ECONOMICS
Nominally, Russian billionaires have never been as wealthy as they are in 2025. However, adjusted for inflation, their fortunes are significantly lower than they were before the war and dramatically smaller than in 2008. What’s more, although the number of dollar-denominated billionaires in Russia has reached a new high, the average size of their fortunes in real terms has noticeably declined. Real incomes of ordinary Russians are also falling, and the shrinking pool of resources in the economy is intensifying competition for them. War and sanctions have led to extremely uneven enrichment among groups within the Russian elite, and this is just the beginning of a major redistribution.
How the billionaires suffered
Russian billionaires have never been as rich as they are in 2025, according to a new Forbes estimate. The magazine put their combined wealth at a record $625.5 billion — the previous peak, in 2021, was $606 billion. Back then, in a brief lull between the pandemic and the war, the total assets of Russians on the Forbes list surpassed their pre-crisis 2008 level — $531.7 billion — for the first time. From the viewpoint of Russian billionaires, there was a short-lived surge in 2021 following a 12-year stagnation from 2009 to 2020, then another three years of stagnation from 2022 to 2024. Now though, there has been a new upturn, at least nominally.
In the 17 years since 2008, the U.S. consumer price index has risen 1.5 times, with about half of that increase occurring since the pandemic. Measured in 2008 dollars, Russian oligarchs are still getting poorer: in February 2021 their real wealth stood at $489 billion, while in February 2025 it was just $416 billion. That’s only 78% of what it was at its peak in the bygone days of the 2000s.
A closer look at the dynamics of billionaire fortunes reveals that in 2022, one-third of Russian billionaires dropped out of the club altogether, with the Forbes list shrinking from 123 to 88 people. However, fortunes recently began to grow again, and by 2025 the number of billionaires had risen to 146. Since 2023, the combined wealth of these people has increased in both nominal and real terms.
Still, the net worth of a typical Russian billionaire has fallen. In 2008 dollars, the average wealth of a Russian on the list was $4.83 billion, and in 2021 it was still $3.98 billion, but by 2025 it had dropped to just $2.85 billion. Today, the real assets of the average Russian billionaire amount to 72% of what they held before the war and 59% of the 2008 level.
Nominally, however, a “mid-tier” billionaire is slightly wealthier now than they were three years ago. Back then, Forbes valued their fortune at $4 billion, compared to $4.3 billion today. Examples of such “mid-tier” billionaires, who rank between 760th and 900th on the global list, include:
- Former Alfa-Bank board member Petr Aven ($4.7 billion, 33rd place in Russia);
- Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim ($4.6 billion, 34th place);
- Igor Kesaev, co-owner of retail holding Mercury Retail ($4.5 billion, 35th place);
- Ivan Tavrin, founder of Kismet Capital Group, owner of Avito ($4.4 billion, 36th place; estimate made prior to the 50% sale);
- Oleg Deripaska, co-owner of En+ Group, including Rusal ($4.1 billion, 37th place);
- Yegor Kulykov, who holds stakes in the producers of Arbidol and Pentalgin ($4.1 billion, 38th place).
Tatyana Kim has fared the worst among them. The Wildberries founder is now three times poorer than she was before the war. In 2022 her fortune shrank from $13 billion to $2.1 billion; rebounded in 2023 to around $8 billion, then fell back to its current $4.6 billion. This reflects an initial shock, followed by adaptation to new conditions, and then losses caused by the growing burden of the war.
Notably, Wildberries’ turnover has continued to soar during the war years: in 2024, its sales were more than four times higher than in 2021, surpassing those of X5 Retail. According to Forbes, Kim remains the richest woman in Russia and continues to live in the Moscow region. She has not been subject to international sanctions apart from those imposed by Poland.
Petr Aven has more or less held on to what he had, retaining 89% of his 2021 wealth. Aven and the Russian companies in which he is a major shareholder are under international sanctions, but the billionaire himself still resides in NATO member Latvia. Clearly, his longstanding ties to Putin are still working in the favor of Russia’s former Minister of Foreign Economic Relations.
Oleg Deripaska is actually 8% richer than he was before the war, but he still lags far behind his position of 2008, when the Rusal founder was the richest person in Russia and ranked ninth on the global Forbes list. In 2022, Deripaska lost half his fortune, but it has grown each year since, and by 2025 it has exceeded the prewar level.
The billionaire was sanctioned by the United States in 2018 as a “wallet” of the Putin regime, and after the 2022 invasion, European countries also imposed sanctions, even seizing his assets. At the same time, Deripaska repeatedly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and likely lost his luxury property in Sochi because of it.
