Yet Another Putin "Wallet" Surfaces in Cyprus

After the collapse of the USSR, a wave of newly wealthy Russians flooded into Cyprus. The island became a convenient place for them to store stolen capital. With Putin’s rise in the Kremlin, the trend grew to enormous proportions, and today Russian-speaking residents of Cyprus number, according to various estimates, 120,000–150,000 people — 10% of the island’s population.

Among them there are almost no former political or economic refugees. Wealthy Russians — businessmen and officials loyal to the Putin regime — mostly relocated to Cyprus for its offshore opportunities and the chance to obtain citizenship through the purchase of real estate.

The overwhelming majority of these people are patriots of Russia who support Putin’s regime and the war in Ukraine. They believe Kremlin propaganda and spread it among Cypriots. At the same time, they exert significant influence on Cyprus’s economy and political situation. This greatly facilitates the penetration of Putin’s agents into Cyprus’s political and economic elite. In addition, Cyprus is a popular place of residence for retired or business-turned officers of the Russian security services. This situation persists to this day.

After the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, EU countries sharply curtailed opportunities for Russian citizens to live, travel, work and do business in Europe. In Cyprus, however, little has changed. After the abolition of the “golden passport” program, the parliament and government of the Republic of Cyprus adopted legislative amendments allowing foreign specialists, primarily workers in the technology sector, to easily obtain residence permits, and citizenship of the country under an accelerated procedure after 4–5 years of residence on the island. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of those who took advantage of this opportunity turned out to be citizens of the Russian Federation. According to CDN data, many of them obtained residence permits and, probably, citizenship using fraudulent documents.

Adding piquancy to the situation is the fact that the amendments to migration legislation were themselves drafted and lobbied for by a group of businessmen of Russian origin from the IT sector, members of the TechIsland association. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, thousands of Russians have used this loophole to enter Europe. It was precisely through technology companies, including members of the TechIsland association, that tens of thousands of Russian citizens relocated to Cyprus after 2022, a significant portion of whom used forged documents to do so.

And after almost five years of war, the flow of relocants from Russia to Cyprus and onward into the EU continues to grow.

Among those Russians who have relocated and continue to relocate to Cyprus under the new program are a huge number of career officers and agents of Russian security services posing as ordinary programmers and engineers, as well as people directly connected to the Kremlin and personally to Putin. Among them are also holders of the personal assets of the Russian dictator — so-called “Putin’s wallets.” In 2024, Cyprus Daily News published an article about one of them, Vladimir Smirnov, former chairman of Putin’s “Ozero” cooperative. According to data available to the editorial team, the Russian “Cypriot” Smirnov serves as the administrator of several secret Kremlin funds on the island, hidden in trusts and fiduciary companies.

And at the end of August it emerged that since 2022 another “Putin’s wallet” has settled in Cyprus. This person’s name is Alexander Chachava.

As is well known, Putin has no “own” money in the conventional sense. His bank account holds no stolen billions — only his modest presidential salary can be found there. Putin keeps all his wealth with his closest friends-“wallets,” to whom he has handed out enormous pieces of the Russian economy, made them oligarchs, and given them access to a state budget worth trillions of rubles. And they, in turn, use that money to pay for his expenses and wishes.

For example, Putin did not pay for the palace in Gelendzhik with his own money. It was paid for by his university classmates, billionaires Ilgam Ragimov and Nikolai Yegorov, as well as his closest friend Gennady Timchenko. Putin’s Crimean dacha was paid for by other billionaire friends of his, the Kovalchuk brothers. Many more such examples could be cited.

On August 27, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) published an investigation titled “Who Really Owns Ozon? How the Marketplace Was Bought for Putin.”

FBK found that Russia’s second-largest marketplace, Ozon, has a direct connection to Putin. The purchase of the company that owns about a third of Ozon’s shares, previously belonging to the investment fund Baring Vostok, was financed by structures belonging to billionaire Gennady Timchenko, a close friend of Putin’s.

From June 2025 to April 2026, Alexander Chachava’s structures bought out the joint-stock company “O23,” created in 2024, which owned 27.71% of Ozon’s shares, for 38 billion rubles, and increased the size of their stake to 34.95%. The total value of the deal exceeded 51 billion rubles (512 million euros).

