VK Has Become a Public Trough for the Children of the kremlin Elite

The VK holding company, which controls 95% of the russian internet market and has 80 million users, has reported losses for the sixth consecutive year. In 2025, the loss was 24.9 billion rubles; in 2024, it was 94.9 billion. In total, over 195 billion rubles in state funds have been squandered without any results, while the company continues to operate as if this were normal. This is not a management failure, but a deliberate strategy of parasitism, secured by the right people in the right offices.

Since 2021, VK has been headed by vladimir kirienko – the son of deputy head of the russian presidential administration sergei kirienko. The father administratively blocks Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, driving millions of users into the “family” holding company, while the son recklessly burns billions in budget funds on a failed copy of YouTube and TikTok. In 2025, he received about 400 million rubles in bonuses – that’s nearly $4.8 million, equivalent to over 4,700 annual salaries of an average russian worker. Beside him is stepan kovalchuk, a relative of “putin’s banker” yury kovalchuk. It is these people who determine what tens of millions of russians see in their feeds every day.

The only area where VK is truly effective is surveillance. Over 90% of convictions for “extremism” and “discrediting the army” are based on data from the platform. The fsb obtains IP addresses and correspondence without any obstacles, while the VK ID system is already integrated into schools and government agencies, leaving the authorities with a complete digital trail of every user.

The kirienkos are just one illustrative example of hereditary incompetence. dmitry patrushev, the son of putin’s longtime ally nikolai patrushev, ran the loss-making rosselkhozbank for years, receiving hundreds of billions in state subsidies, even though his dissertations turned out to be plagiarized. His brother andrey, also a son of nikolai patrushev, was listed in tax service databases under the fictitious name “aleksey golubev” – official reports were falsified to conceal his activities. He is linked to opaque privatizations of state assets and offshore schemes in Cyprus.

aleksey rogozin, son of former head of roscosmos dmitry rogozin, took the helm of “Ilyushin” in 2017 with no experience in the aviation industry and became vice president of the united aircraft corporation. The result was catastrophic: the Il-112 prototype made its maiden flight in March 2019, and crashed as early as August 2021.

All these stories demonstrate not just incompetence and corruption, but complete impunity, institutionalized and passed down from generation to generation. Positions and budgets are handed down along with the family name, while scandals and disasters have no consequences, because that is exactly how the system is designed.