The Rise Of Putin: How Russia’s Oligarchs Built Their Own Destruction

The Oligarchs Who Created Putin — And The Fatal Mistake That Gave Him Russia

They Thought Putin Was Their Puppet — Then He Took Russia From Them

On 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin appeared before Russia looking tired, unsteady and ready to leave. He announced his resignation and transferred presidential power, including authority over one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, to a former intelligence officer who had been almost unknown to ordinary Russians only months earlier.

Vladimir Putin did not seize the Kremlin from the men who controlled Russia. They escorted him inside. The billionaires, political fixers and presidential relatives surrounding Yeltsin believed they had found a disciplined, dependent and manageable successor who would protect their fortunes, preserve their access and prevent the next government from prosecuting them.

They had made one of the greatest political miscalculations of the modern era.

Putin protected Yeltsin, but he did not remain subordinate to the system that had installed him. He captured national television, subordinated regional governors, filled the state with trusted security veterans, destroyed Russia’s most politically independent billionaire and established a new bargain under which immense wealth remained possible only through obedience to the Kremlin.

The oligarchs thought they had chosen a servant. They had selected the man who would take possession of the machinery they built.

Russia Was Being Sold At Extraordinary Speed

The Soviet Union’s collapse did not produce an orderly transition from communism to Western-style capitalism. It produced an economic rupture in which state assets, political connections and personal survival became part of the same violent struggle.

Factories, banks, mines, television networks and energy companies that had previously belonged to the state were transferred into private ownership. Hyperinflation devastated household savings, wages went unpaid and millions of Russians experienced a collapse in living standards while a small number of businessmen accumulated extraordinary fortunes.

These men became known as the oligarchs. Their strength did not come from money alone. They combined control of banks and major industries with ownership of national media, access to senior officials and influence over government appointments.

By the middle of the 1990s, some oligarchs effectively possessed their own ministers, parliamentary allies and media organisations. Boris Berezovsky later claimed that the financial and television support provided by powerful businessmen had been crucial to Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, when fears of a Communist return brought the Kremlin and private wealth into an increasingly intimate alliance.

The result was not simply a corrupt economy. It was a partially privatised political system.

The oligarchs had discovered that control over television could shape public opinion, that proximity to Yeltsin’s family could unlock state assets and that money could be transformed into political protection. They began to behave not as businessmen operating under the government, but as participants in the government itself.

This mattered because the same machinery used to protect Yeltsin would later be used to manufacture Putin’s political ascent.

Boris Berezovsky Became Russia’s Ultimate Kingmaker

No figure captured the confidence and danger of the era more completely than Boris Berezovsky.

Trained as a mathematician, Berezovsky moved into business during the collapse of Soviet economic controls and built interests spanning cars, aviation, oil and television. He became closely connected to Yeltsin’s inner circle, particularly the group of relatives and officials commonly known as “the Family.”

Berezovsky understood that the most valuable commodity in the new Russia was not necessarily oil, television or cash. It was access.

He helped sustain Yeltsin politically, cultivated relationships inside the Kremlin and used media influence as a weapon against rivals. He was not merely commenting on Russian politics from the outside. He was helping to design the environment in which presidents survived or fell.

Putin initially appeared to Berezovsky as an ideal product of that environment.

The two men had known each other from the 1990s, and Berezovsky became an important supporter of Putin’s rise. He backed the relatively obscure official, promoted him through his political and media networks and helped present him as a credible successor capable of restoring order without threatening those who had accumulated power under Yeltsin.

Berezovsky saw Putin’s lack of an independent political movement as reassurance. Putin had no great personal fortune, no national television network, no mass party and no obvious popular constituency. His rise depended on appointments rather than elections.

To the oligarchs, dependence looked like weakness.

They failed to consider that a man without an independent base might respond by capturing the only base powerful enough to make every other one irrelevant: the Russian state.

Putin Rose By Making Himself Useful

Putin’s rise before 1999 was striking because it lacked the conventional characteristics of a democratic political career.

He had spent 16 years in the KGB and served in Dresden in East Germany. After returning to Russia, he worked with Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg, before moving into the presidential administration in Moscow.

