He needs to throw a couple of the fattest leeches out of windows so the rest get the message.
Reminds me of that time he forced a greedy oligarch to pay his employees and then humiliated him in public.
Please donate to the closed windows fund, tovarish
Admitting the country is broke, and it’s the war that has done it, and asking the filthy rich to loosen their grip on their gold… let’s see how this works out for him. Considering Putin is one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest, I expect they’ll tell him to go first, go big, with receipts, or go home.
But wouldn’t there then be the risk of them having various state mechanisms turned against them, up to and including defenestration? Billionaire mysteriously dies and state collects a portion of their assets… or something.
Billionaire mysteriously dies and
state collects a portion of their assetsgenerously donated all his wealth and assets to the mother Russia in his will.There you go.
There’s a podcast called Sad Oligarch. It talks about just how many rich Russians have died under mysterious circumstances since Putin started his war.
I imagine that’s due to a combination of dissent against the war or insufficient support for it? And then, is the implication that their holdings were usually scooped up by the state?
If not the state itself then the state owned companies that they controlled, or one of Putin’s allies.
But yeah, the podcast is worth a listen.
This is a very western view, where the rich are very powerful.
In Russia, it doesn’t work like that, because it is not a state of law. If you refuse the dictator, he will order your murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deaths_since_2022
On the flip side, Putin is not immune to polonium tea either.
By most accounts he spends most of his days living in a reinforced bunker surrounded by a very close group of trusted security. He is deeply paranoid after a lifetime of KGB work. He knows exactly how to get to someone like him, and he appears exceedingly good at anticipating potential attacks. His brutality and cunning appear to have worked so far. This is why you see people occasionally being murdered in very public fashion. It doesn’t matter if they actually crossed him. Suspicion is sufficient. He keeps everyone in a constant state of fear that every conversation they have is being recorded, because it is.
The only way things might get bette in Russia is when he dies, but the truth is, the Russian people accept this kind of authoritarianism. Russia has always had monarchs and dictators, and the Russian people practise an infamous brand of stoicism and nationalism. It’s very likely that they simply accept a new dictator after Putin. Russians are not revolutionaries at heart. They won’t fight civil wars to overthrow dictators. They don’t value freedom like we do.
This take is laughable. Pu has been telling oligarchs and state companies to do this or that since forever. The post is a nothingburger. Pu is literally the head of the mafia and has a severe micromanagement habit, his job is to decide who gets which companies and state contracts and how much everyone is allowed to steal. All the current oligarchs owe their riches to Pu, because almost everyone of them were friends of his since the nineties or earlier, and were put into their positions by him. When he tells someone that they need to share more, they do that, or they go work as the governor of Kamchatka (if they’re lucky).
Just like in the FSB, the worst thing one can decide to do is be disloyal to Putin. The chekists aren’t fond of that.
Isn’t he an oligarch himself?
He is the oligarchiest.
Russia is in desperate need of an oligarchiectomy
I don’t think this man ever “asks” for anything.
Stay away from them windows, Vladdie.
Putin trying to imitate Trump? That’s a bit of a role reversal.
