inefficiency of someone else's management. On this basis, Wintershall Dea's stakes in Russian gas projects worth $5.3 billion were stripped away. The fourth: "unlawful" 1990s privatization — 23 assets worth 400 billion. In October 2024, the Constitutional Court effectively abolished statutes of limitation, placing every privatization deal since 1991 in the crosshairs. The fifth: extremism — 8 assets, the largest being KDV Group owner Denis Shtengelov's confectionery empire worth half a trillion rubles. Companies are declared instruments of extremism but, contrary to what the law on extremist activity actually requires, are not liquidated — they are transferred to the state, because liquidation is bad for business.

Airport at Half Price, Pasta for the General

Behind the abstract trillions stand concrete people, concrete schemes, and concrete beneficiaries. The Domodedovo story is textbook. Dmitry Kamenev and Valery Kogan built the airport from the ground up in the early 1990s, turning it into the country's largest hub. In January 2025, the Prosecutor General filed the claim: Kamenev held residency in Turkey and the UAE, Kogan had Israeli residency — meaning foreigners controlled a strategic object. In June, the court transferred 100% of shares to the state with immediate effect. On January 20, 2026, the first auction failed — the only bidder, a Chechen-registered sole trader, was disqualified. On January 29, in a Dutch auction with descending price, Domodedovo was purchased for 66.1 billion rubles by LLC Perspektiva — a company with registered capital of ten thousand rubles, incorporated six weeks before the auction. Perspektiva is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sheremetyevo Airport, whose private shareholders include Arkady Rotenberg (34.8% through TPS Avia Holding) and Alexander Ponomarenko alongside Alexander Skorobogatko. An airport valued at one trillion rubles passed to Putin's childhood judo partner for six percent of its worth. Rotenberg, naturally, had publicly denied any interest in the purchase just weeks earlier.

Rolf — Russia's largest car dealership — took a different route. Its founder Sergei Petrov served as a State Duma deputy for A Just Russia and allowed himself to criticize the authorities. In 2019, criminal proceedings were opened against him; Petrov left for Austria. In December 2023, Putin signed a decree transferring Rolf to the Federal Property Agency — the first time a mechanism designed for foreign assets was applied to a Russian-owned business. In February 2024, the court nationalized all shares. By September, the new owner was named openly: Umar Kremlev, head of the unrecognized International Boxing Association, social media personality, and sports functionary. An investigation by the outlet Proekt established that the seizure was personally lobbied by Alexei Rubezhnoy, chief of the Presidential Security Service, who also pushed Kremlev's candidacy. A company with annual revenues of 324 billion rubles passed from a dissident entrepreneur to a man from the presidential guard.

The KDV confectionery group — the Yashkino and Kirieshki brands, Babkiny Semechki — was taken on the most exotic grounds of all. In October 2025, Moscow's Tverskoy Court recognized Denis Shtengelov and his father Nikolai — a Ukrainian citizen — as an "extremist organization" and confiscated 58 companies worth 497 billion rubles: 14 factories, 40 brands, and 1,300 Yarche! retail stores. The charge: the father financed Ukrainian military units; the son transferred 21 billion rubles abroad. The largest single-instance confiscation in the entire campaign. The asset now sits on the Federal Property Agency's books — too large a prize to hand to a single beneficiary without provoking a scandal.

Friends Get Everything, Enemies Get the Law

The formula Putin articulated back in 2011 at a meeting with business leaders — "For our own people — everything; for the others — the law" — has become the master principle of the redistribution. Follow where the confiscated assets actually go, and the picture clarifies immediately.

Arkady Rotenberg, through his Roskhim holding, has assembled a collection of chemical enterprises: Metafrax (purchased for 15 billion against a market valuation of 116 billion — an eight-fold discount), the Bashkir Soda Company, Kuchuksulfat, Volzhsky Orgsintez, Dalnegorsk Mining. Plus Domodedovo. Plus, according to The Insider, Rotenberg is the ultimate beneficiary of Rosirtprom, concealed behind a chain of shell companies. Total value of received assets: hundreds of billions of rubles.

Yuri Kovalchuk and the structures of Bank Rossiya rode the gas windfall: through the SOGAZ insurance company — whose shareholders include Kovalchuk and Putin's cousin Mikhail Shelomov — they acquired Wintershall Dea's 35% stake and OMV's 25% stake in Severneftegazprom, the operator of the South Russian gas field. Earlier, Kovalchuk's entities purchased the legendary Crimean Massandra winery for 5.3 billion rubles — a fraction of the vineyards' actual worth. The total value of gas assets flowing into the Kovalchuk orbit: approximately 560 billion rubles.

