(Bloomberg) — Several of Russia’s richest people including some close to President Vladimir Putin have moved billions of dollars abroad in the past year after growing concerned about the country’s economy and the government budget.
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High-profile asset seizures have intensified fears among members of the Russian elite that the state could confiscate their wealth or that they may lose their fortunes, according to six wealthy Russians and other people familiar with the thinking of several of the country’s billionaires.
Several billionaires moved some additional assets out of Russia recently, amid concerns about the banking sector, according to some of the people and documents including corporate filings and property purchase records reviewed by Bloomberg News.
There has been a shift in portfolios held by some of Russia’s wealthiest people over the last year, accelerating in recent months, toward cryptocurrency, gold and foreign property and private investment funds, especially in the Gulf, the people said. They were granted anonymity to discuss personal financial arrangements that aren’t public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Russia’s billionaire elite was welcomed in the West for decades, gaining reputations for major business deals, glamorous property purchases and lavish parties. After Putin ordered the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, plunging relations with the US and Europe to their worst since the Cold War, international sanctions forced many Russian tycoons to move assets back to Russia and re-register their companies there. Many saw their overseas assets frozen.
At home, though, they faced different risks. Since 2024, authorities have intensified high-profile asset seizures targeting a number of tycoons, including some who sought to maintain ties with the outside world, even if only through dual citizenship, or who had previously held official positions. The slowdown of the Russian economy since 2025 further reduced their profits and limited opportunities to preserve and grow their wealth domestically.
While it’s difficult to calculate the scale of informal outflows of capital, such as opaque crypto transactions that don’t feature in official data, a conservative estimate of the money leaving Russia outside of official figures so far this year is in the tens of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the investment decisions of several Russian billionaires. This was an increase compared to last year, they said.
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Fears of confiscations and economic turbulence prompted outflows to pick up again over the last year, the people said.
To be sure, many wealthy Russians have continued to seek investment opportunities outside the country despite the difficulties created by the war and sanctions. Capital flight has also been a persistent theme in Russia as the war has ground on — the central bank has said by one broad measure some $250 billion left the country in the first year of the conflict.
Putin is searching for ways to raise revenue after being warned by finance officials that spending on the war in Ukraine is on an unaffordable path. He wants to protect defense expenditure by focusing cuts on other areas of government spending. While much of the country is facing hardship, Russia’s billionaires have seen their wealth rise in the last year, adding to pressure on them to shoulder more of the burden.
Some entrepreneurs grew more concerned after a closed door meeting with Putin in March, where billionaire Suleiman Kerimov proposed that those in attendance make a substantial contribution to the state to reflect how their businesses were built in the 1990s, an initiative Putin welcomed.
Following the meeting, Peskov denied the president had asked tycoons to contribute, after Kerimov offered to give a large sum to the state.
One businessman acknowledged he was moving money to countries including Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates in the wake of concerns over state pressure on tycoons. Two others said they were investing in the UAE, Turkey or Saudi Arabia in volumes similar to past years, while a fourth said he’d started investing in Africa.
There has been rising interest from Russians to park their capital outside of the country since 2024 due to increased pressure on them at home, according to a person familiar with the financial arrangements of wealthy Russian clients.
Prosecutors last year secured the return to the state of assets they valued at more than 4 trillion rubles ($51.5 billion), Russian Prosecutor General Alexander Gutsan said in March. Among the tycoons who have lost assets to the state are Vadim Moshkovich, founder of Ros Agro Plc, one of Russia’s largest agricultural holdings, Konstantin Strukov, who controlled one of the country’s biggest gold mining companies and Dmitry Kamenshchik, who lost Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
The Dubai property market has seen further high-end purchases by Russians and they’re also investing increasingly in property in Turkey and Monaco, according to several of the people.
Methods for moving wealth abroad have evolved as Russians seek new ways to evade both Western sanctions and the Kremlin’s attentions. Dubai’s status as a crypto hub has helped the elite move money across jurisdictions. Other informal routes which are proving increasingly popular have opened up in Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, home of the A7A5 stablecoin.
The token was developed by A7, a cross-border payments company owned by Moldovan fugitive banker Ilan Shor and the heavily sanctioned Russian state-owned lender Promsvyazbank.
The company said on its website it can make same-day payments to any country in the world. In September, Promsvyazbank Deputy Chairman Mikhail Dorofeev said A7 processed 7.5 trillion rubles (about $96 billion) of transactions in the first half of 2025, according to the RBC news service.
Concerns about the health of Russian banks have grown since last summer, when banking officials expressed fears about the level of debt on their balance sheets and warned their outlook was graver than publicly acknowledged.
A pro-Kremlin think tank, the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, warned in May that it saw signs of a looming systemic banking crisis.
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