The Russian Billionaire Selling Putin’s War to the Public

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One of the most influential voices bolstering Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine belongs to a 71-year-old billionaire who argued that a war could prove Russia’s strength.

Yuri Kovalchuk, for decades a close friend of the Russian leader, shares Mr. Putin’s vision of Russia as a powerful military and cultural counterpoint to the U.S., people who know him say. The billionaire and Mr. Putin have met frequently since the start of the war in February, and also talk by phone or video, according to a friend of the Kovalchuk family as well as to a former Russian intelligence official.

Mr. Putin has long relied on an inner circle of trusted allies to run businesses in the most critical sectors of the Russian economy. Mr. Kovalchuk stands out both for his personal relationship with the president and for his role in shaping public opinion, according to financial and court documents and interviews with former intelligence officials and friends and associates of the billionaire.

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Mr. Kovalchuk, who remains subject to financial sanctions by the U.S., EU and U.K., is helping Mr. Putin consolidate control of the internet—important to Kremlin efforts to reach younger people with a presidential election coming in 2024. He bought control late last year of VK Co., which runs the country’s largest domestic social-media network, VKontakte, often called the Facebook of Russia.

State-tied accounts inundate the platform with posts decrying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the West, according to experts on Russian social media. In territories of Ukraine that it controls, Russia arranged for new mobile phones to come programmed with the platform and blocked the local population from accessing foreign social-media sites.

Part of the logic of buying VK was to keep tabs on anti-Kremlin users, according to a person in the tech industry with ties to the Kremlin. As Russian security officials use the platform to identify and track violators of laws that ban discrediting or spreading misinformation about the Russian military, VK informally shares data about users with authorities, according to people familiar with the platform’s practices.

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Between February and October, VKontakte was the source of more than 45% of the 1,122 alleged violations on social media of a law banning antiwar statements, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist and research fellow at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

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