Despite the zealously protected secrecy, the Russian president’s worth runs well into the billions of dollars.

William Browder, a one-time leading investor in Russia who was instrumental in passing the Magnitsky Act sanctioning foreign individuals committing human rights abuses, estimates Putin’s wealth at more than US$200 billion. That would put him on par with Tesla’s Elon Musk as the richest person on Earth.

Browder based his estimate on a deal he said Putin struck with the oligarchs in 2004, a Mafia-like offer they could not refuse: half of all they earned would belong to him.

“He doesn’t have any money in his own name,” Browder said from London.

Where is the money?

A lot of it is stashed in overseas accounts, investments and properties. An estimated US$800 billion is held by wealthy Russians offshore, according to a 2017 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

That includes significant real estate, the lion’s share in Europe. Oliver Bullough, a British money-laundering expert formerly based in Russia, is about to relaunch “kleptocracy tours” around London showing luxury properties owned by Russian oligarchs.

Transparency International has estimated that nearly US$2 billion of British real estate has been bought by Russians with Kremlin ties or links to corruption, much of it in London, Russia’s “laundromat” or “Londongrad”, as some call it.

“They often use their children or close associates as cut-outs to hide their wealth,” he said.

Putin denies he owns ‘palace’ as opposition urges more protests

Closer to home, the team of Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader whom Putin’s government has jailed, produced a lengthy report (written in Russian) detailing a complex web of transfers and people that went into “Putin’s palace”, a massive estate in the south of Russia overlooking the Black Sea estimated to be worth US$1.3 billion. Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, who has close links to Putin, has said the property belongs to him.

Ukraine crisis: what previous wars tell us about Putin’s next moves

How long have they been preparing for sanctions?

After Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the US and the European Union imposed a series of restrictive measures against Russian individuals and entities.

But Putin and his band of rich friends have spent years dispersing and hiding the assets, aided by a cottage industry of lawyers, accountants and banks that have served the oligarchs in exploiting the West’s laissez-faire approach to disclosure requirements, as well as loopholes and schemes, to mask their ownership.

“We have a coalition not of the willing, but of the woeful: Putin’s henchmen teaming up with amoral lawyers,” British Parliament member Bob Seely told the House of Commons this week, naming several UK lawyers.

Maira Martini, an anti-money-laundering expert at Transparency International in Berlin, says investigating illicit Russian money will require unprecedented cooperation between countries because funds are often cloaked through shell companies in one country, banks in another and then spent on assets like luxury property in a third country.

“Putin’s wealth is hidden really well,” Martini said. “There are layers and layers between his assets. It requires a whole understanding of who has been serving as proxies for people close to the regime.”

Ill, ‘unhinged’, or calculating? Putin keeps everyone guessing

How are the US and allies going after Russian oligarchs?

The US, European Union and United Kingdom are working with an expanding sanctions list of Russian elites with ties to the Russian president. Those lists represent the prime targets as government investigators begin trying to peel the onion of secrecy.

And on Monday, Switzerland broke from its tradition of neutrality by joining to freeze the assets of Putin, Russia’s prime minister and foreign minister, as well as scores of individuals targeted last week by the EU.

For those on the list, the sanctions would block access to assets and financial transactions in the US, EU and Britain. They would essentially freeze their accounts holding cash and securities.

The US is preparing to add more Russian oligarchs and related parties to its list. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Task Force KleptoCapture, an inter-agency effort to enforce the financial sanctions and other economic measures against targeted Russian individuals and entities.

“We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to investigate, arrest, and prosecute those whose criminal acts enable the Russian government to continue this unjust war,” Garland said.

Russia billionaires’ superyachts head to Maldives to escape sanctions

What are the chances of getting their wealth?

It’s not going to be quick and easy, and in some cases it might be impossible to find proof of Putin’s holdings until after he is no longer in power.

“There’s a political will to go after this systemically, but it takes time. You’ve got to mean it, and it won’t happen overnight,” said Daniel Fried, a former US ambassador to Poland and currently a fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Jamison Firestone, an American lawyer who once practiced law in Russia and has been doing work for Russian dissident Navalny’s group, says the response that he’s seeing from the West is vastly different from the past, in its scope and intensity.

“We weren’t sanctioning family members before, we weren’t pulling their visas,” he said. “And what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning. I cannot imagine, as Kyiv comes under aerial bombardment, that as things get worse and we look at those images on TV, I cannot imagine that we’re not going to keep rolling these out. I think we’re really at the tip of the iceberg here.”

What might the sanctions accomplish?

The goal is not to make Putin a pauper. It’s to disrupt the lives of Putin’s inner circle enough so that they might exert pressure on the Russian leader to moderate his conduct.

It’s unclear whether the oligarchs, even under financial pressure, would dare ask Putin to pull out of Ukraine, let alone try to remove him from power. Putin is using people who are extremely loyal to him and likely dependent on him.

He has built many networks based on personal favours and kompromat, or damaging information, that give him a lot of control over people, said Olga Khvostunova, director of the Institute of Modern Russia in New York.

Still, some say the oligarchs who struck a Faustian bargain with Putin have grown accustomed to enjoying a lavish lifestyle, one that they may not want to give up.

“This isn’t just about money,” Firestone said. “This is about a way of life. The West has done something amazing that we’ve never done before.

“We’re no longer looking for whether you’ve done something wrong. What we’re basically saying is: everything you have is derived by supporting this one dictator. You now have to make a choice. You can’t enjoy our system while continuing to support this regime.”

Said Fried, the former ambassador: “If Putin drives the country into economic chaos and isolation, which he seems to be doing, and the war grows more unpopular, suddenly Putin’s position is unassailable until it’s vulnerable. … I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow. But I also remember [former Romanian President Nicolae] Ceaușescu. He went from being a dictator to being a dead guy in about a week.”.

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How international sanctions imposed since Ukraine invasion are hitting Russia

How international sanctions imposed since Ukraine invasion are hitting Russia

How may Putin be reacting to the sanctions?

On February 24, the day Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, the Russian news agency Tass reported that he summoned 37 of Russia’s business representatives to St Catherine Hall in the Kremlin. It was a virtual who’s who of Russian industry, and they included a handful of billionaires who have since been hit with sanctions from the West.

Putin told them why he had decided to attack and apparently braced them for likely sanctions. And according to published accounts, Putin left the hall without giving any of the business leaders an opportunity to comment.

The sanctions against Putin himself are certainly far more symbolic than anything that would in themselves would be harmful to him. Yet the symbolism is powerful. “The wealth of Putin, we’re supposed to understand it as a tribute. It’s not just that he’s one more billionaire who hides his money,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder said in a lecture Wednesday. “No, it’s a tribute. It’s an aspect of his power. ”

Daniel Treisman, a UCLA professor who specialises in Russian politics and economics, added: “It’s not that he has assets outside the country that are vulnerable to seizure that he’s worried about losing. I doubt that he was ever really going to use all those billions of dollars. It certainly won’t lead him to cut back the luxuriousness of his lifestyle.”

At the same time, Treisman said: “it will certainly be taken as a personal attack, and he’s quite thin-skinned about those things.” And how he might react as the West steps up the pressure on him and friendly oligarchs may be worrisome, especially given his nuclear sabre-rattling.

“I think we have to be worried about his emotional and psychological state,” Treisman said. “He’s clearly extremely emotional about these issues. And any leader when backed into a corner may make decisions that previously seemed unlikely.”