A widening series of arrests surrounding the notorious businessmen Arkady and Boris Rotenberg has raised questions over whether two of President Vladimir Putin’s oldest and most influential allies are headed for a fall from grace.

Russian daily Vedomosti dubbed the two stoligarchs – state sponsored oligarchs – as the “Kings of state contracts” in 2017 during the infrastructure investment boom after they hoovered up billions of dollars’ worth of state business. However, now it appears they may become the latest victims of a wartime purge among Russia’s elite as tensions in the Kremlin rise.

The brothers, childhood friends and former judo sparring partners of Putin during his St Petersburg days, have not been accused of wrongdoing. But investigators have detained several figures connected to their sprawling network of construction, transport, aviation and financial interests.

Political analyst Mikhail Komin, wrote in a note for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that the arrests are part of a campaign to dismantle the patronage network built by Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s former defence minister.

That purge began in April 2024 with the high profile arrest of Timur Ivanov on corruption charges, Shoigu’s deputy and a senior procurement official known for his lavish lifestyle. It subsequently spread through the defence ministry, ensnaring officers, contractors and officials who had once appeared untouchable.

The Rotenberg investigation has followed a similar pattern, says Komin.

Russian law enforcement authorities this month detained Konstantin Makhov, a former aviation official who became a senior manager on some of the brothers’ largest projects, and Alexander Neradko, who headed the Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsia, for almost 15 years before leaving in 2023.

The two men are accused of involvement in the alleged embezzlement of RUB800mn ($10.4mn), during construction of a third runway at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. They have not been convicted, and the sum cited by investigators could change as the case develops.

Makhov had previously overseen airport infrastructure at Rosaviatsia before moving into companies involved in the vast gas-processing and LNG complex under construction at Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea.

The Gazprom-linked (MOEX: GAZP) project is designed to process 45bn cubic metres of gas and produce 13mn tonnes of LNG annually. Its estimated cost has risen to almost RUB5 trillion, making it one of Russia’s largest and most politically important industrial developments.

Another Rotenberg-linked manager involved in the project, Stanislav Multakh, has also reportedly been detained.

The pressure extends beyond aviation and construction. Artyom Dovlatov, a former deputy chairman of the state development institution VEB.RF, was placed under house arrest in May. Mikhail Poluboyarinov, the former chief executive of Aeroflot (MOEX: AFLT), was detained in June on suspicion of abuse of office.

Senior managers at SMP Bank, which the Rotenbergs sold to state-owned Promsvyazbank in 2022, have also reportedly been questioned and subjected to searches.

Komin argued that the likely trigger was the failure to build adequate fortifications in Russia’s Kursk region before Ukraine’s surprise cross-border offensive in August 2024.

Former Kursk governor Alexei Smirnov was arrested over the alleged theft of funds allocated for border defences. Roman Starovoit, another former governor who later became transport minister, was found dead in an apparent suicide in 2025 as the investigation gathered pace.

Both men had links to the Rotenbergs’ political and commercial network.

“In Putin’s Russia, it’s extremely hard to stop a purge once it has begun,” Komin wrote, arguing that each arrest gives investigators information capable of generating further cases.

The taller they are…

The brothers occupy a far more important position in Putin’s informal hierarchy than Shoigu. Their businesses have won some of Russia’s largest state contracts during Putin’s quarter-century in power, including the Kerch bridge linking annexed Crimea to the Russian “mainland”.

They also acquired the Prosveshcheniye schoolbook publisher and expanded into infrastructure, banking, mining and property. In 2021, Arkady Rotenberg claimed ownership of the vast Black Sea estate that the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny alleged was “Putin’s palace”.

The war initially appeared to strengthen their position. Businesses linked to the brothers have benefited from state contracts and from the redistribution of assets seized or nationalised by the Russian authorities.

Domodedovo itself was nationalised in June 2025 and sold in January to a subsidiary of Sheremetyevo airport for RUB66.1bn. Sheremetyevo’s controlling shareholder has previously been linked to Arkady Rotenberg and his business partners.

But the brothers have struggled to demonstrate their usefulness to Putin’s central wartime priorities. In a rare slight, their network was excluded from the highly profitable and large-scale military drone production at Russia’s flagship drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan – a classic project normally given to a stoligarch to run.

At the same time, their reported sponsorship of the Española unit, a formation built around nationalist football hooligans, failed to develop into a lasting military project, at a time when several leading companies and regions were building private armies.

The brothers now have few obvious means of reversing the pressure, Komin said. They could hope Putin decides the punishment has gone far enough, or seek to restore their standing by delivering a successful project directly connected to the war.

Neither course looks certain. The arrests have yet to reach the brothers themselves, but the removal of managers with detailed knowledge of their companies leaves a network built over more than two decades increasingly exposed.