Behind closed doors at Russia’s most elite business gathering, Putin dropped all pretense: he is waging an open-ended war of conquest, he has no intention of stopping, and he expects Russia’s wealthiest men to finance the killing. No shame. No hesitation. No limit.
Let us be precise about what happened on March 26, 2026, in a closed room in Moscow.
Vladimir Putin gathered Russia’s most powerful businessmen – the country’s billionaires, industrialists, and tycoons – at the Congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. In the public portion of the meeting, he delivered a cautious, measured speech about economic prudence. Don’t get too excited about the oil windfall from the Middle East war, he told them. Markets are volatile. Be conservative.
Then the cameras left. And then the real Putin spoke.
According to multiple sources reported by The Bell and the Financial Times, Putin told the assembled oligarchs that Russia would advance ‘to the borders of Donbas’ – meaning the continuation and expansion of a war that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. And then, having announced his intention to keep killing, he passed around the collection tin. He asked Russia’s wealthiest men for ‘voluntary contributions’ to fund the war effort.
The audacity is staggering. The moral bankruptcy is complete. And the compliance of the men in that room tells you everything you need to know about what Russia has become.
The scene: a racket in a ballroom
Understand what this meeting was. The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs is not a trade association in any meaningful Western sense. It is a gathering of men who built their fortunes through the chaotic privatizations of the 1990s – men who were once powerful enough to bend governments, subvert elections, and shape national policy.
That era is over. As CEPA analyst Alexander Kolyandr noted, since the financial crisis of 2008-09, and with accelerating speed after Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russia’s billionaires ceased to be oligarchs in any meaningful sense. They bend to the Kremlin’s will. They do not shape it. The invasion of Ukraine completed their subjugation: in exchange for state help in weathering Western sanctions, they pledged absolute loyalty and public support for the war.
So when Putin entered that room on March 26, he was not meeting with independent business leaders. He was meeting with his hostages. Men who have too much to lose and nowhere to go. Men who know, with complete clarity, that refusal is not an option.
The idea to extract money from Russia’s business elite to fund a war of aggression was conceived by Igor Sechin – the head of Rosneft, a man who controls one of the world’s largest oil companies but does not own it. Sechin will not be writing a personal check. He drafted the proposal, handed it to the tsar, and the tsar called the meeting. The men who actually built things, employed people, and created wealth will pay. The regime’s functionary who came up with the scheme will not.
This is not capitalism. This is not even crony capitalism. This is a protection racket operating at a national scale, with the president of the Russian Federation as its don.
The men who said yes: profiles in capitulation
Two men reportedly pledged contributions on the spot. Their names deserve to be recorded, because history will judge them.
Suleiman Kerimov reportedly promised 100 billion rubles – approximately $1.1 billion. He is under sanctions from both the United States and Ukraine. He is a senator of the Russian Federation, meaning he holds public office. A sanctioned billionaire-senator pledging over a billion dollars to fund a war of conquest, on the spot, in a closed room, because the president asked. This is the Russia that Kerimov has chosen to be part of. Let his name be attached to that choice.
Oleg Deripaska also agreed to contribute when approached, according to reporting by The Bell and the Financial Times. He too is under U.S. and Ukrainian sanctions. Deripaska has occasionally hinted at pragmatic views on the war – but when the moment of choice arrived, in a room with Putin, he opened his wallet. Words are cheap. The check is real.
Igor Sechin did not just comply with the demand – he invented it. The day before the meeting, he sent Putin a letter proposing that oligarchs be asked to purchase war bonds. He designed the mechanism by which Russia’s private wealth would be conscripted to fund killing. Since Sechin does not own Rosneft’s shares, he himself will not pay. He constructed a system for others to bear the cost of a war he enthusiastically supports. In any country with functioning institutions, this would be a scandal. In Putin’s Russia, it earns you influence.
The budget that tells the real story
Putin’s defenders – and he has them, in Russia and abroad – will argue that voluntary contributions from billionaires are unremarkable. Wealthy people donate to national causes during wartime. Churchill asked for sacrifice. Roosevelt mobilized industry. What is different here?
Everything.
First: this is not a defensive war. Russia launched an unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The soldiers dying in Donbas are dying for Putin’s imperial ambitions – for his publicly stated belief that Ukraine is not a real country, that its people are not a real people, and that its territory belongs to Russia. The ‘contribution’ being solicited is a contribution to conquest.
