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During the war with Ukraine, the number of billionaires in Russia has reached an all-time high. But in the 25 years Vladimir Putin has been in power, Russia’s rich and powerful – known as oligarchs – have lost almost all their political influence.

All this is good news for the Russian president. Western sanctions have failed to turn the uber-rich into his opponents, and his carrot-and-stick policies have turned them into silent backers.

Former banking billionaire Oleg Tinkov knows exactly how the sticks work.

The day after he criticised the war as “crazy” in an Instagram post, his executives were contacted by the Kremlin. They were told his Tinkoff Bank, Russia’s second-largest at the time, would be nationalised unless all ties to its founder were cut.

“I couldn’t discuss the price,” Tinkov told the New York Times. “It was like a hostage – you take what you are offered. I couldn’t negotiate.”

Within a week, a company linked to Vladimir Potanin – currently Russia’s fifth-richest businessman, who supplies nickel for fighter jet engines – announced that it was buying the bank. It was sold for only 3% of its true value, says Tinkov.

In the end, Tinkov lost almost $9bn (£6.5bn) of the fortune he once had, and left Russia.

This is a far cry from the way things were before Putin became president.

In the years following the break-up of the Soviet Union, some Russians became fabulously rich by taking ownership of massive enterprises formerly owned by the state, and by exploiting the opportunities of their country’s nascent capitalism.

Their newly acquired wealth brought them influence and power during a period of political turmoil and they became known as oligarchs.

Russia’s most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, claimed to have orchestrated Putin’s ascent to presidency in 2000, and years later he appealed for forgiveness for doing so: “I didn’t see the future greedy tyrant and usurper in him, the man who would trample freedom and stop Russia’s development,” he wrote in 2012.

Berezovsky may have exaggerated his role, but Russia’s oligarchs were certainly capable of pulling strings at the highest echelons of power.

A little more than a year after his apology, Berezovsky was found dead in mysterious circumstances in exile in the UK. By that time, Russian oligarchy was well and truly dead, too.

So when Putin gathered Russia’s richest in the Kremlin hours after ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, there was little they could do to object, even though they knew their fortunes were about to take a massive hit.

“I hope that in these new conditions, we’ll work together just as well and no less effectively,” he told them.

One reporter present at the meeting described the assembled billionaires as “pale and sleep-deprived”.

The run-up to the invasion was very bad for Russia’s billionaires, and so was its immediate aftermath.

According to Forbes magazine, in the year to April 2022, their number fell from 117 to 83 because of the war, sanctions and a weakened rouble. Collectively, they lost $263bn – or 27% of their wealth each on average.

But the years that followed showed that immense benefits were to be reaped from being part of Putin’s war economy.

Lavish spending on the war spurred economic growth of more than 4% a year in Russia in 2023 and 2024. It was good for even those among Russia’s ultra-rich who were not making billions directly out of defence contracts.

In 2024, more than half of Russia’s billionaires either played some role in supplying the military or benefited from the invasion, says Giacomo Tognini, from Forbes’s Wealth team.

“That’s not even counting those who aren’t directly involved, but do need a relationship of sorts with the Kremlin. And I think it’s fair to say that anyone running a business in Russia needs to have a relationship with the government,” he told the BBC.

This year saw the highest ever number of billionaires in Russia – 140 – on the Forbes list. Their collective worth ($580bn) was just $3bn shy of the all-time high registered in the year before the invasion.

While allowing loyalists to profit, Putin has consistently punished those who have refused to toe the line.

Russians remember all too well what happened to oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once Russia’s richest man, he spent 10 years in jail after launching a pro-democracy organisation in 2001.

Since the invasion, almost all of Russia’s mega-rich have stayed quiet, and those few who have publicly opposed it have had to abandon their country and much of their wealth.

Russia’s wealthiest are clearly key to Putin’s war effort, and many of them, including the 37 business people summoned to the Kremlin on 24 February 2022, have been targeted by Western sanctions.

