As Russian troops roll in, Ukraine's second-richest man, Victor Pinchuk, must choose between his head and heart
If you’re standing at the charred wreck that Kiev’s Independence Square now resembles, getting to Victor Pinchuk’s house takes about 40 minutes, through the winding streets of Old Town, past the drab Soviet high-rises and elevated highways and into the woods. Two security agents in military uniforms, fully armed and equipped with radios, make sure you’re an invited guest. And then onto the 280-acre spread you go.
It’s from this gilded perch, complete with six-acre Japanese garden, sculptures from Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst and a glass entertainment pavilion designed by the same team which built the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium in Beijing, that Pinchuk watched his country’s astonishing revolution unfold live on television.
Ukraine’s second-richest man, worth an estimated $3.2 billion, saw the swelling crowds move from rock-throwing to song-singing; he saw the snipers shooting unarmed protesters; he saw a tyrant fall, a new government struggle. And he’s still watching, as Russian troops pour into Crimea and his country flirts with national schism. “We were in shock,” says Pinchuk, 53. “To see death as it happens, live on the air, is horrible.” He wasn’t just a passive spectator. “We were on the phone constantly—with businessmen, with politicians, with our Western and Eastern friends, discussing what all of us could do.” His team ferried medical supplies to the wounded in the Maidan, as the central square is known. “My thoughts were with them all the time,” he now says.
That reference seems pretty apt. In The Idiot Dostoyevsky chronicles the anguish of a Russian noble with ties to Europe who can’t choose between the woman he thinks he should marry and the one who has captured his heart. Pinchuk faces a similar internal battle, the fate of his country at stake, his head wrestling with his soul.
“It’s very hard to be in politics and, at the same time, in business,” says former heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko, one of the heroes of Independence Square, who now intends to run for president.
“If I have resources I must try to be useful to the country,” says Pinchuk. And it isn’t just the heavy hitters who have enjoyed his generosity. Increasingly over the last few years Pinchuk 2.0 has devoted his philanthropy to exposing Ukraine’s youth to outside ideas and global society. He brought Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and physicist Michio Kaku to Kiev to talk with young students. His jazzy PinchukArtCentre in Kiev has shown the works of avant-garde artists like Anish Kapoor and Takashi Murakami. Sharing those works, says Pinchuk, “is a very important tool for us, for modernising our country.”
(This story appears in the 04 April, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)