By Galina Korol | 2026-04-16

President Vladimir Putin once made a deal with Russia's business elite: get rich, stay out of politics, and the Kremlin stays out of your way. That deal is now dead.

In late March, Putin held a closed-door meeting with Russia's largest companies following a session of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE). According to the Bell, a Russian business outlet, the agenda went beyond economics. Attendees were told the war would continue and that they were expected to help pay for it.

"They said, we're going to fight," one attendee told the Bell.

The signal came with a price tag. Senator and businessman Suleiman Kerimov pledged 100 billion RUB (roughly $1.1 billion). The proposal reportedly originated with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who had written to Putin the day before suggesting the Kremlin "shake up the business community" and introduce war bonds.

Breaking the social contract

Ivan Us, chief consultant at the Center for Foreign Policy Studies of the National Institute for Strategic Studies (NISS), said the episode marks the end of a tacit agreement that has governed Russian capitalism since the early 2000s.

"It was the model that we don't touch you, and you don't get involved in politics," Us told Kontur.

That arrangement held even through the shock of February 2022. At a meeting days after the full-scale invasion, Putin told the country's largest entrepreneurs their situation would not change. They kept working. The Kremlin kept its distance. But that era is over.

"This is no longer a one-time thing. It's about violating that very social contract," Us said. He described Russia's financial position as a zugzwang -- a chess term for a position where every available move makes things worse. "Turning to the business community is like one of those moves."

Squeezing from all sides

The numbers explain the pressure. Ihor Chalenko, director of the Center for Analysis and Strategies and a member of the National League of Centrists (NLC), said the federal budget's planned deficit was essentially wiped out in the first two months of this year. Oil exports dropped nearly 40%, opening a hole the government has no straightforward way to fill.

"On the whole, the income situation is still challenging," Chalenko told Kontur.

The strain extends beyond Moscow. Regional budgets are breaking under the weight of signing bonuses for new recruits.

"In a number of regions these payments are being discontinued because the budgets can't cope with the burden," Chalenko said.

Small and medium-sized Russian businesses have entered a deep crisis this year, according to a March report from Ukrainian foreign intelligence, with earnings falling, prices rising, wages going unpaid, and some companies shutting down entirely.

Ivan Preobrazhensky, a political scientist and expert on Central and Eastern Europe, described the dynamic bluntly. The logic governing the relationship between Russian elites and the state, he said, follows a simple principle.

"The thicker the wool, the more often you have to shear them," Preobrazhensky told Kontur. "For now the money hasn't gone anywhere outside the country — the authorities came and asked to share it."

The snuffbox effect

Forcing oligarchs to fund the war serves a political purpose beyond filling the budget, analysts say. Chalenko said the Kremlin is using "forced voluntary" contributions to spread culpability and deepen elite loyalty.

"When the business community participates in these sorts of payments, they become complicit," he said.

But Us warned that the strategy carries a historical risk the Kremlin may be underestimating. When Russian rulers have pushed their inner circle too hard, history has not been kind to them.

"In Russian history there's the concept of the snuffbox," Us said. "It refers to how Emperor Paul I was murdered by his own elites when he was struck with one after he had started to interfere too aggressively with them."

The parallel, he argued, is not abstract. From Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to Nikita Khrushchev and Yuri Andropov, pressure on elites has repeatedly prompted those elites to help the leader "exit life or power" once the threat to their own survival became critical.

What the Kremlin is offering big business in exchange for billions of rubles is, by Us's account, not a deal -- it is an implicit threat. Cooperate, and past sins from the privatizations of the 1990s remain buried. Refuse, and those files could surface at any moment.

"That's not a compromise. It's a covert threat," Us said. "It means that the old guarantees are no longer in effect."

In trying to turn oligarchs into war financiers, Putin may have turned them into something more dangerous: men with both the motive and the means to remove him.