By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-06-02

Russia's billionaire class is thriving. While ordinary Russians face housing costs pushed out of reach by record interest rates and soldiers die at the front, the country's wealthiest 155 people have accumulated $697 billion in combined net worth -- roughly 1.3 times the entire federal budget.

The numbers are striking in their scale. Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the country had 88 dollar billionaires. By early 2026, that figure had nearly doubled, making Russia a world leader not just in wealth concentration but in the speed of that concentration during wartime.

Fortunes built on ice

The 2026 Forbes Russia billionaires list shows that Arctic extraction has been the primary engine of this boom. Steel, copper, nickel and liquefied natural gas operations on the Kola and Taymyr peninsulas have made household names out of a handful of industrial barons.

Steel tycoon Alexey Mordashov leads the ranking with a net worth of $37 billion -- the first Russian billionaire to cross the $30 billion threshold. Vladimir Potanin added $5.5 billion in a single year, a pace of more than $600,000 per hour.

Companies including Severstal, Norilsk Nickel, Lukoil and Novatek continue to dominate the Arctic landscape, managing operations from iron-ore mining and copper smelting to massive liquefied natural gas projects. Their footprint comes at a cost: these operations remain the Arctic's primary sources of heavy metal pollution and are regularly targeted by Western sanctions and strategic drone strikes.

To work around international restrictions, some billionaires are moving operations eastward. Potanin has announced plans to relocate copper smelting to China. Others are routing exports through the Northern Sea Route.

The 'Kremlin kids' dividend

The war economy has created a secondary beneficiary class: the children of senior officials, who turned emergency financial policy into personal profit.

The Central Bank raised interest rates to a record 20% to stabilize the ruble. For ordinary Russians, the move made mortgages unaffordable. For the 735 offspring of senior officials who had repatriated capital from the West to avoid sanctions, it functioned as a windfall. Together, they earned more than 10 billion RUB ($108 million) in interest income alone.

The most prominent examples: 36-year-old Nikolai Tkachev, whose deposits grew 23-fold and generated more than 1 billion RUB in interest; and 23-year-old Varvara Manturova, who collected 585 million RUB while acquiring stakes in major industrial holdings.

Others, including Pavel Yakushev and Gulnara Kerimova, moved to neutral jurisdictions such as the United Arab Emirates while keeping their capital in high-yield Russian accounts. Across this cohort, interest payments surged 578% since 2021.

Women remain a marginal presence at the top of Russia's wealth hierarchy. Only five of the 155 billionaires on the 2026 Forbes list are women. They include Tatyana Kim, founder of e-commerce giant Wildberries and currently Russia's wealthiest woman, and Elena Baturina, founder of Inteco, who held that title for many years.

A mobile elite

Early predictions that sanctions would trap Russia's wealthy within their own borders have not materialized. These 155 billionaires hold passports or significant assets in at least 30 countries.

A study by Russia.Post found that roughly 60% of sanctioned billionaires intensified their activities abroad after 2022. Elena Shvetsova of the Institute for Social Policy at Moscow's Higher School of Economics noted that before 2022, between 50% and 66% of Russian billionaire wealth was held in foreign jurisdictions. That exposure forced rapid tactical adjustments when sanctions hit, with individuals tailoring their responses based on asset liquidity and the specific nature of the restrictions against them, she said.

The wealth concentration underlying all of this is historically extreme. According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2025, the top 1% of Russians own 47% of all national wealth; the top 10% control 75%. The report placed Russia alongside Brazil and South Africa at the apex of global inequality.

Tipping point ahead?

War dividends for Russia's ruling class have been substantial, driven by high commodity prices and the opportunity to acquire exiting Western assets at discounts of up to 60%.

Signs of strain are emerging, however. Sustained infrastructure strikes and tightening secondary sanctions are beginning to squeeze the oil sector. Defense spending now accounts for nearly 38% of federal budget outlays in 2026. As fiscal pressure builds, analysts suggest the government may soon be forced to extract revenue from the ultra-rich to sustain the war effort.

For now, Russia's billionaire class is engaged in a delicate balancing act: preserving fortunes built during a conflict that increasingly threatens the very system they depend on.