Chachava himself is not the true owner of Ozon — he had neither the money nor the political weight to purchase such a stake in the marketplace. The true owner of the asset was whoever found the money and the administrative resources to buy Ozon, while Chachava’s structures were used as cover.

Having studied the financial statements of a number of companies connected to the acquisition of the largest stake in Ozon, FBK traced a chain of loans totaling more than 51 billion rubles to the company LLC “Delta,” owned by Gennady Timchenko, Vladimir Putin’s closest friend. It was Timchenko, through “Delta,” who paid for the purchase of Ozon. The money reached Chachava’s structures in the form of an interest-free loan.

The heads of one of the key intermediary companies of Chachava’s, through which Timchenko bought the Ozon shares, previously worked in structures connected to Putin’s relative Mikhail Shelomov, as well as to Putin’s friend Yuri Kovalchuk and Putin’s mistress Svetlana Krivonogikh.

Over the four and a half years of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Alexander Chachava has become one of the largest private owners of the Russian internet. Structures connected to him now control 19.69% of Russia’s “Yandex.” In September 2022, seven months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, LETA Capital, an investment firm belonging to Chachava, bought the international gaming corporation MY.GAMES from the VK holding company for $642 million. The CEO of VK since December 2021 is Vladimir Kiriyenko — the son of Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy head of the Russian presidential administration. This fact points to Chachava’s connection to Putin’s presidential administration.

Now, following FBK’s investigation, there is no doubt that this deal too was carried out in the interests of Putin and his inner circle and deserves a separate, independent investigation.

In December 2022, Chachava moved MY.GAMES’s headquarters to Amsterdam and opened company offices in several countries, including Cyprus, where he himself relocated from Moscow in the spring of that year, immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Of course, he did this not out of anti-war views, but for the convenience of doing business in the interests of Putin and his inner circle. Sanctions imposed against Russia greatly complicated commercial activity in Russia, so he relocated to EU territory.

In Cyprus he found support, like-minded people and partners in the person of Alexei Gubarev, connected to the Putin regime no less than Chachava himself, and the TechIsland association founded by Gubarev, which allows Chachava to present himself as a respectable international IT investor. MY.GAMES, in turn, presents itself no longer as a Russian business that relocated to the island after the start of the war, but as a full-fledged participant in the European IT industry.

Gubarev knew perfectly well from the very beginning about Chachava’s connection to Putin, and this fact became decisive in their partnership.

MY.GAMES and Chachava himself are active members and strategic partners of the TechIsland association.

Chachava and MY.GAMES participate in various projects of the island’s Russian IT community, and the company’s office in Limassol is used to hold the association’s events. For example, they were partners of the Game Changers Charity Event, organized in support of the City Friends Club, an organization belonging to Anna Gubareva, wife of the founder and leader of the TechIsland association, Alexei Gubarev.

MY.GAMES CEO Elena Grigoryan regularly speaks at TechIsland Summit conferences.

“Putin’s wallet” Alexander Chachava, through the TechIsland platform, in 2023 took part in discussions with the Cypriot government on changes to migration legislation — the very same amendments that made it possible to bring Russian citizens to the island en masse without proper vetting.

Chachava, with his ties to Putin, is not unique within TechIsland. Many companies in the association and their owners, despite having relocated to Cyprus, retain ties to Russia and to Russian authorities, and some continue to cooperate with Russian security services as they did at home. Like Chachava, many of them continue to do business in Russia itself.

Thanks to the FBK investigation, it was possible to identify a keeper of Putin’s assets and to see how he and other businessmen serving the interests of the Russian dictator use Cyprus and structures created by émigrés from Russia holding Cypriot passports as a convenient base for their activities and a refuge from Western sanctions. And in wartime, all resources that fall into Putin’s hands go toward its continuation. Working for Putin and his inner circle is, in essence, working for Russia’s war machine and for the continuation of the war in Ukraine.

Yet Another Putin «Wallet» Surfaces in Cyprus

Iosif Bronshtein