For Denis Aven, Yale was a great place. He had friends, cash in his pocket, and cachet. Her Campus, a women’s college magazine, even singled him out in 2014 as “a Campus Cutie” who studied economics, spent spring break in Mexico, and seemed like “a worldly European.”
Yet Aven (class of 2016) is more than a worldly European. Like his twin sister, Daria, who also graduated from Yale, Denis is a child of sanctioned billionaire Petr Aven, the former head of Russia’s largest private-sector bank, and a member of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. The Aven twins, in fact, are part of a rarefied breed: the sons and daughters of oligarchs whose immense wealth may have helped secure them a safe berth in the always-tough-to-enter Ivy League.