Igor Kesaev’s fortune has grown even faster. He owns businesses involved in cigarette sales and machine gun manufacturing. In 2022, his wealth fell from $4 billion to $2.6 billion, but by 2023 it had surpassed its prewar levels, eventually reaching $5.5 billion. Although Kesaev’s net worth has declined over the past year, it still remains 13% higher than in 2021. That said, these figures are in nominal dollars, and when adjusted for the depreciation of the dollar, it becomes clear that both Deripaska and Kesaev (who is also under international sanctions and lives in Moscow) have, in fact, become poorer due to the war.
A clear winner is Yegor Kulykov, co-owner of pharmaceutical companies including Generium, one of the producers of the Sputnik V vaccine. According to Forbes, Kulykov currently lives in Switzerland, while his more public and wealthier partner, Viktor Kharitonin, remains in Moscow. Kulykov had not appeared on the Forbes list before 2022, but between 2022 and 2024 he managed to double his fortune before it plateaued over the past year.
Finally, the biggest winner of the war years was Ivan Tavrin, a former top executive at mobile operator Megafon and a major investor in Avito and HeadHunter. Tavrin entered the billionaire list in 2024 and had become another $2 billion richer by the time the 2025 ranking was published. However, last month it was reported that he had sold a 50% stake in Avito to Rosselkhozbank. Although Tavrin was named the top beneficiary of the war by Bloomberg in 2023, that assessment may change following the move. (Rosselkhozbank served as the lender in the 2022 purchase of the company from South African holding Naspers.)
How Russia’s non-billionaires fared
According to official statistics, the majority of Russians have their incomes rise since the start of the war. A Central Bank survey covering 2022–2024 found that 65% of households gained, 26% lost out, and 9% saw no change. The survey was conducted among the population as a whole, with a median reported income of roughly 30,000 rubles per person.
In nominal terms, incomes rose across all population groups, but the increases were uneven. The poorest decile saw the biggest jump, rising by 33% from an average monthly income of 9,000 rubles ($109) to one of 12,000 rubles ($146). Middle-income groups saw more modest gains of around 25%.
However, if one makes the fairly safe assumption that actual inflation in the country is higher than what Rosstat reports and instead uses figures from the ROMIR center, it turns out that real incomes fell across the board. ROMIR publishes the so-called FMCG deflator, which shows that consumer prices rose by 31.5% in 2022, and by another 20.8% in 2023. Those households that had an income of 9,000 rubles per person before the war and were supposedly “helped” by the war with an increase to 12,000 rubles are now, when measured in early 2022 rubles, effectively receiving only 7,500. And even adjusting these numbers to account for the fact that households also pay for services, which rose in price less rapidly than goods, the picture remains far from optimistic.
Who lost out the most
Contrary to the stereotype that many in Russia profit from war, the reality is that, aside from a very narrow group, the war is unprofitable for the overwhelming majority. While many foreigners have been unable to withdraw capital, Russian oligarchs and ruble billionaires have faced entirely unfamiliar obstacles: it turned out to be difficult not only to leave Russia but also to legalize their status abroad. In addition, a massive redistribution of assets has taken place. Over the past two years, 411 companies with assets totaling 2.6 trillion rubles have been nationalized ($31.6 billion). Some companies have found new owners who could be considered beneficiaries of the war, but they remain outnumbered by those who lost out: revenue from privatization amounted to only 132 billion rubles ($1.6 billion).
The economy has not become one of forced mobilization, instead remaining mostly market-driven. Fiscal policy has stayed relatively conservative, and as a result, there has been no significant inflationary pressure from budget deficits. Prices are rising at about the same rate as in the early Putin years, when inflation typically ran at 10–15%.
At the same time, the population has lost access to preferential mortgages, and the slowdown in construction threatens to make housing even less affordable. Housing completions in apartment buildings fell by 12% in 2024 compared to 2023, and in the first quarter of 2025 the figure was 17% lower than in the same period of 2024. The rapid growth of real wages is slowing, according to Rosstat, and household consumption has entered a phase of stagnation.
Thus, the war, sanctions, and retaliatory regulations have brought significant losses and serious challenges for different segments of Russian society. For most of the population, the main blows came in the form of slowed growth in real incomes and living standards due to inflation, along with reduced access to a range of foreign goods and services. For members of the business elite, the war resulted in large-scale property losses due to nationalization and significant restrictions on their usual ability to manage capital abroad. At the same time, for a small segment of this same elite, the redistribution of assets has become a source of unprecedented enrichment.
Overall, the consequences of the war have not taken the form of uniform impoverishment or enrichment, but rather a transformation and redivision within the economy as a whole — deepening social stratification through specific mechanisms of loss and gain for each social group. Going forward, experts warn, polarization will intensify between those who profited from the war and those who have not.