The son of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has a job at an affiliate of Rostec, the giant state industrial conglomerate that makes many of the weapons Moscow uses in its war against Ukraine, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, Systema, has found.
In 2016, ahead of his graduation from one of Moscow’s most elite universities, Ilya Medvedev told an interviewer with the Russian tabloid MK that he would not want to work for a big state company.
But that’s exactly what he does. Since October 2022, the younger Medvedev, who turned 30 this month, has been an adviser to the director of RT-Razvitiye Biznesa (RT-Business Development), which is part of Rostec.
He is involved in investments and asset management and draws a monthly paycheck of 270,000 rubles ($3,400), according to leaked Federal Tax Service data reviewed by Systema.
Vladimir Putin tapped Dmitry Medvedev to be president from 2008-2012, enabling Putin to avoid exceeding the constitutional limit of two consecutive Kremlin terms. Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 and, in 2020, pushed through an amendment allowing him to potentially remain in the top office until 2036.
As president, Medvedev presented himself as a relative liberal and a supporter of democratic reform. Now deputy chairman of Putin’s advisory Security Council and chairman of the ruling United Russia party, he has become an often rabidly bellicose supporter of Russia’s war on Ukraine, using social media to deliver poisonous rhetoric and nuclear threats against the West.
Many adult children of high officials in Putin’s ruling structures hold jobs at state companies or private firms with connections to the government or have been appointed to government posts themselves.
The director of Rostec, Sergei Chemezov, has been close to Putin since their time as Soviet KGB officers stationed in East Germany in the 1980s, when they lived in the same apartment building in Dresden. In Ilya Medvedev’s first few months at RT-Business Development, the head of the company was Aleksandr Nazarov, a longtime acquaintance of Chemezov’s.
Ilya Medvedev is the only child of Dmitry Medvedev and his wife, Svetlana. There was no public announcement of Ilya Medvedev’s hiring at RT-Business Development, and there is no public information about how he got the job.
As prime minister from 2012 to 2020, Dmitry Medvedev was responsible for ties with Rostec, and an investment fund linked to Dmitry Medvedev has called itself a partner of Rostec.
In 2015-2019, Ilya Medvedev had a job at the Internet giant VK — though none of the employees Systema spoke to could say what he did there: “I never once saw him at work,” a former senior manager said.
Rostec owned shares of VK through RT-Business Development, and another VK shareholder at the time was the prominent billionaire Alisher Usmanov. In 2019-2022, Ilya Medvedev worked in the investment division of Kriptonit, an IT company that belonged to Usmanov at the time.
In 2022, a representative of Usmanov has denied the tycoon was close to the Medvedev family and said any attempt to connect Usmanov to Ilya Medvedev’s career was “biased.”
Rostec and RT-Business Development did not respond to requests for comment for this report.
Dmitry Medvedev has been chairman of United Russia, one of the main instruments of Putin’s political control nationwide, since 2012. His son joined the party a few months after Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He was subsequently hit with US and European Union sanctions.
In 2023, United Russia said Ilya Medvedev had coordinated the establishment of a website called I Am In Russia for use by residents of the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine that Putin baselessly claims are part of Russia.
