If you’re looking for Russia’s weak point at the moment, you could do worse than start at a house on West Heath Road in leafy north London. It looks modest enough, but it would probably set you back $15 million.

It is the primary residence of Andrey Yakunin. His father, Russian Railways chief executive Vladimir Yakunin, is a former KGB agent and longtime pal of President Vladimir Putin. He was also a lead organizer of the Sochi Olympics and heads National Glory of Russia, an organization that aims to protect Russians from Western culture. (In a barely-readable book called Problems of Contemporary World Futurology, he predicted the collapse of the West in 10-20 years). His wife, Natalya, is in the same trade. She heads Sanctity of Motherhood, which propagates the “many-child family” through traditional Russian values and Orthodox Christianity. Their son Andrey is a fund manager, a graduate of the London Business School, and a specialist in “mid-market business hotels,” particularly ones that adjoin Russian train stations. His son, in turn, attends a posh English private school.

The Yakunin family is Putin’s Kremlin in microcosm, a hypocritical spookocracy that rejects everything about the West except its money, houses, and consumer goods. It also encapsulates the Kremlin’s weakness. If Putin’s Ukraine adventure causes Europe to freeze assets and inconvenience the Kremlin elite, then Putin will find himself losing support fast—from the constituency he needs the most.

Putin may project a macho image by getting his guns out at any opportunity, but his actual power is based on elite support, and the elite supports him because he has made it rich beyond the dreams of avarice. For example, Vladimir Yakunin and Putin were neighbors in St. Petersburg. Putin made Yakunin head of Russian Railways, and now, Yakunin owns a palace outside Moscow, where the bathhouse alone has a reported floor area of 15,000 square feet.

The Russian economy is vulnerable. The ruble has tumbled, as has Russia's stock market too. But that will not bother the elite, which keeps its money in dollars and spends as much time in the West as in Moscow—and that encapsulates how hard it is for Europe to take action. In London, thousands of people—the estate agent who sold the home on West Heath Road; the brokers who shift Andrey Yakunin’s stock; the lawyers who sign off on his deals; the teachers at his son's school—have a piece of Russian action. And this isn’t just a London problem. Andrey Yakunin has a brother in Geneva. (There are just the two Yakunin boys. The appeal of the many-child family appears to have struck Natalya Yakunin late in life.)