Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin was a Soviet and Russian politician and businessman. He was the Minister of Gas Industry of the Soviet Union, after which he became first chairman of Gazprom energy company and the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Russia (1992–1998) based on consecutive years. He was a key figure in Russian politics in the 1990s and a participant in the transition from a planned to a market economy. From 2001 to 2009, he was Russia's ambassador to Ukraine. After that, he was designated as a presidential adviser.

PJSC Gazprom is a Russian majority state-owned multinational energy corporation headquartered in the Lakhta Center in Saint Petersburg. As of 2019, with sales over $120 billion, it was, until 2023, ranked as the largest publicly listed natural gas company in the world and the largest company in Russia by revenue. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Gazprom was ranked as the 32nd largest public company in the world. The Gazprom name is a contraction of the Russian words gazovaya promyshlennost. In January 2022, Gazprom displaced Sberbank from the first place in the list of the largest companies in Russia by market capitalization. In 2022, the company's revenue amounted to 8 trillion rubles. In 2023, the company is delisted from international markets, and continues substantial constriction in its operational results.