Yuri Kovalchuk spent his childhood and youth in
Leningrad. He was the second child in a family of history teachers. His father, Valentin Mikhailovich Kovalchuk, is Russian, and his mother, Miriam Abramovna Kovalchuk (née Viro), is
Jewish. His brother Mikhail is five years older than him. From 1987 to 1991, he was the first deputy director of
Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute. In 1992, Kovalchuk was a founder of the STREAM Corporation (). Kovalchuk is very closely associated with
Vladimir Stolyarenko. Since the early 1990s, Kovalchuk has owned a
dacha in Solovyovka in the
Priozersky District of the
Leningrad region, located on the eastern shore of the
Komsomolskoye lake on the
Karelian Isthmus near Saint Petersburg. His neighbours there are
Vladimir Putin,
Vladimir Yakunin,
Andrei Fursenko,
Sergey Fursenko,
Viktor Myachin,
Vladimir Smirnov and
Nikolay Shamalov. Together they instituted the co-operative society
Ozero (the Lake) which united their properties on 10 November 1996. The May 2008 issue of Russian
Forbes listed him for the first time in its
Golden Hundred of Russia's richest, calling him and another new entrant to the
List,
Gennady Timchenko, "good acquaintances of Vladimir Putin." The magazine placed him at number 53 on the Russians-only list, with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion. After sanctions imposed on Kovalchuk in 2018, this dropped to $650 million. His elder brother
Mikhail Kovalchuk is the scientific secretary of the Council for Science and High Technologies attached to the president of the
Russian Federation. In 2015, Yury Kovalchuk's
National Media Group (NMG) and US
Discovery Channel joined forces to form Media Alliance of which NMG owns 80%. Later that year, Kovalchuk acquired the rights to
Ted Turner's Russian assets including the Russian version of
CNN,
Cartoon Network and
Boomerang. The reason for the sale was based on the Russian media ownership law that limits ownership of Russian media by foreigners. In 2020, the world's leading streaming entertainment service
Netflix partnered with the National Media Group to launch a local-language streaming service in Russia. In 2017, Kovalchuk purchased the century-old
Novy Svet vineyard in
Crimea for $26.4 million in one of the first privatization deals in the region since the
annexation of the region by Russia. As of January 2019, Kovalchuk and
Nikolai Shamalov through their ownership of Rossiya Bank have become the most important investors in Russia's development of annexed Crimea. On 15 April 2021,
Alexei Navalny's website stated that since 2003 Kovalchuk has owned Putin's residence at Valdai, which is on the southern of a peninsula between
Lake Uzhin and
Lake Valdai in the
Novgorod Oblast near
Saint Petersburg and across Lake Valdai from
Valday. Built in 1980, Putin's Dacha is often called
Valdai,
Dolgie Borody, or ''Stalin's Dacha'', though Stalin was not alive when it was built. Abutting north of this location is owned by the Russian Federation and used by the
Federal Security Service. In December 2021,
Alisher Usmanov's holding company USM said it had sold its stake in Russia's leading
internet group VK to state-run insurance company
Sogaz, which is partly owned by Yury Kovalchuk. ==Sanctions==