# Two Russian Businessmen Broke Ranks in Public, and the Story Grew on the Way to Print > The head of Sberbank and a fertiliser billionaire have said things Russian businessmen do not usually say out loud. What follows in the reporting, about capital flight and mutiny, rests on much thinner ground. - Source: France 247 - Canonical URL: https://france247.news/article/russian-elite-distance-putin-capital-flight - Author: Clement Dubois - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-08-03T10:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-03T10:30:00.000Z - Tags: Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Sanctions --- Two things in this story are firm. German Gref, who is 62 and runs Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia, and who has been inside Vladimir Putin's circle for a long time, has argued for an end to the war in Ukraine on the grounds that it is doing lasting damage to the economy, and is reported to have accused the Kremlin of holding the economy back to avoid a peace deal it would find humiliating. Separately, Andrei Melnichenko, a billionaire whose money is in fertiliser, publicly called for Western economic support, which in the Russian context reads as criticism of how the country is being run. That is genuinely unusual. Russian business figures at that level do not, as a rule, say anything in public that can be read as disagreement with the Kremlin, and two doing so within weeks is a data point worth recording. Gref in particular is not a dissident. He is an insider whose institution absorbs the cost of sanctions and a war economy directly, and whose argument is about balance sheets rather than politics. The economic pressure behind it is documented well enough. Ukrainian drone strikes have hit Russian oil infrastructure repeatedly, and the disruption has reached ordinary commerce, including the Wildberries online marketplace, with fuel shortages reported in places. A war economy running on high rates and closed capital markets does not fail suddenly. It grinds, and the people who run large institutions inside it see the grinding first. Where the reporting becomes weaker is everything that comes after. The claim that the wealthiest Russians have moved tens of billions of dollars abroad in the past year, that the regime is very fragile and stands a strong chance of collapse, and that factions are positioning for a Russia after Putin, comes from a single conflict analyst quoted in a British tabloid, and from there into aggregation and onward. It is a forecast attributed to one person, not a finding, and the headline word mutiny is doing a great deal of work for something nobody named has claimed. It is worth being blunt about why this matters. Predictions of imminent collapse in Moscow have been published continuously since February 2022 and have so far been wrong every time. That does not make the next one wrong, and elite defection is genuinely one of the mechanisms by which authoritarian systems end. It does mean the evidentiary standard should not fall just because the conclusion is one many readers would like. The measurable version of the question is capital movement, and it is measurable. Outbound flows from Russia show up in the balance of payments, in Gulf and Central Asian property registries, in Emirati and Turkish company formations and in the bank statistics of the jurisdictions receiving the money. If tens of billions have moved in a year, it will be visible in those numbers rather than in an interview. What can be said today is narrower and still notable. Two men with a great deal to lose have said in public that the war is costing more than it is worth. --- Originally published by France 247. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://france247.news/article/russian-elite-distance-putin-capital-flight.