He advanced through bureaucratic and security positions rather than through popular campaigning. In 1998, Yeltsin appointed him director of the Federal Security Service, the FSB, which succeeded the KGB’s domestic-security functions.

Putin did not initially present himself as a visionary national leader. He established a reputation as a controlled, effective official who could complete difficult tasks, manage sensitive information and demonstrate loyalty to powerful patrons.

This was precisely what the Yeltsin circle wanted.

Yeltsin’s health was deteriorating, his popularity had collapsed and allegations of corruption surrounded figures close to his administration. The president’s allies feared that a hostile successor could investigate the privatisations, financial arrangements and political deals of the previous decade.

Former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov appeared particularly threatening. He represented a more independent political centre and supported a campaign against economic crime that alarmed oligarchs and officials who feared prosecution, confiscation or imprisonment.

Yeltsin’s circle therefore needed more than a candidate who could win an election. It needed a guarantee.

The ideal successor would be sober, competent and strong enough to defeat political opponents, yet sufficiently loyal to protect the people who placed him in office. Putin seemed to fit every requirement.

What appeared to be an arrangement for mutual survival became the foundation of a new political order.

The Crisis That Transformed Putin

Putin’s ascent accelerated dramatically during the autumn of 1999.

In September, apartment buildings were bombed in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk. Hundreds of civilians were killed, many while sleeping in their homes. The attacks created an atmosphere of terror and helped generate support for renewed military operations in Chechnya.

Putin responded with deliberately forceful language. He presented himself as a leader prepared to pursue and destroy those responsible, projecting decisiveness after years in which the Russian state had often appeared weak, chaotic and humiliated.

His public standing surged as the second Chechen war began.

The apartment bombings have remained surrounded by allegations that elements of the Russian security services may have been involved. Those allegations have never been proved in court and cannot responsibly be presented as established fact.

The greatest controversy concerned an apartment block in Ryazan, where residents reported suspicious activity and local authorities discovered what was initially treated as a bomb. Individuals associated with the FSB were detained, but the agency later said the incident had been a security exercise.

The explanation did not end public suspicion. Critics questioned why an anti-terror exercise appeared so similar to the attacks terrifying the country and why local services had apparently not been informed.

What is beyond dispute is the political consequence.

The bombings created fear. The war created a demand for authority. Putin supplied the image of a leader capable of restoring the state, and a prime minister who had entered office with little national support became the favourite to succeed Yeltsin.

Whether this transformation was the product of ruthless political exploitation, extraordinary historical circumstances or something darker remains contested. Its result is not.

Putin went from obscurity to national command in a matter of months.

Yeltsin Left And Received His Protection

Yeltsin’s resignation on the final day of 1999 immediately made Putin acting president.

One of Putin’s first acts provided legal protections for the outgoing president. The central expectation of the succession had therefore been satisfied: Yeltsin and his family would not be subjected to the prosecutorial reckoning they feared.

This reinforced the belief that Putin understood loyalty and would honour the arrangement that had brought him to power.

But the oligarchs had confused a specific promise with permanent obedience.

Putin could protect Yeltsin without permitting Berezovsky and the other billionaires to continue controlling government policy. He could preserve parts of the old elite while ending the political system that had allowed private fortunes to dominate the presidency.

The transition was not a sudden purge. Putin consolidated authority through a series of administrative, regulatory and legal decisions, each of which could be defended individually as a measure to restore order.

Together, they changed the nature of the Russian state.

The Regions Were Brought Back Under Moscow

Putin’s early reforms weakened regional governors who had acquired extensive autonomy during the Yeltsin years.

Russia was divided into large federal districts supervised by presidential representatives. Regional leaders lost some of their direct influence at the centre, while the Kremlin gained a clearer chain of command across a country spanning 11 time zones.

The official justification was coherent. Russia had endured separatism, uneven law enforcement, corruption and serious inconsistencies between regional and federal authority.

The political consequence was equally clear.

Independent regional power centres became more dependent on presidential approval. Governors who might once have resisted Moscow increasingly operated within a system controlled from the Kremlin.

