You’d think from the headlines all around the world that every sanctioned Russian oligarch has by now lost their super-yachts, their mansions, and their multi-national bank accounts and are living in social exile, their reputations severely tarnished.
And yet…
while the stories of supposed misery among the fabulously wealthy make for salacious reading, are they really indicative of mass financial suffering among Russia’s corrupt plutocracy? Or are they just gossipy headlines, serving a symbolic or political purpose rather than a substantive one? Most seriously of all: Could they even actually be counter-productive?
To find out what the oligarchs are really doing and thinking, I turned to what one might argue is the most reliable source of what is really going on: the “ROGs,” my invented acronym for the “Russian Oligarch Girlfriends.”