Concerning stuff!
When will the lethargic, apathetic Russian Slav(e)s/Serfs finally get rid of their last tsar, the megalomaniac, warmonger and war criminal Putin the Terrible! He is an ugly remnant of the Cold War and a former KGB agent. He is a wannabe Stalin. Please Russian people make the world a better, more peaceful place again! How many more young Russian men will be killed or maimed before you act!
"During the war with Ukraine, the number of billionaires in Russia has reached an all-time high. But in the 25 years Vladimir Putin has been in power, Russia's rich and powerful - known as oligarchs - have lost almost all their political influence.
All this is good news for the Russian president. Western sanctions have failed to turn the uber-rich into his opponents, and his carrot-and-stick policies have turned them into silent backers.
Former banking billionaire Oleg Tinkov knows exactly how the sticks work.
The day after he criticised the war as "crazy" in an Instagram post, his executives were contacted by the Kremlin. They were told his Tinkoff Bank, Russia's second-largest at the time, would be nationalised unless all ties to its founder were cut. ...
Within a week, a company linked to Vladimir Potanin - currently Russia's fifth-richest businessman, who supplies nickel for fighter jet engines - announced that it was buying the bank. It was sold for only 3% of its true value, says Tinkov.
In the end, Tinkov lost almost $9bn (£6.5bn) of the fortune he once had, and left Russia. ...
Russia's most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, claimed to have orchestrated Putin's ascent to presidency in 2000, and years later he appealed for forgiveness for doing so: "I didn't see the future greedy tyrant and usurper in him, the man who would trample freedom and stop Russia's development," he wrote in 2012.
Berezovsky may have exaggerated his role, but Russia's oligarchs were certainly capable of pulling strings at the highest echelons of power.
A little more than a year after his apology, Berezovsky was found dead in mysterious circumstances in exile in the UK. By that time, Russian oligarchy was well and truly dead, too. ..."
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