In 2025, after many wealthy Russians had already been living under sanctions for several years, Sberbank, a Russian state bank, opened a ski resort called “Manzherok” in the Altai region. Sberbank CEO Herman Gref envisioned it as becoming the most luxurious resort in the country. Sberbank succeeded — and now 13 guarded villas host wealthy Russians. After reviewing the resort’s internal documents, Meduza special correspondent Maria Zholobova found Russian officials, businessmen on the Forbes list, hackers, and people connected to Russia’s Federal Security Service among the guests. At the resort, they’re provided with personal security, a car, and a butler — and treated to “sanctioned goods.” To make this happen, the resort’s creators forcibly bought up local residents’ homes.

In 2011, Sberbank took over a money-losing ski resort. Local residents were evicted from the area, and it became Russia’s Courchevel.

In July 2025, Altai’s traffic police announced it would close the Chuysky Trakt — the main road through the republic — for three days. Local authorities said the closure was necessary so that motorcades carrying Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and other government delegations could travel unimpeded to the Manzherok resort, near Mount Sinyukha. At the time, the resort was hosting an international environmental conference, expected to draw top officials from across the CIS.

In the comments under the Altai traffic police’s post, residents asked at least for a schedule of the closures, so they could “work around the officials’ visit.”

“Don’t worry 😊,” the traffic police’s official account replied.

“These bureaucrats are so infuriating,” Altai residents wrote. “They’re not servants of the people. They’re quite the opposite: enemies!”

For a while, the traffic police’s press team pushed back, but eventually closed the comments section.

Although no agreements, declarations, or memorandums were signed at the high-profile conference at Manzherok (at least, Meduza was unable to find any), the Russian government called the gathering a “landmark event in environmental diplomacy.”

Prime ministers from eight “friendly” countries were greeted with bread and salt and then shown the beauty of the Altai region. Manzherok spent nearly 440 million rubles just on a four-day “cultural and entertainment program,” according to the resort’s procurement records reviewed by Meduza. That amount went entirely to Norm Production, a company founded by the creators of Comedy Club, for its services at the conference.

Over the past several years, after Sberbank invested in Manzherok, the resort has become a favorite spot for Russian officials. The bank became the owner of the unfinished ski resort in the rural settlement of Manzherokskoye in 2011.

At the time, experts called the asset problematic and illiquid. “Sberbank got stuck with a bad deal,” one analyst told the Russian business daily Kommersant, commenting on the acquisition.

Sberbank CEO Herman Gref himself tried to get rid of the resort, spending several years looking for buyers, but found no takers. The bank then changed its strategy. Gref’s new goal became “to make Manzherok the best resort in the world.”

“While Europe is closed off, we’ll replace the word ‘Courchevel’ with ‘Manzherok.’ Everyone will come to us,” Gref promised after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. To that end, the Sberbank chief promised to tear down all the “kibitkas,” “shalashi,” and “shankhais,” that is, the numerous mini-hotels, tourist camps, and guesthouses in the Altai region.

Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper, reported that land plots were bought out “ultimatum-style” from residents of the village of Ozernoye, where the resort is located. Refusal wasn’t an option: the land redistribution proceeded under the cover of a comprehensive territorial development program that allowed land to be seized for government investment projects.

Livestock that grazed along the roads started being taken to “paid impound lots,” as the media called them, in what locals believe was an effort to keep cows from spoiling the view. If cows weren’t bought out because it was too costly, they were slaughtered instead, Novaya Gazeta reported.

A well-known video showing Gref scolding taxi drivers outside the Gorno-Altaisk airport (“What are you doing standing here in your underwear? Who are you? Some kind of gang… Disperse them”) was also filmed not far from Manzherok.

Local residents, initially happy about the resort’s construction because they thought they too would be able to ski there, quickly realized that this “world-class tourist cluster” was likely to become a source of problems for them.

Residents of Manzherok recorded an appeal to Putin: “We ask you, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, to preserve our village.” According to their petition, the territorial development project calls for seizing 1,600 hectares (3,954 acres) of land for Manzherok.

