Talking with some of Russia’s richest power brokers
The government’s economic section has a special position today. Technocrats are in high demand because they are supposedly saving the economy from the endless stream of new sanctions. In actual fact, their task is hopeless. About 70% of goods manufactured in Russia have imported components, and it is impossible to replace them. There are endless meetings in the government, says a well-known financier and former high-ranking official. The director of a factory that makes Russian aircraft comes in. He’s got a problem: his engines are imported. He promises that he will build his own — if they give him money and lots of it. Then he can make it in two years — if he can make it. A financier tells me, “I haven’t met anyone [in the economic section of the federal government] who supports it [the war in Ukraine]. They all know it’s a catastrophe. But they are all trying to figure out how to comply.”
“Where can I go?” says another top-ranking bureaucrat, also horrified by what is happening, and one of the few who is not yet under sanctions. “They won’t let me leave.”
You don’t need to be a mind reader to see that they are all trying to come up with a way to get out.
“90% of them don’t like what is going on,” says a doctor in a private Moscow clinic about his patients who are government officials.
“Everyone is afraid to open their mouth — the example of Ulyukayev or Abyzov is before their eyes, so they adapt,” says a financier.
“Only the security forces knew about the start of the operation. Even [Prime Minister] Mishustin didn’t know, and neither did Elvira Nabiullina [governor of the Central Bank],” says a government official. “During that famous televised Security Council meeting, it was clear that the most informed were against it,” says a retired secret service general. He thought the officials trying, however fearfully, to say that maybe this wasn’t the right time were Mikhail Mishutin; Nikolai Patrushev (Security Council Secretary); Dmitry Kozak (chief negotiator of the Minsk agreements); and Sergei Naryshkin (head of the Foreign Intelligence Service), whom Putin publicly humiliated. [Continue reading…]