The Patrushev family — through Rosselhozbank and its subsidiary RSHB-Finance — received control of Makfa, which commands more than 20% of Russia's pasta market. The Patrushevs compete with VTB and the Kovalchuks for agro-industrial assets across southern Russia. Sergei Chemezov and Rostec are targeting ChEMK and the entire Ural ferroalloy complex — 80% of Russia's market. Gennady Timchenko operates through his son-in-law Gleb Frank: his Bering Sea Crab company is harvesting confiscated crabbing quotas. Rosatom absorbed FESCO — a transport group valued at 233 billion rubles — under a presidential decree, free of charge, as a property contribution from the Russian Federation. And Danone Russia, according to The Bell, ended up with a nephew of Ramzan Kadyrov.

Voucher Auctions in Reverse

The parallel with 1990s privatization is obvious — and analysts draw it without embarrassment. Andrei Yakovlev of Harvard's Davis Center explicitly calls the process "loans-for-shares 2.0": in 1995, key assets were handed to loyal businessmen for pennies in order to bind them to the Yeltsin regime ahead of the 1996 election. The logic today is identical, but operates in two stages — first confiscate from the "unreliable," then sell to "ours" at a scandalous discount. "If the regime collapses, the new owner loses the asset," Yakovlev explains. "So he has every reason to hold the regime together to the bitter end." The Kremlin is not merely creating a new elite — it is creating an elite shackled to itself by chains of complicity.

The Re:Russia analytical centre headed by Kirill Rogov called deprivatization "a national project for elite reformatting and preparation for a power transition" — the most-discussed topic in Russian business circles and the country's most consequential political development. Chatham House flagged as early as 2023: "Putin is using deprivatisation to create a new generation of loyal oligarchs." Sergei Guriev had warned years earlier that the illegitimacy of 1990s privatization created a vicious cycle in which any politician could weaponize dubious ownership origins as a tool of expropriation. The prophecy has been fulfilled with grim precision.

Yet the differences from the 1990s are real. Then, assets moved from the state to private hands. Now they move from private hands back to the state — and onward to new private hands. Then the mechanism was vouchers and rigged auctions. Now it is prosecutor's writs and presidential decrees. Then the beneficiaries were young adventurists — Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Potanin. Now it is childhood friends, Ozero cooperative partners, children and sons-in-law of security service veterans. And then the entire 1995 loans-for-shares scheme brought the federal budget a paltry $700 million. Now, from four trillion rubles confiscated, the federal budget received just over 100 billion rubles — 2.5%. The remaining 97.5% dissolved into state corporations and the pockets of "friends."

Krasnov Left. The Machine Stayed.

The architect of the campaign, Igor Krasnov, was promoted in September 2025 to chair the Supreme Court. The man who organized the seizure of trillions now presides over the court that hears cassation appeals from those stripped of their assets. A closed loop. His replacement, Alexander Gutsan — classmate of Medvedev at Leningrad State University's law faculty, career prosecutor, eleven years as deputy prosecutor general — told TASS in December that "populism and artificial inflation of statistics" are unacceptable, a hint at possible moderation. But the numbers say otherwise: throughout 2025, the Prosecutor General's Office drove property redistribution worth 2% of GDP. The conveyor runs without interruption regardless of the name on the door.

Putin publicly denied deprivatization twice — in September 2023 at the Eastern Economic Forum and in March 2024 at the Prosecutor General's collegium. But in April 2024, at the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs congress, something revealing happened. Putin assured the business community that privatization would not be revisited. RSPP chairman Shokhin quipped: "I'm surprised there's no applause." Putin replied: "I can tell you why there's no applause. Because the actions of law enforcement, despite our conversations, continue." By 2025 and 2026, he stopped denying it at all. Why bother refuting the obvious?

A Country Divided Twice

Economist Boris Grozovsky of the Wilson Center put the mechanism simply: "Siluanov faces enormous budget difficulties for 2025 and beyond, and two or three trillion a year would help him enormously." Military spending reached 13.5 trillion rubles in 2025. The National Wealth Fund has contracted by a factor of 2.5 since the war began. The budget deficit by July 2025 hit 4.9 trillion rubles. Deprivatization is not only a tool of political consolidation — it is a desperate attempt to patch holes in a treasury bled dry by war and sanctions. The patching, however, is not going well: of the four trillion seized, the budget captures crumbs, while the lion's share flows to those for whom the entire operation was designed.

Russia is undergoing the largest property redistribution since the "wild nineties" — and may well be surpassing it in scale. The country is not so much nationalizing as redistribution: from the insufficiently loyal to the absolutely loyal. Formally through the courts; in practice through a phone call. Formally into state coffers; in practice into the accounts of a dozen families. Andrei Yakovlev maps three possible scenarios: North Korean (the state absorbs everything), Belarusian (moderate control), or revolutionary (social eruption, as in 1917). Which one prevails depends on how quickly the system consumes itself. Because when the loyal proprietors too begin to be tested for loyalty — and the signals are already there — the flywheel will not stop. It will simply grind through the next circle.