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Vladimir Potanin sat on the advisory panel of the New York-based Council on International Policy and among the trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan a month ago, alongside the world’s financial and business elite.
Those power circles, which included former Blackstone Inc. executive Tom Hill and billionaires from Brazil and India, had been nurtured for decades. Potanin, Russia’s richest man, is now barred from entering. He’s dropped off both boards in the last two weeks.
The nickel and palladium magnate, who is one of Russia’s few original oligarchs still active in business, has not been sanctioned. Potanin, who has a net worth of $24.5 billion, is regarded as the mastermind behind the contentious loans-for-shares program that resulted in the privatization of natural resource companies following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For much of the last two decades, cultural institutions in the United States in the arts, non-profits, and education were willing to overlook the history of how billionaires with ties to Russia amassed their fortunes. In Potanin’s case, he was publicly seen with Vladimir Putin years ago, including in an exhibition hockey game in Sochi.
Potanin, 61, now needs to stand out as an example of how quickly Western bastions of social capital are rotating in the face of mounting pressure on Putin to end the Ukraine war. While Russia’s elite have a number of options for reshaping their fortunes in the aftermath, regaining their place in these institutions will likely be more difficult.
“The reputational risk of keeping an oligarch on an institutional board like CFR right now is just too great,” said David Szakonyi, co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Information Collective, which has studied the philanthropy of billionaires with ties to Russia. “It will be extremely difficult for Potanin to reclaim his former positions.”
Potanin, president of MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, which produces about 40% of global palladium and 10% of refined nickel, did not respond to interview requests.
For the first time since the Ukraine invasion, Boris Yeltsin’s former first deputy prime minister for energy and economy spoke publicly last week, criticizing Russia’s retaliation against international sanctions.
