Former Russian banking tycoon Oleg Tinkov says a single Instagram post condemning the war in Ukraine cost him nearly $9 billion, after he was forced to sell his stake in his bank for a fraction of its real value. He described the episode as a “hostage” situation that shows how dissenting billionaires are brought to heel in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Tinkov, the founder of Tinkoff Bank, was once celebrated as one of Russia’s wealthiest bankers. That status changed dramatically in April 2022, when he used Instagram to denounce the war as “insane” and to criticize Russia’s military as poorly prepared and riddled with corruption. As CNBC reported at the time, Tinkov claimed 90% of Russians opposed the war, and the remaining 10% were “morons.” He urged an immediate and “face-saving” end to the war.
Tinkov told the BBC recently that within a day of that post, senior executives at his bank received a call from officials linked to the Kremlin, delivering a stark ultimatum. Either Tinkov’s stake would be sold and his name scrubbed from the brand, or the bank—then one of Russia’s largest lenders—would be nationalized.
A forced fire sale
Tinkov said that what followed was not a negotiation but coercion under threat. He claimed he was told to accept whatever price was offered for his roughly 35% stake in TCS Group, the owner of Tinkoff Bank, or risk losing everything. “I couldn’t negotiate the price. I was like a hostage,” he told The New York Times. He ultimately sold the stake in April 2022, shortly after his Instagram post.
Within a week of this conversation, Tinkov said, a firm linked to metals magnate Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest men and a key supplier of nickel used in military hardware, stepped in to buy the stake. Tinkov told the BBC that the deal valued his holding at just about 3% of its true market worth, wiping out almost $9 billion of the wealth he had built over decades in business.
Exile and erasure
After the sale, Tinkov left Russia, eventually renouncing his Russian citizenship and becoming one of the few high-profile businessmen to publicly break with the Kremlin over the war. He alleged that the campaign against him extended beyond the balance sheet, including pressure to remove his name from the bank brand and efforts to erase his role in building the institution that once carried it.
In his telling, the episode shows how quickly loyalty is enforced when oligarchs step out of line. Public criticism of the invasion, even from a figure whose bank helped power Russia’s consumer boom, was treated as a direct challenge to the state in wartime. There are numerous examples from the recent past, including the erstwhile oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man, who spent 10 years in jail after launching a pro-democracy organization in 2001. Like Tinkov, he has since become an exile, residing in London.
For his part, Tinkov has taken a few years to retrench and is newly visible in 2025, recently emerging as a backer of Plata, a Mexican fintech led by former Tinkoff Bank executives.
But the former oligarch’s experience sits within a wider pattern described by analysts who say the Kremlin now relies on a mix of fear and opportunity to keep Russia’s wealthy elite compliant. Sanctions, war-time controls and the threat of asset seizures have made fortunes inside Russia highly contingent on political loyalty, while the departure of Western firms has opened up bargain acquisitions for trusted allies.
The war in Ukraine, meanwhile, has rumbled on, with President Trump holding meetings and calls with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After the 2025 Christmas holiday, Trump met with Zelensky at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida while fielding phone calls with Putin, claiming a peace deal is “closer than ever,” more than three years after Tinkov made his fateful Instagram post.
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