Second: the financial picture reveals a regime in structural crisis. Russia’s federal budget ran a serious deficit in 2025, and in the first months of 2026, the shortfall had already approached the full-year target – and this before the oil windfall from the Iran war had fully materialized. The Finance Ministry has suspended Russia’s budget rule entirely until the summer, directing all oil and gas revenues straight to the budget rather than into reserves. The government is separately considering spending cuts of up to 10% in ‘non-sensitive’ areas – meaning everything except the military.
Russia is simultaneously swimming in oil money from the Iran war and going broke paying for its war in Ukraine. The oil boom is masking a structural catastrophe. And even with oil at $100 a barrel, Putin is passing around the collection tin. That tells you precisely how deep the hole is.
Maxim Reshetnikov, head of Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development, told the State Duma that the government does not rule out introducing a windfall tax across multiple industries. In other words: if the voluntary contributions prove insufficient, compulsion follows. The word ‘voluntary’ in Putin’s Russia means: volunteer now, or be volunteered later.
The double message: public caution, private conquest
The deliberate contrast between Putin’s public and private messages at this meeting deserves particular attention. It is not accidental. It is a technique.
In public: moderation, prudence, caution. ‘If the market swings one way today, tomorrow it could swing the other way.’ This is the message intended for foreign investors, for Western capitals still hoping for a negotiated end, for the parts of the Russian public that feel the economic pressure of the war. Responsible statesman. Cautious manager. Steady hand.
In private: conquest and demands for tribute. Russia will push to the borders of Donbas. The war continues. Pay up.
‘We will go to the end.’ Four words that should end every discussion about whether Putin is open to a genuine peace settlement, whether he can be talked down, whether quiet diplomacy might succeed where public pressure has failed. He told Russia’s most powerful men, in a room where he believed the words would not leave: we will go to the end.
This is the man that some Western voices still describe as a pragmatist who can be reasoned with. This is the man whose territorial ambitions some propose to satisfy with a negotiated partition of Ukraine. He is not a pragmatist. He is an ideologically committed imperialist who has concluded that the costs of conquest are affordable and the alternative – humiliation – is not.
The militarism that has consumed Russia
What has Putin’s militarism cost? Not in abstract geopolitical terms – in concrete, measurable human and economic terms?
Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers are dead or wounded in Ukraine – exact figures suppressed by the Kremlin, but confirmed by leaked documents, insurance data, and regional death notices. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers have been killed or wounded in a war they did not start and did not want. Over 6 million Ukrainian refugees are displaced across Europe, with millions more internally displaced. Russia’s federal budget deficit approached its full-year target in the first two months of 2026 alone. Inflation runs persistently high; the central bank’s key rate is held at historically elevated levels. Russia’s most talented young people – engineers, scientists, programmers, artists – have been fleeing the country in the hundreds of thousands since 2022, in what demographers are already calling the largest brain drain in Russian history. University students are being coerced into military contracts at over 100 institutions across 36 regions. Russia’s coal and metals sectors are already in serious crisis, with business owners now being asked to redirect profits to fund the very war disrupting their markets.
This is what Putin’s militarism looks like from the inside. Not a triumphant superpower projecting strength. A regime bleeding from a self-inflicted wound so severe that it must now hold closed-door meetings with billionaires and pass around a collection bowl.
The collection tin is not a sign of strength. It is a confession of exhaustion – an admission that four years of war have consumed so much of Russia’s human and financial capital that even record oil revenues are not enough to keep the machine running. Putin is not winning. He is spending.
The businessmen who have no choice – and those who pretend they don’t
It would be too simple to condemn Russia’s oligarchs without acknowledging the genuine coercion they operate under. Some of them almost certainly understand what they are funding. Some have, in carefully worded private conversations, expressed doubts. Oleg Deripaska himself made comments that were interpreted as indirect criticism of the war’s economic costs, though never its moral ones.
But understanding coercion is not the same as excusing compliance. These men have options that ordinary Russians do not. They have wealth held in offshore structures that Western sanctions have frozen but not entirely eliminated. They have families in Western countries. They have assets that, even partially, give them leverage that no conscripted student in Novosibirsk possesses.