After the 2004 Beslan school siege, in which more than 300 hostages died, Putin used the security crisis to justify further centralisation. Direct elections for regional governors were removed in their existing form, allowing the presidency to exercise far greater control over who governed Russia’s regions.

A recurring pattern had emerged: catastrophe produced demands for stability, and stability produced permanent expansions of executive power.

The Kursk Disaster Exposed The Danger Of Free Television

In August 2000, the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk sank during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea. All 118 sailors on board died.

The government’s response provoked anger. Information was delayed, official accounts shifted and Russia initially resisted offers of foreign assistance. Putin remained on holiday during the early stages of the disaster and appeared slow to address the public.

National television channels subjected the authorities to sustained criticism.

Berezovsky believed he was using the same instrument that had worked throughout the Yeltsin period. Television pressure could embarrass a politician, weaken his public position and force him back to the negotiating table.

Putin drew a different lesson.

No private businessman could be permitted to control a television network capable of threatening the presidency.

Berezovsky’s influence over ORT, now known as Channel One, was neutralised. Another media magnate, Vladimir Gusinsky, lost control of NTV amid financial, prosecutorial and state-linked pressure before leaving Russia.

The precise commercial and legal routes differed, but the political result was unmistakable. The most powerful national television platforms were brought under state control or the ownership of organisations closely aligned with the Kremlin.

Berezovsky had helped create Putin through television. Putin ensured that Berezovsky would never be able to use television to unmake him.

The Oligarchs Were Offered A New Deal

Putin summoned leading oligarchs and established a new understanding.

They would not necessarily lose the fortunes accumulated during the chaotic privatisations of the 1990s. They could retain companies, properties and immense personal wealth.

In return, they were expected to abandon independent political power.

They were not to finance serious opposition, use television against the president or treat their wealth as authority over the Kremlin. Most accepted the arrangement because they preferred subordination to confiscation.

The system did not abolish oligarchy. It transformed it.

Under Yeltsin, billionaires could use wealth to shape the state. Under Putin, billionaires could remain wealthy only while serving—or at least refusing to challenge—the state.

The old oligarchs had imagined themselves as owners of Russian politics. Putin reduced them to licence holders whose privileges could be revoked.

Berezovsky rejected the new rules. He entered opposition, left Russia and ultimately received political asylum in Britain.

His departure served as an early warning, but one businessman’s destruction would later deliver a far more terrifying message.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Proved Nobody Was Untouchable

By the early 2000s, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was one of Russia’s richest men and the principal figure behind the oil company Yukos.

Khodorkovsky’s rise had been rooted in the same controversial privatisation environment that produced other oligarchic fortunes. Yet Yukos was increasingly presented to international investors as a modern, transparent and well-managed company.

Khodorkovsky began financing civil-society projects and political parties. He criticised corruption, discussed Russia’s political future and appeared capable of developing an independent national platform.

His mistake was not merely being rich.

It was attempting to convert that wealth into political power beyond the Kremlin’s control.

In October 2003, masked security officers boarded Khodorkovsky’s aircraft at a Siberian airport and arrested him. The theatrical nature of the operation was almost as important as the charges.

Russia’s wealthiest business figures watched one of their own being removed from a private aircraft by armed agents. The message travelled instantly through every boardroom in the country.

Khodorkovsky was prosecuted and imprisoned. Yukos faced enormous tax claims, was dismantled and saw major assets transferred into the expanding state-controlled energy sector, particularly Rosneft.

The Kremlin maintained that Khodorkovsky had committed serious financial and tax offences. Critics argued that comparable conduct across the oligarchic class had been treated differently and that the decisive distinction was his willingness to challenge Putin politically.

That question revealed the new Russia more clearly than any official statement could.

The issue was no longer whether the fortunes of the 1990s had been acquired cleanly. The issue was whether their owners accepted presidential supremacy.

Before the Yukos case, a billionaire might still have imagined that wealth, international connections and corporate power provided protection.

After it, nobody could reasonably believe that.

