In December 2025, the most powerful businessmen in Russia did something unusual. They wrote Putin a letter.
Not a public letter. Not a protest. A careful, formal petition, handed directly to the president at their annual year-end meeting, signed by the leadership of the RSPP – the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the closest thing Russia has to a chamber of commerce for oligarchs. The letter asked for one thing: that the state stop taking their companies.
Alexander Shokhin, the union’s chairman, explained what they wanted. “A clear formula,” he said, “that would not leave room for interpretation by the courts.” Compensation when the state seizes an asset. Limits on a legal principle called “the public interest,” which prosecutors had stretched until it could justify confiscating almost anything. Protection against retroactive seizures – the mechanism by which any privatization from the 1990s could be declared illegal in 2025 and the asset reclaimed without payment.
Putin listened. He did not respond to a single point in the letter. The next day, he met with Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov – the man who had led most of the seizures – and thanked him for his “professionalism and dedication.”
The businessmen had their answer.
The Numbers
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the scale of what the Kremlin calls “renationalization” – and what its critics call state-organized looting – has grown every year without exception.
In 2022 alone, approximately 100 companies worth a combined 1.3 trillion rubles were seized. By 2024, the annual total had risen to 157 companies worth at least 1.1 trillion rubles. By mid-2025, the cumulative value of assets taken since the invasion exceeded 4 trillion rubles – roughly 43 billion dollars.
The pace has roughly doubled every year. There is no sign it is slowing.
More than 400 companies have been identified as targets. The list includes Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, Russia’s largest car dealership chain Rolf, gold producer Yuzhuralzoloto, grain trader Rodnye Polya, food conglomerate KDV Group, warehouse operator Raven Russia, lead producer Dalpolimetall, ports in Murmansk, Kaliningrad, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal. Factories, shopping centers, medical institutions, educational facilities, energy companies, and land plots across Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Urals, and the Far East.
In the 2010s – the entire decade – there were six nationalization cases in Russia. Since 2022, there have been more than one hundred.
The Legal Machinery
The sophistication of the mechanism is worth understanding, because it is not crude. It does not look like theft from the outside. It looks like law enforcement.
The Prosecutor General files a lawsuit. The lawsuit argues that the original privatization of the company – which may have occurred in 1993, or 1997, or 2004 – was conducted illegally. Perhaps the owner at the time had connections to foreign capital. Perhaps the paperwork was imperfect. Perhaps the state did not receive fair value. The asset is therefore not legitimately private property. It must be returned to the state.
In 2024, the Constitutional Court ruled that there is no statute of limitations on corruption cases. This single decision transformed the legal landscape completely. Every privatization from the 1990s is now potentially vulnerable. Any company with any historical irregularity – and in the chaos of the post-Soviet 1990s, almost all of them had some – can be targeted at any time.
Less than 1% of these cases end in favor of the original owner.
The standard legal language in the lawsuits has become formulaic. The Domodedovo airport case accused its owners of “pursuing the aggressive policies of Western states aimed at strategically defeating Russia by damaging its economy.” The same phrase, word for word, appeared in the lawsuit against Borets, an oilfield services company. It is template language. It is not meant to describe a specific crime. It is meant to provide legal cover for a decision that has already been made.
What “Foreign” Means in 2025
The definition of “foreign ownership” – the most common justification for seizure since 2023 – has been stretched until it is almost meaningless.
Domodedovo’s owner, Dmitry Kamenshchik, is Russian. He restructured the airport’s ownership through a Cypriot holding company, as hundreds of Russian businesses did in the 1990s and 2000s when offshore structures were standard practice encouraged by the state. In 2024, anticipating trouble, he moved the ownership structure back to Russia. Prosecutors said this created a “false appearance” of Russian control, and that he was really serving Western interests. His partner Valery Kogan held Israeli citizenship. The airport was seized.
Borets, which supplies pumping equipment for 80% of Russia’s oil production, was seized on the grounds that two of its shareholders held British and Swedish citizenship – despite the fact that the company had been registered in a Russian special economic zone since 2023 specifically to avoid this problem. Prosecutors said the Russian registration was also a “false appearance.”
The message to any Russian businessman with a foreign passport, a foreign spouse, children studying abroad, or historical connections to offshore structures is unambiguous: you are not safe. Restructuring will not protect you. Compliance will not protect you. The decision to take your company will be made before the legal justification is written.
Who Gets What
This is where the story stops resembling socialism and starts resembling something older and more familiar.
The assets almost never stay with the state. They are transferred quickly – often below market value, often to people whose connection to Kremlin power structures is direct and documented.
Metafrax Chemicals, a major petrochemical company, went to Roskhim, a company linked to the Rotenberg brothers – Arkady and Boris, two of Putin’s closest associates since their childhood in St. Petersburg. Rolf, the car dealership chain formerly owned by businessman Sergei Petrov, went to Umar Kremlev, a figure with strong security service connections. Makfa, a food company, was transferred to a structure connected to the Patrushev clan – Nikolai Patrushev being a former FSB director and one of the most powerful figures in the Kremlin inner circle.
