Russia got richer last year amid the war in Ukraine, while the Western countries that provided funds and weapons to Kiev to fight against Moscow lost trillions of dollars of their wealth.
Russia added $600 billion of total wealth in 2022, the Business Insider (BI) reported this week, citing the latest annual Global Wealth Report of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) published on Tuesday.
According to the BI, the number of Russian millionaires rose from around 350,000 to about 408,000 last year. However, in 2022, about 1 million of an estimated 23.7 million lost their millionaire status in the United States.
It said 4,500 Russians joined the super-rich people’s club of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNW) — people with more than $50,000,000 — last year.
In the meantime, the collective West, North America and Europe together, lost $10.9 trillion, UBS said, noting that the US alone shed $5.9 trillion of its wealth.
The Swiss bank suggested that Russia’s gains might be attributed to the rising price of oil, a major export commodity and a key economic engine for Russia.
Russia’s added wealth came amid the West’s unprecedented anti-Moscow economic sanctions.
Western officials have admitted that the West’s sanctions on Russia had backfired, hurting Europeans instead.
Amid the West’s planning for anti-Moscow sanctions shortly after the start of war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin warned European buyers of Russian oil and natural gas that punitive measures imposed by the West would backfire, and those Western countries would be hit worse by the bans.
After Western countries banned Russia’s oil, Moscow turned to the East and increased its sales of crude to other countries which in turn re-exported oil to the European countries.
As a result, Mexico, India, and Brazil also gained significant amounts of wealth in 2022, while the US, Japan, Canada, and Australia lost the most, the UBS report suggested.
