Of the 1,150 companies we discovered, 80% are also on Ukraine’s register, which means they were established before the Russian troops arrived and were then transferred into Russian jurisdiction. Out of those, 250 are industrial and agricultural enterprises. The largest of them would generate an income of up to 450 million UAH prior to the war (€13.35 million in 2021), Ukraine’s register says.
The new owners of Ukrainian businesses are mostly Russians: 150 founders of enterprises in large occupied cities have Russian citizenship, and only 14 are Ukrainian nationals. They open new production facilities or expand their companies in the occupied territories. Most frequently those are entrepreneurs from Moscow, the Rostov region, or Crimea.
Of the thousand companies in the occupied cities, only 260 have a disclosed owner. As Ilya Shumanov, CEO of Transparency International Russia, explains, this is how enterprisers try to avoid sanctions: “During the occupation of Crimea, the Russian authorities allowed the owners of Crimean companies to remain undisclosed so that they would not fall under sanctions. This creates a high risk of money laundering through corruption schemes and fraud. The same method is used in the occupied territories these days.”
WHAT ELSE RUSSIA HAS SEIZED:
- Deposits of coal, oil, gas and other resources
Most of Ukraine’s coal deposits are located in the east of the country, and 100 of them are occupied by Russia. The loss of control over the deposits cost Kyiv $12.4 trillion,
as per The Washington Post.
The Russian troops
pillaged BIOL, a prominent dinnerware manufacturer in Melitopol, as early as May. It can now be found in the Russian register. BIOL’s CEO is a Russian national, and its owner is classified. A similar story happened to the Melitopol Automotive Spare Parts Plant: it was pillaged by the occupiers, and is now run by a Russian businessman, a co-founder of six companies nationwide, from Moscow to the Urals.
Prior to the war, Ukraine provided 46% of world exports of sunflower oil and 9% of wheat exports. By July 2022, Russia occupied 22% of Ukraine’s agricultural land,
according to NASA Harvest.
Factories are being used for the needs of the Russian military
Before the war, about thirty enterprises in Berdiansk, including large industrial ones, were owned by the Ukrainian MP Olexander Ponomarev. The Russian military
detained the businessman in March. In an act of protest, all Ponomarev’s factories
shut down operation.
After being captured for 10 days, the MP was
admitted to hospital, and all of his enterprises were
seized by the occupation authorities on 31 October.
Having captured the south of the Zaporizhzhia region, the agrarian stronghold of Ukraine, Russia started to move out grain and agricultural machinery. According to Bloomberg
estimates, Russia has stolen 6 million tonnes of grain from the occupied regions, and the total losses of Ukraine’s agricultural sector, including lost equipment, unharvested crops and the affected land, reached $34 billion by November 2022,
according to the Kyiv School of Economics.
“Those are not liberators, those are marauders,” Melitopol mayor Ivan Fedorov wrote on Facebook in April 2022, adding that the Russian forces stole equipment valued at €1.5 million from local agricultural enterprise Agro-Invest. Most of the equipment had GPS trackers installed: it was transported to Crimea and Chechnya.
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