The resort was a modest ski complex with one- and two-star hotels when Sberbank took it over in 2011; 15 years later, it had become an expensive, year-round destination.

Despite statements in the press that Manzherok’s management is working to make the resort “accessible to all Russians,” the cheapest room at its three-star hotel cost about 20,000 rubles a night in December.

Experienced skiers and snowboarders are disappointed with the new resort: it’s “boring,” the lifts close at 5 p.m., there are no parties, and there’s nowhere to “listen to music (not a violin).”

“It’s completely dead here,” one of them concluded.

Staying at the luxury villas costs from 200,000 rubles a night. Guests get special security and a butler.

In 2023, Sberbank decided to develop the slopes of Mount Malaya Sinyukha as well, at the foot of which Manzherok is located. The result was the resort’s most expensive lodging: 13 villas that cost between 200,000 and half a million rubles a day.

A week at the most expensive chalet, the “Imperial”-class Moskva, will cost nearly three million rubles in November.

There’s no way to find out how much a stay costs during the New Year holidays or the “long weekends” around February 23 and March 8, since those dates are already unavailable.

The villas’ main selling point is privacy. The chalets sit in a forest cleared specifically for them and are “hidden from prying eyes,” Manzherok emphasizes. “Regular” Manzherok guests can’t access the villa grounds, since they’re located behind a separate checkpoint. Each villa has its own access to the ski slopes.

Manzherok provides VIP guests with round-the-clock personal security. The resort only hires specialists with several years of experience working with “VIP individuals” for the job, according to its procurement documents. Chalet guests also get a personal car to get around the resort grounds.

The villas range from 400 to 1,400 square meters (4,306 to 15,069 square feet) in size (the largest belongs to the most expensive, “Imperial” chalet). The chalets are built from “century-old Siberian cedar.” They are named and decorated “in honor of the world’s iconic cities”: Minsk, Baku, Samarkand, Bishkek, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Alma-Ata, Ashgabat, Dushanbe, Shanghai, as well as Kazan and Moscow. The “presidential” chalet is named after St. Petersburg.

Since 2025, Italian architect Lanfranco Cirillo, who designed Putin’s “dacha” near Gelendzhik, has overseen Sberbank’s architectural and design projects. Leyla Uluhanli, a socialite dubbed a designer of ”the best homes in Moscow, London, and New York,” whom trade media call an “expert in luxury interiors,” decorated the chalets.

Manzherok promises that chalet guests will be “immersed in the atmosphere” of the cities the chalets are named after, right from the doorway. In the “Bishkek” chalet, guests are greeted by “ancient talismans that, according to legend, protect against evil spirits,” along with traditional robes and chess sets painted by Kyrgyz craftsmen.

The “Yerevan” villa has backgammon sets, “Tbilisi” has a papakha hat and a burka cloak, and “Samarkand” has a collection of copper dishware. “Minsk” has “mesmerizing sconces made of wheat stalks,” while “Alma-Ata” features an 18th-century batyr shield and an antique gold-embroidered shapan.

The designers spared no expense decorating the villas. For example, Manzherok’s procurement records show that the company paid 1.7 million rubles for a single armchair and ottoman from the Italian brand Arketipo.

Each villa comes with a personal butler who, according to the resort, works around the clock. “Beyond all praise. He catches every glance, understands every sigh,” the authors of the Telegram channel Antiglianets, who had stayed in “Samarkand,” gushed.

According to the resort’s internal documents, Manzherok meets some guests right at the airport, “planeside,” and pays mobile carriers separately to improve signal quality across the chalet grounds.

The Manzhara restaurant next to the chalets serves guests maral venison, black caviar, Khasan oysters from the Far East, and other delicacies.

The resort’s procurement documents reviewed by Meduza explicitly specify “the supply of sanctioned goods.” The same vendor supplies Manzherok with fresh truffles.

Guests especially praise the quality of service: “You won’t find this kind of treatment in the Seychelles or the Maldives.”

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The resort’s first guests included Konstantin Malofeev, hackers, and officials

Even before the FBI officially declassified its investigation into the Evil Corp hacking group in 2019, its members avoided leaving Russia, fearing arrest.