And yet when Putin asked, they said yes. Immediately. Without public objection. Without even the performance of reluctance.
The contrast with the behavior of some Russian businesspeople in the early months of the war is instructive. In 2022, a small number of Russian executives resigned from boards, issued statements, or quietly moved assets and family members abroad. Some paid a price. Most did not. The window for that kind of visible, documented non-compliance has narrowed significantly. The men who remain in Putin’s inner circle have, by staying and complying, made a choice.
Creatures of the Kremlin. Built by the state, protected by the state, and now conscripted by the state to fund the state’s wars. This is the bargain Russia’s business elite made when they accepted Putin’s protection in exchange for their political silence. They traded their independence for their fortunes, and now he is calling in the debt.
The shamelessness: why it matters
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the March 26 meeting is the complete absence of any apparent shame on Putin’s part.
He did not frame the request as a difficult necessity. He did not acknowledge the burden he was asking these men to bear. He announced his intention to continue a war of conquest, described the territorial goals of that conquest, and invited his audience to fund it – in the same breath, in the same room, with the same composure with which he might discuss quarterly earnings or infrastructure investment.
This is the behavior of a man who has so thoroughly constructed a reality in which his war is legitimate, necessary, and just – in which Ukraine does not deserve to exist as a sovereign state, in which NATO ‘aggression’ justifies any Russian response, in which the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people are acceptable inputs into a historical calculation he has decided to make – that requesting private financing for that war requires no more explanation or justification than any other line item in a budget meeting.
He is not embarrassed. He will not be embarrassed. And that is precisely why the rest of the world must be.
A note on the Kremlin’s denial
The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the reports on March 27. ‘It’s not true that Putin made such a request,’ he told reporters.
He then immediately contradicted himself, acknowledging that a participant at the meeting had ‘said he wanted to donate a very large sum of money to the state’ and that many businessmen present felt they owed a debt to the state because ‘the start of their business was linked to the state one way or another.’
So the denial and the confirmation occupied the same press statement. The request did not happen. Also, the participants immediately volunteered billions of rubles because they felt it was their duty.
Dmitry Peskov has spent years refining the art of the transparent lie – the denial that admits the truth while maintaining the form of a refutation. It is a specific kind of contempt for the audience: not even the effort of a convincing lie, just the gesture of one. The story is true. Everyone knows the story is true. The denial exists not to deceive, but to establish that the Kremlin can say anything it wants and nothing will follow from it.
That contempt is itself part of the message.
What must follow
The March 26 meeting should be understood as a data point, not an aberration. It reveals a regime that has no intention of seeking a genuine peace settlement in Ukraine – Putin’s own words, in private, to the people whose financial support he needed most: ‘we will go to the end.’ It is under deeper fiscal strain than its public posture suggests. It has fully converted Russia’s business elite from independent actors into instruments of state policy. And it operates without accountability, shame, or internal constraint – the only check on Putin’s behavior is external.
For Western governments still debating the terms of a possible negotiated settlement: the man in that room on March 26 is not negotiating in good faith. He told you so himself. He told his own billionaires.
For the oligarchs who said yes: history will record your names and your checks. The archive of this war is being built in real time, and it will be thorough.
For the Russian businesspeople – and there are some – who have not yet fully committed to the machine: the window is narrowing, but it has not closed. The Nuremberg defense – ‘I had no choice’ – did not work in 1945. It will not work when the accounting for this war is finally done.
When a head of state can gather his country’s wealthiest men, announce that he intends to keep killing, and ask them to help pay for it – without hesitation, without shame, without even the pretense of regret – that state has passed beyond the ordinary categories of authoritarian governance. It has become something else: a machine for organized violence, asking its elite to become shareholders in the slaughter.
Sources:
The Bell (en.thebell.io), March 2026: original reporting on the closed-door meeting.
CEPA (cepa.org): Alexander Kolyandr, ‘Putin Tells Billionaires to Fill the Begging Bowl,’ March 30, 2026.
Riddle Russia (ridl.io): ‘Private Investors in the War,’ March 2026. Reuters: Kremlin denial, March 27, 2026.
Financial Times: corroborating reporting on oligarch pledges.
UA.News, Bossa News, Zamin.uz: additional corroborating coverage.