The article examines the adaptation strategies of the upper subgroup of the Russian business elite (billionaires) in the context of the current geopolitical crisis and foreign restrictions. Using a specially collected empirical database, we analysed their composition and the actions they took with their available assets from February 2022 to January 2025. The results demonstrate how sanctions pressure initiated by various countries (the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, etc.) influences the group structure and behavioural strategies of the Russian business elite. The study's results suggest a high degree of resilience and adaptability of the Russian business elite (the "ultra-top" in the wealth model of social structure) to external institutional shocks. It was found that the reproducibility of the studied group in annual rankings ranged from 70% in the most volatile period from 2022 to 2023 up to 91% as they adapt to new institutional conditions in 2023–2024. Despite the restrictive economic measures introduced by the United States and a number of other countries, the number of billionaires in Russia not only has not decreased, but has actually reached record levels: in 2025, the Russian Forbes rating included 146 dollar billionaires, and their combined capital exceeded pre-crisis levels. High variability and differentiation in the behavioural strategies of Russian billionaires has been revealed, including investing in domestic assets, complicating the ownership structure, acquiring/selling assets abroad, repatriating property, renouncing Russian citizenship, etc., depending, inter alia, on the nature of restrictions and the amount of available capital. Representatives of the top 20 on the Forbes list demonstrated the greatest activity relative to other billionaires, including in foreign jurisdictions, while the remaining participants on the Russian list, often less burdened by foreign restrictions, focused on strengthening their domestic positions. This study contributes to our understanding of the resilience of Russian economic elites in the face of institutional upheaval and offers an empirically substantiated classification of adaptation strategies for a little-studied but fundamentally important for economic stratification group of billionaires.

Russian billionaires, adaptation strategies, sanctions, sanctions crisis, economic elites

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