Emboldened Kremlin Steps Up Efforts to Seize Businesses in Russia

The legal onslaught on Moscow’s second-largest airport has been seen as part of the Kremlin’s wartime drive to seize control of key assets still in private hands.

After the fall of Communism, Russia ushered in capitalism by selling off billions of dollars in state assets.

Now, 30 years later, the Russian government is stepping up a wartime campaign to do the opposite: seizing private businesses, this time in the name of national security.

In the last month, courts have ordered Russia’s largest warehouse owner to be taken over by the state and also directed the nationalization of a major grain exporter. And in the most stunning case, prosecutors filed a lawsuit in January to seize Moscow’s second-largest airport.

The new spate of expropriation expands on the seizures of Western-owned businesses in Russia after President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began three years ago. But in these latest cases, the owners are Russian, a sign of how the Kremlin’s push to seize control of the economy amid the war in Ukraine is reaching into ever more industries.

Critics say the asset seizures are also undermining the last vestiges of Russia’s rule of law. They have become “chaotic” and “out of control,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

By seizing lucrative private enterprises, the Kremlin can put large sections of the economy either in state hands or under indirect control of Mr. Putin’s associates, allowing the government to tailor industrial output to the needs of the war effort and also be in a position to introduce price controls. It also aligns with the Russian leader’s goal of tightening his grip on domestic policy.