He is ready for the great escape, although he has escaped it for now. He is tempting us in every way, perhaps with a bit of posthumous malice, or with a belated awareness. Certainly this year he will not be seen in the hermitage of Porto Cervo. Pack your bags, too, despite the European Commission has not yet ratified that list of new oligarchs ready to end up in the anti-Putin "freeze". It is said of him that he was the richest man in Russia, more reserved and less showy than the other yes-men of the Tsar, yet that mild and shy character did not prevent him from assuming a leading role in the excited phases of the invasion of Ukraine. He did it with half sentences, gradually more and more explicit, as if to contend for the role of bastian opposed to his most fearsome internal competitor, that Roman Abramovic, who has made a promised land on the international stage. Until yesterday, when his company, the one that he founded and led to become a real world giant of primary aluminum, Rusal, broke the delay with an official statement as super partes as it was hard. The position is taken by the president of Rusal, officially a Dutchman, in an attempt to protect the empire of metal from possible sanctions.

The richest

When Bernard Zonneveld dictates the communiqué, however, few believe that he is not behind that passage: Oleg Vladimirovič Deripaska, born in 1968, ex-husband of Boris Yeltsin's niece, considered by all to be one of the men, until yesterday, more close to the Tsar of Russia. Before the collapse of his primary businesses, in the first decade of 2000, according to the Forbes ranking, he was considered the richest Russian, the ninth in the world, with an estimated assets of 28 billion dollars. When the world agencies broke the Rusal note yesterday morning, the message, which ran from one end of the world intelligence to the other, was only one: the showdown has begun among the Russian oligarchs. That billionaire life, between pharaonic villas from Porto Cervo to Capaccia, from Romazzino to Liscia di Vacca, from suite planes to nabob yachts, begins to creak and the attachment to the supreme leader, for opportunism or rational calculation of interests, is less day after day. The press release from Rusal, the Russian multinational that owns Eurallumina, the raw material factory for the production of aluminum, located in the industrial area of Portovesme, and closed since 2009, is a blow to the system of the oligarchs, to their blood relationship with Vladimir Putin. The words are engraved in the blood of the Bucha massacre, whoever was responsible for it. Rusal writes: "We believe that this crime must be thoroughly investigated." To add a warning immediately afterwards: "We support an objective and impartial investigation into this crime and call for severe punishment for those responsible." Words that would appear normal, but which take on a relevant specific weight precisely because they are spoken by the man of direct expression of that oligarch that Putin considered one of his followers. It is not certain that this distancing, as sensational as it is unexpected, can stop the European sanctions against Deripaska, but it is clear that in the Nuraghi Island, occupied in the most famous part of the Russian tycoons, a deep crack is materializing among men of Putin. And leading this fracture that risks becoming incurable is the aluminum magnate who had set up a factory in Portovesme in Sardinia and a stratospheric and famous villa, in the heart, indeed, on the top of Porto Cervo. Climbing towards the heliport overlooking the old Aga Khan yacht club means reaching the end of the run of the golden paradise of the Costa Smeralda. It is there, in that enclave enclosed by strawberry trees and wrought iron gates with Sardinian shapes, that you come across one of the most prestigious villas of these nabobs born and raised in the steppes of the Soviet Union and, until last year, before the war, undisputed masters of this proscenium as rich as it is enchanted. Villa Walkirie in Porto Cervo is the villa of Oleg Deripaska, the man of Eurallumina, the Sulcis factory closed in the first decade of 2000 leaving hundreds of workers on the street. It is the residence for a few weeks a year of the Russian tycoon who governs the eastern aluminum market and beyond, influencing the metal system all over the world. It is impossible to enter it, like his fellow oligarchs, he has invested a fortune in video cameras monitored by the gaze of those who approach. It is not a place for malicious people, much less for the curious. Here you do not pass. To find out, you have to come across that real estate agent who quietly tells you that you can rent or even buy that iconic villa. In fact, from April 1st, the magnificence of walls and chimneys, windows and swimming pools is for rent or for sale, depending on everyone's availability. Not a handy residence for vacationers without private planes and yachts. Spending even just one night, if they ever rented it for an emotion of sunset and sunrise, it would mean for an ordinary mortal to go into debt for a lifetime. Still, the ultra billionaire has decided to get rid of it before it's too late. Before the end of Usmanov and his associates, all evicted, or rather frozen, waiting to understand if the "freezing" state will shave the green lawn or polish the ancient marble floors. He, Deripaska, plays on multiple tables. On the one hand, he tries to ingratiate himself with the European institutions, to make it clear that he does not agree with the war. He even arrives, albeit belatedly and perhaps in a not completely disinterested way, to write it with an official press release from his company. On the other hand, however, he fears not to be convincing and then the villa, "in a dominant position over the village of Porto Cervo and the entire bay of the main center of the Costa Smeralda", is for sale.