The UK’s National Crime Agency called Evil Corp the most significant cybercrime group in the world. It used malware to attack banks and financial institutions, with damage from its activities estimated at more than $100 million. In 2019, the FBI offered a then-record $5 million reward for information about the group’s founder, Maksim Yakubets.

If Yakubets leaves Russia, he will almost certainly be arrested and extradited to the United States. As a result, the hacker has vacationed first at Sberbank’s Mriya resort in Sochi, then at a luxury hotel on the shore of Lake Baikal, and now at Manzherok in the Altai region.

In October 2025, Yakubets and his wife, Alena Benderskaya, paid more than four million rubles for a stay at Manzherok, Meduza found (it’s unknown how many days they spent at the resort).

Alena is the daughter of Eduard Bendersky, a former member of the Vympel special forces unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) who is now officially a businessman. Vadim Krasikov, the killer who was exchanged in the summer of 2024 and returned from Germany, where he had been serving a sentence for the killing of former Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, also served in Vympel.

Krasikov spoke with Bendersky by phone several times before the killing, according to the independent Russian investigative outlet The Insider. The UK’s National Crime Agency called Bendersky a key intermediary between Evil Corp and the Russian state, which tasked the group with carrying out cyberattacks against NATO countries.

Benderskaya and Yakubets paid for their hotel stay on the same day as Felix Evtushenkov, the son of AFK Sistema founder Vladimir Evtushenkov and the company’s current chief executive. Documents obtained by Meduza show that the two transactions took place about 15 minutes apart.

Bendersky, who also stayed at Manzherok, was not placed on the FBI’s wanted list like his son-in-law, Maksim Yakubets, but the U.S. Justice Department imposed sanctions against him.

Since the full-scale war began, European resorts have been closed to sanctioned Russian officials and businessmen. Russia, for its part, has also barred senior politicians, civil servants, and state company employees from traveling abroad.

“There were cases when very senior people were told: no, no vacation at all. Go rest… in Altai, for example,” The Moscow Times quoted a senior state company employee as saying.

Manzherok’s villas began receiving guests in 2025. The resort’s private section turned out to be an ideal place for Russia’s elite to vacation.

Meduza obtained a list of Manzherok’s first guests. Besides hackers and people connected to the FSB, we found sanctioned officials, lawmakers, and businessmen among them.

The “Orthodox oligarch” Igor Altushkin, whose fortune Forbes Russia valued at nearly $5 billion, was placed under UK sanctions in 2023 — the country that had become his family’s second home. In 2019, Alexey Navalny’s team found that the Altushkins owned a mansion in London next door to David Beckham, as well as a five-room apartment nearby.

Navalny’s investigation found that Altushkin’s wife, Tatyana, and their son, Timofei, hold British citizenship. “I only use it so it’s more convenient for me to travel around Europe without a visa,” Altushkin’s son, Timofei, artlessly said in his own defense to journalists.

In 2024, the European Union also imposed sanctions on Altushkin, founder of the Russian Copper Company, Russia’s third-largest copper producer. The EU’s justification also said that the businessman finances a unit fighting in Ukraine (The Moscow Times had previously discovered this).

The billionaire and his son now apparently travel to Manzherok. In 2025, the Altushkin family paid the resort nearly 26 million rubles.

Alexei Krapivin, the “king of state contracts” and a shareholder in 1520, the largest construction contractor for Russian Railways, paid about the same amount, 23 million rubles, for a stay at the most expensive “Imperial” chalet. In 2022, Forbes Russia valued Krapivin’s fortune at $800 million, enough to put him on the list of Russia’s 200 richest businessmen (Forbes Russia has not published that ranking since the start of the full-scale war).

The ANO Evraziya, which is linked to Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, paid Manzherok more than 20 million rubles. He fled Moldova in 2024 after being accused of large-scale embezzlement from Moldovan banks. Shor came to Russia, obtained citizenship, and launched the A7 payment system to help evade Western sanctions.

A7 is now described as Russia’s largest company in the cross-border money transfer market, and the United States has designated it a “significant transnational criminal organization.”

