Part 1. Introduction

There’s a street in Voronezh. On it, in 1968, a boy was born who would, fifty-eight years later, become the largest private shareholder of the country’s main state bank.

It might seem like just another guy buying shares, right? Every day, retail traders are picking up something on the Moscow Exchange. But Yurchenko is not just any 'retail trader'. He holds 10.86% of VTB shares worth 66 billion rubles. Plus, he’s got a bid in for the bank's supervisory board, which is currently controlled by the state.

All of Positiv, LSR, Astra, Ozon Pharma, Seligidar, Novabev, Samolyot, Arenadata — each of these companies is worth less than 66 billion rubles in market cap at the time of writing. This is the scale of one individual against entire public businesses.

Name: Yevgeny Valeryevich Yurchenko. Voronezh State University, Faculty of Radiophysics and Electronics (1992), then the Economics Faculty of the same VSU (1994). Candidate of Economic Sciences, Associate Professor.

Right now, Yurchenko is a public figure with a declared goal: 'to work on the supervisory board of VTB, to develop a strategy for increasing the capitalization of the state bank' (according to his own words in an interview with RBC, February 2026).

There's only one question. The very one you probably already thought of while reading the first two paragraphs.

Where's the money coming from?