Danone’s Russian operations, seized from the French dairy giant, were managed by an appointed administrator who then privatized them – using the company’s own funds – for himself. The administrator was a nephew of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader who commands his own paramilitary force and has been one of Putin’s most loyal supporters since the beginning of the Ukraine war.
The pattern is consistent. Assets are taken from one private owner using state legal power. They are transferred to another private owner whose political loyalty is not in question. This is not a return to Soviet-style state ownership. It is a redistribution of private wealth from one group to another, with the state as the instrument.
The Pressure Below the Headlines
The seizures of Domodedovo, Rolf, and Danone get attention because the assets are large and the names are known. But the pressure extends far below the headline cases, into a gray zone of quiet coercion that does not appear in court records.
After the Danone and Baltika seizures became public, owners of foreign companies operating in Russia began receiving approaches from unfamiliar buyers. The pitch was always the same: “You see what’s happening. Sell us your business while you still have the chance. Otherwise they’ll just take it away.” The buyers were typically unknown in the Russian business world. Their names were not associated with any major companies. But their message made clear they had access to people who could make the threat real.
The offers came in at three to four times below market value.
Some owners sold. Others have been waiting, hoping the pressure will ease. The letter from the RSPP to Putin in December 2025 suggests the most powerful businessmen in Russia now understand that waiting is not a strategy.
Even the Protected Are Not Safe
For years, the conventional wisdom in Russian business was that the right connections could insulate a company from seizure. If you had a patron in the Kremlin – a silovik, a senior minister, an old friend of the president – your assets were safe.
That conventional wisdom is no longer reliable.
Domodedovo was believed to be protected by Nikolai Patrushev. Sheremetyevo Airport had Arkady Rotenberg as a shareholder with a third of the equity. Both airports faced nationalization pressure. The pattern, analysts say, reflects a shift in the internal balance of power: groups that were previously dominant are weakening, and rival factions are using the nationalization mechanism to take assets that were previously protected by now-fading patrons.
“It started as a tool for disciplining business,” one analyst observed. “It has become a tool for settling scores between competing Kremlin factions.” The businessmen being targeted in 2025 are sometimes not targets of the state as an institution. They are targets of specific individuals within the state who have decided to use the state’s legal machinery for private benefit.
This distinction matters for understanding the trajectory. A centrally directed nationalization campaign might have a logic, an endpoint, a policy purpose. A system in which powerful individuals compete to use the nationalization mechanism against each other’s allies has no natural stopping point.
What the Public Thinks
The reaction of ordinary Russians to the wave of seizures is complicated, and it illustrates one of the regime’s genuine political strengths.
The privatizations of the 1990s remain a wound in Russian public memory. The decade after the Soviet collapse was experienced by most Russians as a period of theft on a massive scale – a time when insiders used political connections to acquire state assets worth billions for prices that were essentially nothing. The oligarchs who emerged from that process were widely seen as illegitimate. The resentment has never fully healed.
When the Kremlin describes its current seizures as “correcting the injustices of the 1990s,” it is speaking to a genuine and widespread feeling. The public reaction to the nationalization of Danone or Domodedovo is not, for most ordinary Russians, horror. It is closer to indifference, or quiet satisfaction.
The problem is that the correction is not going to the people. The assets taken from the old oligarchs are going to a new set of oligarchs – better connected, more loyal, equally self-interested. But this distinction is not visible in the official narrative, and for many Russians, it may not matter. The people who are losing were rich. The people gaining are also rich. Most Russians are neither.
Small and medium business owners see it differently. They understand that the wave is moving down the wealth ladder. They are the next tier. And unlike the oligarchs of the 1990s, they have no political patron to appeal to and no offshore structure that might complicate a seizure. They are simply waiting.
The December Letter and Its Aftermath
When Shokhin handed Putin the RSPP letter in December 2025, he was not acting alone. Behind the petition were some of the most powerful names in Russian business: Vladimir Potanin of Norilsk Nickel, Alexei Mordashov of Severstal, Vladimir Lisin of NLMK, Vagit Alekperov of Lukoil. Men who have navigated Russian capitalism for three decades and survived every previous cycle of political pressure.
They wanted four things: clear rules, mandatory compensation, limits on retroactive claims, and restrictions on the “public interest” doctrine. What they got was silence from the president and a commendation for the prosecutor who had been taking their colleagues’ companies.
One analysis, published in The Moscow Times in January 2026, put it simply: “Nationalization is not a question of principle. It is a question of pace. Everything will be absorbed eventually – sector by sector, company by company, until nothing significant remains outside the state’s embrace.”
Whether that prediction is correct depends on whether Putin views the seizures as a means to an end – political loyalty, wartime revenue – or as an end in themselves. His silence in December 2025 did not answer the question. But it made clear who was asking it, and who was not.
Sources:
The Moscow Times, The Bell, iStories, Lexology / NSP Law Firm, Russia Matters / Harvard Davis Center, re-russia.net, Kommersant