Mikhail Zygar
When the war in Ukraine began, the Russian elite entered a state of shock. As the West imposed sanctions and travel bans, Russia’s rich and politically connected citizens became convinced that their previous lives were over. Battlefield losses quickly piled up, and many deemed the invasion a catastrophic mistake. “The Russia we deeply love has fallen into the hands of idiots,” Roman Trotsenko, the former head of the country’s largest shipbuilding company, told another businessperson during a phone conversation that was leaked in April 2023. “They adhere to bizarre, outdated nineteenth-century ideologies. This cannot end well. It will end in disaster.” In another leaked conversation, the famous music producer Iosif Prigozhin (not related to Yevgeny Prigozhin) called Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government “fucking criminals.” Some of the oligarchs who were abroad at the time of the invasion refused to return to Russia, including Mikhail Fridman, the owner of the country’s largest private bank.
But that was then. As 2023 wound on, elites started endorsing the war. More musicians began traveling to perform in the occupied territories. In October, Fridman returned to Moscow from London, having decided that life in the West under sanctions was unbearable and that the situation in Russia was comparatively comfortable. And there have been no new recordings of oligarchs grousing about the war. In fact, it is hard to imagine such conversations happening.
That is because Russian elites have learned to stop worrying about the conflict. They have concluded that the invasion, even if they do not support it outright, is a tolerable fact of life. As a result, the odds that they might challenge the Kremlin’s decisions—which were always slim—have gone away entirely. And instead of debating whether to support Putin, Russian elites are now discussing a different question: how the war might end.
They have different answers. Some believe that a big battlefield win would allow Putin to claim a partial victory and, therefore, pause the war. Others think that Putin will not stop until he has gone all the way to Kyiv. Some are convinced that what truly matters to Putin is confrontation with the West, not victory in Ukraine, and that he will thus attack another state in Europe irrespective of what happens with the current conflict. But a few pessimists maintain that the premise of the question itself is wrong. As they see it, the war suits Putin’s political interests, and so he will keep fighting for as long as he lives.
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