Putin Built A State Around Security Loyalists

Putin did not rely solely on fear. He changed the personnel operating the Russian state.

Former intelligence officials, security-service veterans, military figures and associates from Putin’s years in St Petersburg moved into senior positions across government and strategic industry. These figures became broadly associated with the siloviki: the networks emerging from Russia’s security and coercive institutions.

They did not constitute one perfectly unified organisation, and internal rivalries continued. What they shared was a political culture shaped by hierarchy, secrecy, threats and the central importance of loyalty.

Putin’s system rewarded officials who protected the chain of command. Corruption could be tolerated when it reinforced dependence, but independent political ambition could not.

Money flowed downwards through patronage. Loyalty travelled upwards towards the presidency.

The system was resilient because it did not depend entirely on ideology. Officials, governors, executives and security chiefs had personal interests tied to its survival.

To challenge Putin was no longer simply to oppose one politician. It was to threaten a network of people whose positions, fortunes and security depended on the structure he controlled.

Putin Left The Presidency Without Surrendering Power

Russia’s constitution limited the president to two consecutive terms. After serving from 2000 to 2008, Putin formally left the presidency.

Dmitry Medvedev took the title. Putin became prime minister.

The transition created brief speculation that Medvedev might establish an independent political direction. He used more liberal language, spoke about modernisation and occupied the constitutionally superior office.

Yet Putin’s personnel networks, political authority and control over the governing system remained intact.

Medvedev did not dismantle the structure he inherited. Putin continued to exercise decisive influence and returned to the presidency in 2012.

The episode demonstrated that Putin’s power had become larger than the office he formally occupied. The institutions existed, but their practical operation depended on personal relationships and assumptions about where real authority remained.

His return was accompanied by mass demonstrations and growing restrictions on opposition activity, public protest, independent organisations and foreign-funded civil society.

The state was no longer focused only on controlling billionaires. It was narrowing the political space available to any organised alternative.

The Constitution Was Changed Around Him

In 2020, Russia approved a large package of constitutional amendments.

The changes included social guarantees, conservative values, institutional reforms and provisions concerning Russia’s historical identity. Buried within the package was the measure with the greatest consequence for Putin personally: his previous presidential terms were effectively reset.

This allowed him to seek further terms and created a legal route for him to remain president until 2036.

Putin did not formally abolish the constitution. The constitution was modified in a way that accommodated his continued rule.

That distinction captures an important feature of the system.

Russia retained elections, courts, parliament, political parties and constitutional procedures. Yet the institutions increasingly operated inside boundaries established by the Kremlin.

The appearance of legality remained valuable because power was stronger when presented as the outcome of procedure rather than naked coercion.

Putin had advanced from an obscure appointed official to a president around whom the basic law of the country could be reorganised.

The oligarchs had once believed his lack of a political base made him controllable. Two decades later, the state itself had become his base.

Berezovsky Tried To Destroy What He Had Created

From exile in Britain, Berezovsky became one of Putin’s loudest opponents.

He funded political projects, supported opposition initiatives, gave interviews and predicted that Putin’s system would eventually collapse. Yet the media influence and presidential access that had once made him powerful no longer existed.

Berezovsky had understood how to manipulate a weak state. He proved far less capable of challenging a consolidated one.

His financial decline accelerated after a disastrous legal battle with Roman Abramovich in London. Berezovsky claimed he had been coerced into selling valuable Russian assets, but the court rejected his case and delivered a deeply damaging assessment of his reliability as a witness.

The proceedings exposed a fundamental weakness in the oligarchic system.

Their fortunes had often depended on oral arrangements, personal protection, political patronage and understandings that existed outside transparent contracts. Those methods could create enormous power in 1990s Moscow but were difficult to establish as enforceable ownership in a British courtroom.

Berezovsky lost money, reputation and political relevance.

In March 2013, he was found dead at his home in Berkshire. A coroner later recorded an open verdict, concluding that the available evidence did not establish conclusively whether he had taken his own life or whether another person had been involved.

There has never been proof that the Kremlin caused his death.

