The Economist published a lengthy interview with billionaire Andrei Melnichenko in which he speaks about the return of Russian elites to the country after sanctions, his meeting with Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to secure a place inside the system in order to influence its future course.
The magazine stresses that Melnichenko is neither an anti-war dissident nor a public supporter of the war. At the same time, it says his companies remain tied to Russia’s wartime economy: ammonia from his plants is used in munitions production, and the facilities are protected in cooperation with the military and security services amid drone strikes and sabotage threats.
Melnichenko, the owner of EuroChem and SUEK, has a fortune estimated by Forbes at $20.4 billion. According to The Economist, his businesses account for almost 1% of Russia’s GDP. Until 2022 he lived in Switzerland, but after the war began he was sanctioned, moved to the UAE, and started visiting Russia much more often.
According to Melnichenko, the old model in which Russia was the place for business while the West provided property protection, family life, and security collapsed after 2022. The magazine writes that sanctions pushed major businessmen not to pressure the Kremlin but to move back into the Russian system. Fear also played a role: since 2023, assets worth $60 billion have allegedly been nationalized or handed to loyalists in Russia. In the dispute over Sibeco, the magazine’s sources say the conflict ended with a 32 billion ruble donation to the Sirius education center.
According to The Economist, Melnichenko met Putin in person for the first time in May 2025. At that meeting, he said the Russian elite had been wrong to separate the place where money was earned from the place where property and a family’s future had to be protected, and stated that he wanted to play a more active role in public life and work for the good of the country.
Melnichenko also said he had begun meeting very different figures, from Dmitry Muratov to Alexander Dugin, and concluded that despite their conflicting interests, Russia shares a broader lack of a clear vision of the future.
In a separate column for the magazine, he set out his vision of Russia after the war. In his view, Moscow should be part of a new security architecture, and a durable peace is possible only if both Ukraine’s and Russia’s sovereignty are recognized. Among the dangerous scenarios he lists are a humiliated Russia on the West’s periphery, a Russia reduced to China’s raw-material appendage, the breakup of a nuclear-armed state, and its transformation into an isolated militarized fortress. As an alternative, he proposes a “sovereign” Russia in which freedom and property are protected and where business, civil society, nationalists, and technocrats all take part in discussing the country’s future.