War opens faint, once unthinkable fissures between Putin and Russian oligarchs

After an earlier social media post calling for peace talks “as fast as possible,” Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska followed up on Sunday with a veiled shot at Putin’s stewardship of the economy, issuing a statement that said, “It is necessary to change the economic policy, it is necessary to end all this state capitalism.”

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A second oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, said in a letter to subordinates that the Ukraine “crisis will cost lives and damage two nations who have been brothers for hundreds of years,” according to Reuters, which said that it had seen portions of the message.

Even the daughter of Putin’s principal spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, voiced opposition to the invasion by posting a black square on her Instagram account with a caption, “No to war!” It was an apparent message of solidarity with protesters in Russia, even as her father defended arrests of thousands who have turned out for rallies that he said were “not allowed by the law.”

Sanctions experts and former U.S. officials said that while the signs of dissent remain tepid, they represent a more palpable fraying of relations between Putin and the ranks of elite loyalists than has been observed in years.

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