It requires no conspiracy to recognise the symbolism. The man who had helped elevate Putin spent his final years isolated from Russia, financially weakened and unable to reverse the decision that defined both men’s lives.

Ukraine Revealed The Scale Of Putin’s Historical Ambition

Putin’s ambitions did not end with domestic control.

His long-standing statements about Ukraine revealed a worldview in which Russia was not merely defending recognised borders or protecting conventional security interests. He repeatedly questioned whether Russians and Ukrainians represented genuinely separate historical nations.

Putin has described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people,” presented modern Ukraine as the product of disputed historical decisions and argued that the West had turned it into a hostile platform against Russia.

This framing is central to understanding the war.

If Ukraine is recognised as a sovereign nation with the right to determine its own political future, then its movement towards Europe and NATO is a choice made by an independent state.

If Ukraine is instead treated as an inseparable part of a wider Russian historical nation, then its independence can be presented inside the Kremlin’s narrative as a strategic loss, an artificial division or even a betrayal.

That argument does more than justify territorial demands. It challenges the legitimacy of Ukrainian national identity itself.

The invasion launched in February 2022 therefore represented the external expression of the same political principle that had shaped Putin’s domestic rule: alternatives capable of operating independently from Moscow could not be accepted indefinitely.

What Putin Told Tucker Carlson

Putin’s February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson offered one of the clearest demonstrations of how he explains his actions to Western audiences.

Rather than beginning with immediate military events, Putin delivered a long historical account stretching back centuries. He argued that the origins of the war could be understood through medieval states, shifting borders, Soviet decisions, NATO expansion and what he described as Western interference in Ukraine.

The length of the historical argument was itself revealing.

Putin did not present the conflict as a limited dispute that began in 2022. He placed it inside a civilisational story in which Russia had been divided, deceived, encircled and denied what he regarded as its legitimate historical and security interests.

He claimed Russia had no interest in attacking countries such as Poland or Latvia unless Russia itself was attacked. He also suggested a negotiated conclusion to the war remained possible while insisting that Western governments had blocked or abandoned previous opportunities for settlement.

Those assurances sat beside a far more expansive claim: that Ukrainian identity and territory cannot be understood separately from Russian history.

Putin’s message to Carlson’s audience was therefore simultaneously defensive and revisionist. Russia, in his telling, did not seek arbitrary conquest. It sought the correction of historic wrongs and resistance to Western encroachment.

That distinction may persuade some foreign audiences. It offers little comfort to countries whose borders or identities fall within Putin’s interpretation of Russian history.

His Current Ambition Is Larger Than Holding Territory

By 2026, Putin continued to show no willingness to abandon Russia’s central territorial and political demands in Ukraine.

He maintained that Russia could continue advancing militarily if negotiations failed and continued to demand Ukrainian concessions over areas of the Donbas that Russian forces did not fully control. His public position indicated that diplomacy remained acceptable only if it secured outcomes the Kremlin could present as satisfying the original objectives of the war.

This suggests that Putin’s ambition is not confined to holding land already occupied.

He wants any settlement to confirm that Russia possesses a decisive voice over Ukraine’s security orientation, military capacity and relationship with Western institutions. A ceasefire that merely freezes the front without restricting Ukraine’s future could leave the central geopolitical dispute unresolved.

Putin also seeks to demonstrate that Russia cannot be isolated or strategically defeated by Western pressure.

Moscow has expanded cooperation with China, Iran and North Korea while presenting Russia as a leader of a broader challenge to Western political and financial dominance. Russia and North Korea have deepened their strategic partnership, including military cooperation and Pyongyang’s support for Moscow’s position on Ukraine.

At home, Putin’s development goals through 2030 and 2036 emphasise sovereignty, security, technological capacity, population growth, traditional values and reduced vulnerability to external pressure. The official programme connects economic modernisation with cultural and political independence from the West.

This is not simply a programme for surviving sanctions.

It is an attempt to build a Russia capable of sustaining prolonged confrontation while remaining economically functional, militarily powerful and politically insulated.

The Baltic States Now Hear The Threat Directly

Putin’s recent statements also show that the confrontation is no longer rhetorically confined to Ukraine.

