Ukrainian oligarchs

Ukrainian oligarchs are a small class of extremely wealthy businesspeople who emerged after Ukraine's 1991 independence, building fortunes in the 1990s chiefly by acquiring formerly state owned enterprises through the country's privatization process, a pattern that mirrored what happened across other post Soviet states after the Soviet Union's collapse. Their economic weight became enormous: by 2008 Ukraine's fifty richest oligarchs together controlled wealth equal to roughly 85 percent of the country's gross domestic product, and for years a handful of men controlled major political parties, media outlets and industrial monopolies, giving them outsized influence over Ukrainian government and public life. Russia's full scale invasion in 2022 sharply reduced this class's fortunes and numbers, leaving only two Ukrainian billionaires by November 2023, Rinat Akhmetov and Viktor Pinchuk, down from nine a year earlier. Concern over their political power led Ukraine to pass an anti oligarch law in 2021 that formally defines an oligarch by wealth, political influence, media ownership and monopoly control, and imposes registration requirements and limits on political financing.