But if the West wanted to make them poorer and turn against the Kremlin, it has failed, given the continuing wealth and absence of dissent among Russian billionaires.

If any of them had considered defecting to the West with their billions, the sanctions made that impossible.

“The West did everything possible to ensure that Russian billionaires rallied around the flag,” says Alexander Kolyandr of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

“There was absolutely no plan, no idea, no clear path for any of them to jump ship. Assets were sanctioned, accounts frozen, property seized. All that effectively helped Putin to mobilise the billionaires, their assets and their money, and use it to support the Russian war economy,” he tells the BBC.

The exodus of foreign companies in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine created a vacuum quickly filled by Kremlin-friendly business people who were allowed to buy up highly lucrative assets on the cheap.

This created a new “army of influential and active loyalists”, argues Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“Their future wellbeing depends on continued confrontation between Russia and the West,” while their worst fear is the return of the previous owner, she says.

In 2024 alone, 11 new billionaires emerged in Russia in this way, according to Giacomo Tognini.

Russia’s leader has maintained a firm grip on the country’s key movers and shakers, despite the war and Western sanctions – and in some respects because of them.

The revolution will not be televised, but it might have webbed feet and bulging eyes.

It also might have a unicorn’s horn or a chicken’s feathers.

As protests against the Trump administration continue in US cities, demonstrators are adopting the energy of a community costume parade or block party. They’ve taught salsa lessons, handed out snacks and ridden unicycles as armed law enforcement look on.

Mixing humour and politics – a tactic social scientists call “tactical frivolity” – is not new. But it has become a defining feature of American protest in the Trump era, embraced by both left and right.

And one symbol has emerged as particularly salient – the frog. It began when video footage of a confrontation between a man in a frog suit and immigration enforcement agents in Portland, Oregon went viral, and has since spread to protests across the country.

“There’s a lot going on with that little inflatable frog,” says LM Bogad, a professor at University of California, Davis and a Guggenheim Fellow who specialises in performance art.

It’s hard to talk about protests and frogs without talking about Pepe, a cartoon character embraced by far-right groups during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

When the meme first took off online, the image was used to signal certain emotions. Later, it was deployed to show support for Trump, including one notable meme retweeted by Trump himself, depicting Pepe with Trump’s signature suit and hair.

Pepe was also depicted in right-wing online communities on 4chan, 8chan and Reddit in darker contexts, as Adolf Hitler or a member of the violent white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan. Online conservatives traded “rare Pepes” and set up cryptocurrency in his name. His catchphrase, “feels good, man”, was deployed as an inside joke.

But Pepe didn’t start out so controversial.

Its creator, artist Matt Furie, has been vocal about his distaste for how the image has been used. Pepe was supposed to be simply a “chill frog-dude” in this artist’s universe of characters.

The frog first appeared in a series of comics in 2005 – apolitical and best known for pulling his pants all the way down to pee. In the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man, which chronicles Mr Furie’s efforts to wrest back control of his work, he said his Pepe drawing was inspired by his experiences with friends and roommates in his 20s.

Early in his career, Mr Furie experimented with uploading his work to the nascent social web, where other users began to borrow, remix and reinvent his character. As Pepe spread into the more extreme corners of the internet, Mr Furie tried to disavow the frog, even killing him off in a comic strip.

But Pepe lived on.

“It shows you that we don’t control symbols,” says Prof Bogad. “They can change and shift and be reworked.”

Until recently, the popularity of Pepe meant that frogs were largely associated with the right. But that changed on 2 October, when the confrontation between a protester dressed in an inflatable frog costume with a blue neck scarf and an immigration officer went viral.

The moment came just days after Trump ordered the National Guard to Portland, calling the city “war-ravaged”. Protesters began to gather in droves on a single block just outside an immigration enforcement facility.

Tensions were high and an immigration officer sprayed a chemical agent at a protester, aiming directly into the air intake fan of the puffy frog costume.

The protester, Seth Todd, responded with a joke, saying he had tasted “spicier tamales”. But the incident went viral nonetheless.

