TIMCHENKO, Gennady Nikolayevich (b.1952) is a Russian-Finnish billionaire, a close friend of Vladimir Putin. Born in Soviet Armenia and raised in East Germany and Ukraine, in 1976, he graduated from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute. He started his career as an engineer at the Izhorsky plant near Leningrad, which specialized in building power generators. From 1982 to 1988, he worked as a senior engineer for the Ministry of Foreign Trade.