Russia's Elite Asset Sweep

Novaya Gazeta Evropa reports that, in the fifth year of Russia’s War on Ukraine, Russian law enforcement agencies are seizing money and property from officials, lawmakers, security officers, and judges and their associates at a sharply rising rate. The independent outlet says the Kremlin’s new "anti-corruption campaign" is aimed primarily at regional elites.

Since 2022, 908 officials, lawmakers, security officers, and judges have been named in 453 cases involving the seizure of businesses or personal property. There were 40 such cases in 2022 and 47 in 2023. The number nearly doubled in the war’s third year. In the first six months of 2026, authorities opened 123 property-seizure cases, approaching the 152 recorded in all of 2025.

Novaya Gazeta Evropa estimates that Russian officials have lost nearly R1.8 trillion ($23 billion) in assets in anti-corruption cases since 2022. Most of that value came from business holdings.

Real estate dominated personal-property seizures. Authorities confiscated about 2,000 apartments, houses, and land plots through May 2026, as well as 336 vehicles. Journalists also counted more than 70 luxury watches.

Some seizures were less conventional. In 2026, a court sentenced former Troitsk Mayor Alexander Vinogradov to 10 years in prison and confiscated a treadmill he received as a bribe. Former Artyomovsky Mayor Konstantin Trofimov received a similar sentence and lost a water heater. Authorities seized a billiards table worth R500,000 (nearly $6,400) from former Omsk regional prison chief Konstantin Knis and a massage chair worth R200,000 ($2,555) from former Pskov Deputy Mayor Alexander Gratsky.

Regional officials were the main targets, accounting for 510 people. Local security and law enforcement officers followed with 101, while 68 federal lawmakers were implicated.

Not everyone whose property was seized faced criminal charges. Courts confiscated assets, money, and businesses from former Adygea Supreme Court head Aslan Trakhov and Judge Natalia Khakhaleva after anti-corruption lawsuits by the Prosecutor General’s Office. Neither had been criminally prosecuted, the outlet reported.

Moscow, the Krasnodar Oblast, and St. Petersburg lead Russia in the number of such cases.

Nikolai Petrov, a senior research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center, said targeted pressure on regional officials began after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. He said the campaign is intended to break the cohesion of regional ruling groups and remind them that they do not control their territories.

Experts interviewed by Novaya Gazeta Evropa described repression of elites as a deliberate Kremlin strategy. In authoritarian systems, they said, anti-corruption drives are less about punishing bribery than disciplining the state bureaucracy.

Fabian Burkhardt, a senior research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, called corruption both a reward for loyalists and a source of compromising material against officials. The current campaign, he said, is simply using the "stick" on a larger scale.

Petrov compared the system to musical chairs: Someone must always be removed, keeping officials insecure and compliant.

He said the escalation also reflects the aging and departure of President Vladimir Putin’s longtime inner circle. New elites are competing for a fixed pool of property, making redistribution inevitable. If the transition succeeds, Petrov said, it could extend the system’s life by 10 to 15 years, with Putin delegating routine duties to younger loyalists while retaining control over the security services and the power to intervene.