Another Manzherok guest is Konstantin Malofeev, the “Orthodox oligarch” and founder of the Tsargrad television channel, whom the EU and the United States sanctioned in 2014 for supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine. Malofeev was among the first in Russia to face this.

In February and March 2025, several major Russian industrialist billionaires may have visited Manzherok around the same time: Alexander Dyukov, head of Gazprom Neft, and Leonid Mikhelson, chairman of the board of Novatek. Olga Syrovatskaya, wife of Transmashholding co-owner Andrei Bokarev, and Tamara Bogdanova, wife of Surgutneftegas head Vladimir Bogdanov, paid several million rubles for lodging.

In February 2026, Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK), owned by Viktor Rashnikov, paid for lodging at Manzherok.

Rashnikov’s property in Europe was seized in the first wave of sanctions, in March 2022. Three apartments in Paris and a villa on the French Riviera, once home to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, were frozen. A year later, another villa at the Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat resort, reportedly belonging to Rashnikov, was also seized. MMK’s owner tried to challenge the EU sanctions against him, but without success.

According to Manzherok client data obtained by Meduza, the resort issued a bill for about 2.5 million rubles in September 2025 to Artem Chaika (also known in the media under the name LSDUZ), son of former Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.

At the same time, Manzherok issued a bill for just under two million rubles to businessman Maksim Vorobyov, brother of Moscow region Governor Andrei Vorobyov.

Artem Chaika’s brother Igor now heads Rossotrudnichestvo. But Khartiya, a company in which he transferred his stake into trust management, is a major contractor for the Moscow region government.

Besides businessmen, officials vacation at Manzherok too.

Ahead of the New Year holidays in 2026, Moscow Deputy Mayor for Transportation Maxim Liksutov paid for a stay at the resort, spending more than four million rubles on the trip. Liksutov is a former businessman who moved into public service many years ago. Still, every year until the start of the full-scale war, he reported tens and even hundreds of millions of rubles in income on his declarations.

The resort also received payments at various times from:

• Alexander Nikolin, head of Sergei Kiriyenko’s staff
• United Russia lawmaker Maria Vasilkova
• Yulia, daughter of Andrei Makarov, who chairs the tax committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament
• Natalya Kartyshova, wife of Dmitry Kalimulin, head of Putin’s Referentura
• Irina, wife of Alexander Zel, deputy head of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s staff.

Sberbank proudly calls Manzherok “Russia’s Davos” and a “magnet” for “conferences, meetings, and business negotiations.” In his official capacity alone, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has visited the resort at least three times.

Vladimir Medinsky and his Russian Military Historical Society, with support from Russia’s Presidential Administration, created a recurring conference called “Altai: The Ancestral Homeland of the Turks,” and travel to the resort every year. A body under the Presidential Property Management Department paid for lodging for Medinsky and other Kremlin staff.

In May 2026, AST GOZ, a trading platform for state defense procurement and sanctioned companies, hosted a corporate event at Manzherok.

In April 2025, Margarita Louis-Dreyfus flew to Manzherok. She is co-owner of one of the world’s largest agricultural companies, the Dutch firm Louis-Dreyfus. At the time, a buyer was being sought for her Russian assets, whose fate remained undecided.

Gref personally paid 3.4 million rubles for Louis-Dreyfus’s stay, according to Manzherok’s documents. It’s unknown who the Forbes billionaires-list figure might have met with at Manzherok. In July, Kommersant reported that a preliminary sale agreement for Louis-Dreyfus’s Russian business had been signed with a company called Gorizont Industries, whose founders are not disclosed.

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At the end of 2025, Russia passed a law creating a new gambling zone right on Manzherok’s territory. Russia already has several such zones, one of which is just a half-hour drive from the Gorno-Altaisk airport.

The movement Kurultai of the Altai People collected several thousand signatures against the construction of the casino and sent them to local lawmakers. The petition’s authors wrote that they were concerned about rising gambling addiction among residents of an already poor region.

The republic’s State Assembly tried to reassure activists: the new casino isn’t meant for them. Local lawmaker Konstantin Krivoruchko explained:

Meduza sent questions to the subjects of this story but received no response from any of them.