In the end, Tinkov lost almost $9 billion (£6.5 billion) of his once-rich fortune and fled Russia. The period before the invasion was very bad for Russia's billionaires, and so were its immediate consequences. Their collective wealth ($580 billion) was only $3 billion less than the peak recorded the year before the invasion. "The West did everything possible to ensure that Russian billionaires gathered around the flag," says Alexander Kolyandr of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). All of this effectively helped Putin mobilize the billionaires, their assets and their money, and use them to prop up the Russian war economy," he tells the BBC.
