Disassembling Oligarchy: A Network-Based Inquiry into Ukraine’s Economic Elites

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Abstract
Network analysis was employed to investigate ownership and management connections among Ukraine’s 995 top taxpayers as of late 2021, with the objective of empirically evaluating the presence and coherence of “oligarchic” clusters immediately preceding the onset of the Special Military Operation. The analysis is based upon a publicly accessible registry of firms, which provided data on company names, regions of registration, directors, ultimate owners, revenues, profits, assets, and liabilities. From these data, a person-to-person graph was constructed in which nodes corresponded to individual actors (directors or owners) and edges denoted shared ties through asset control or executive functions. Cluster analysis techniques were subsequently applied to identify statistically significant communities of actors linked by common economic interests. The results indicate that, by the end of 2021, Ukraine did not exhibit “oligarchs” as individuals controlling a large share of national wealth and exercising substantial political influence. Instead, most high-revenue entrepreneurs maintained relatively limited portfolios of enterprises, and the few actors who might be classified as oligarchs pursued divergent business and political strategies that failed to fit into a single pattern. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions in the literature on post-socialist political regimes, which often presume the existence of stable and homogeneous “oligarchic” conglomerates. Consequently, informal elite structures in Ukraine appear to have been more fragmented than commonly portrayed. Although the concept of “oligarchy” retains analytic value for examining state-business relations within post-socialist contexts of a certain epoch, the present analysis underscores the necessity of adopting a more nuanced, data-driven perspective on elite configuration. It also calls for a critical reevaluation of assumptions regarding the persistence and immutability of post-Soviet political-economic orders.