Mr Todd’s attire was not too unusual for Portland, known for its quirky culture and left-wing protests that revel in the absurd – public yoga and 80s-style aerobics lessons, and nude cycling groups. The city’s unofficial motto is “Keep Portland Weird”.

The frog even played a role in the ensuing legal battle between the Trump administration and the city, which argued the National Guard deployment was unlawful.

While the court ruled in October that Trump had the right to deploy troops, one judge dissented, referencing in her minority ruling the protesters’ “well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods deployed by ICE”.

“Observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterisation of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd,” Judge Susan Graber wrote. “But today’s decision is not merely absurd.”

Trump’s deployment was “permanently” blocked by courts just a month later, and troops have reportedly departed the area.

But by then, the frog had become a potent anti-administration symbol for the left.

The costume was spotted across the country at No Kings protests last autumn. There were frogs – and unicorns and axolotls and dinosaurs – in San Diego and Atlanta and Boston. They were in small towns like Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and big international cities like Tokyo and London.

The frog costume was back-ordered on Amazon and rose in price.

What brings both frogs together – Pepe and the Portland frog – is the interplay between the humorous, benign cartoon amphibian and a deeper political meaning. This is what political scientists call “tactical frivolity”.

The strategy rests on what Prof Bogad calls the “irresistible image” – often silly, it’s a “disarming and charming” display that calls attention to your ideas without obviously explaining them to a viewer. It’s the goofy costume you wear, or the symbol you draw, or the meme you share.

Prof Bogad is both an expert in the subject and a veteran practitioner himself. He’s written a book on the subject, Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, and taught workshops around the world.

“You could go back to the Middle Ages – when people are dominated, they use absurdity to speak the truth a little bit and still have plausible deniability.”

The idea of this approach is three-fold, Prof Bogad says.

As protesters take on a powerful opposition, a silly costume takes control of the optics. “It makes it look worse if you respond with violence,” he says.

Second, an image can set a certain tone for those within the movement and would-be supporters. In Portland “it was like a radical costume ball and we all got invited”, Prof Bogad says.

Crucially, this kind of tactic can offer political cover for criticism. Sometimes that shows up in claims of political memes as “just a joke” – a defence against critics who would brand your views as dangerous. But it’s especially useful in circumstances where government criticism can be dangerous, Prof Bogad says.

He points to Otpor, the Serbian pro-democracy protest movement that supported efforts to overthrow Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 through pranks and street comedy. For years, critics of Chinese President Xi Jinping have shared images of Winnie the Pooh to signal their opposition online, where more bold-faced criticism could face censorship.

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have also embraced Pepe, unaware of its political affiliations in the US.

“Of course, authoritarians don’t like to be laughed at,” Prof Bogad says. This kind of symbolism works because “without even giving a speech, you are undermining the authoritarian script”.

At home in Oregon, a group of Portlanders doubled down on the viral fame and banded together to form “Operation Inflation”, which collects and distributes inflatable costumes to protesters.

They started a website where supporters can donate $35 to buy suits “for community members to wear at ICE protest sites to help deflate (pun intended) the tensions surrounding protests”.

Brooks Brown, a co-founder of Operation Inflation, says the point is to “shift the story that’s being told” by the Trump administration that all protesters are part of a violent mob.

“Our job is to build a different stage, and to force them onto ours,” he says.

Mr Brown says the inflatables bear similarities with the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when protesters would often dress in their Sunday finest and sit motionless as they were harassed by counter-protesters and arrested by aggressive police.

Pepe, Mr Brown says, “was a fascist symbol for 4chan. And now we’re being reclaimed. Feels good, man.”

By late October, his group had bought more than 350 outfits and is planning a “pipeline” to send supplies to other cities where inflatables have been used at protests.

Once synonymous with the right, the Portland frog has now been sometimes dubbed the “Antifa Frog” online – referencing the decentralised, leftist movement that opposes far-right causes and has been designated a domestic terrorist group by Trump.

Memes depict him fighting Pepe – two frogs battling for national attention.