On Thursday evening, around twelve hours after the start of the war against Ukraine, Russia's most powerful business representatives met with President Vladimir Putin.

37 CEOs sat behind masks and at a large safe distance from Putin in the magnificent Catherine Hall of the Kremlin - where Putin had decided three days earlier to recognize the eastern Ukrainian separatist areas in preparation for the invasion.

Now there were 37 men in the room, many of whom had lost billions of dollars on the same day because their companies' stock prices had plummeted that morning.

Nevertheless, they listened motionless as Putin spoke of the attack as a "necessary measure": There was no other choice because the risks to national security were so great that it was unclear

how Russia “could have continued to exist” otherwise.

He pleaded with corporate leaders for "understanding" of the deployment and the "restrictions" that will be in place, saying Russia will remain a "part of the world economy" despite everything.

Catherine Wagner

Business correspondent for Russia and the CIS based in Moscow.

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Only one of the listeners spoke up, the head of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Alexandr Shokhin.

He assured the President of solidarity: since 2014, Russian "business" has learned to adapt to crises and even to develop under these conditions.

With the support of the government and by companies working "even more energetically, more effectively", the new difficulties can be overcome.

No one in the Katharinensaal remarked that Russia's economy was set back years by the war and its aftermath.

War is poison for the economy

That sounds crazy: Business representatives support a policy that is poison for their own interests.

Which not only affects their companies, but many of them personally - cutting them off from their villas in southern France and London, from "shopping in Milan" and "partying in Saint Tropez", as EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell tweeted this week.

America's President Joe Biden also announced new sanctions against "corrupt billionaires" this week: The oligarchs had benefited from their proximity to the Kremlin, now they should pay for it.

But it is not to be expected that this will change anything in their loyalty to Putin.

On the contrary: since 2014, when the West believed it could unrest in the Kremlin elite with personal sanctions, entry bans and asset freezes,

Putin tied the CEOs even more closely to himself.

And not behind closed doors, but publicly, so that everyone understands: If you want to play, you have to support politics.

A good example of this is Arkady Rotenberg, a martial arts friend from Putin's childhood days in St. Petersburg.

His rise paralleled that of his friend of almost the same age;

from the judo trainer and sports studio operator that Rotenberg was at the end of the 1990s, he transformed within 10 years into the "king of government contracts".

Together with his brother Boris, he was awarded the contract when the state-controlled gas company Gazprom sold several pipeline and plant construction companies in 2008;

From this, the brothers formed the new company Strojgasmontasch, which from then on was allowed to build overpriced lines for the state.

At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Rotenberg received a sixth of the order volume.

But then came the annexation of Crimea, and the Russian-backed war in eastern Ukraine began.