In May 2026, when questioned about suggestions that NATO states could strike Russian military facilities in Kaliningrad, Putin warned that Russia possessed the means to destroy anyone who attempted it.

The statement was framed as deterrence against an attack on Russian territory. Yet its severity reflects the broader danger surrounding the Baltic region, where NATO members share borders with Russia and Kaliningrad sits as a heavily militarised Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland.

Putin continues to deny plans for an unprovoked attack on NATO. At the same time, Russia’s military posture, nuclear rhetoric and insistence that Western support for Ukraine makes NATO states participants in the conflict sustain a climate in which escalation can never be dismissed.

His objective may not require invading another NATO country.

It may be enough to convince European governments that supporting Ukraine carries intolerable risk, divide the alliance over how far deterrence should extend and force neighbouring states to adjust their behaviour around Russian power.

The strategy depends on uncertainty. Russia does not need every threat to be acted upon if the threat itself changes political decisions.

Putin Wants To Rewrite The Outcome Of The Cold War

The deepest ambition visible across Putin’s speeches is the reversal of what he considers Russia’s post-Soviet humiliation.

The collapse of the Soviet Union reduced Moscow’s territory, influence and control over Eastern Europe. NATO expanded into countries previously governed from or strategically subordinated to Moscow. Former Soviet republics pursued separate national identities and foreign policies.

Putin does not need to recreate the Soviet Union precisely to overturn that outcome.

He can instead seek a sphere of influence in which neighbouring countries remain formally independent but cannot make strategic choices against Russian interests. Governments may retain their flags and institutions while operating within limits enforced by Moscow’s economic, political or military power.

Ukraine is the decisive test because its successful integration with Europe would demonstrate that a large, culturally connected former Soviet republic could permanently escape Russia’s orbit.

For Putin, that outcome would be more than a foreign-policy defeat. It would undermine the historical narrative used to justify the war and expose limits to the state he spent a quarter of a century constructing.

This is why territorial compromise alone may not resolve the conflict.

The war concerns land, but it also concerns whether Ukraine has the right to exist entirely outside Russian control.

The Oligarchs’ Mistake Now Shapes The World

The businessmen who promoted Putin in 1999 were not planning an authoritarian restoration or a war that would reshape European security.

They wanted protection.

Yeltsin’s circle wanted immunity. Berezovsky wanted influence. The oligarchs wanted to keep their assets. Officials wanted stability after a decade of economic collapse and political humiliation.

Each group made a decision that seemed rational in isolation.

They gave Putin television coverage because they needed to defeat his rivals. They gave him presidential authority because they needed a safe succession. They accepted tighter controls because they wanted to preserve their fortunes. They remained silent when competitors were destroyed because resistance appeared more dangerous than compliance.

By the time the wider consequences became clear, no single institution remained strong enough to reverse them.

Putin did not capture Russia in one dramatic act. His power was assembled through bargains, emergencies, prosecutions, appointments, ownership transfers, constitutional changes and the repeated surrender of people who believed cooperation would protect them.

That remains the most important warning in his rise.

Authoritarian systems are not always created when a powerful man suddenly defeats everyone around him. They can be created when wealthy, influential and frightened people repeatedly conclude that surrendering one more limit is the safest decision available.

Berezovsky thought Putin would owe him gratitude. The oligarchs thought their money made them permanent. Governors thought cooperation would preserve their regional authority. Legislators thought supporting the Kremlin would protect their careers.

All misunderstood the direction in which dependency would travel.

The men who chose Putin believed he depended upon them. Within a few years, their freedom, fortunes and futures depended upon him.

Now the consequences extend far beyond the oligarchs who built their own trap. Ukraine is fighting for its survival, European governments are rebuilding their defences, NATO is confronting its most dangerous strategic environment in decades and Russia is preparing its political, military and economic system for a confrontation that could continue for years.

The oligarchs selected Putin because they thought he would preserve the world they controlled.

Instead, he took that world from them, rebuilt it around himself and began demanding that countries beyond Russia accept the same central rule: sovereignty exists only until it conflicts with the power of the Kremlin.