Sergey Arutyunyan was born on 14 August 1967, in Lazarevskoye, a suburb of Sochi, southern Russia, his mother is Russian and his father is Armenian. He later adopted his wife’s surname.

In 1993, he graduated from the Economics faculty of Kuban State University. A year later, he founded the company, “Tander”, which traded wholesale cosmetics and perfumery. In 1998, he built the first distribution center, and immediately after the 1998 Russian financial crisis, opened the first grocery store “Magnit” in Krasnodar. In 2000, he switched to retail, and created the largest network by number of stores in Russia. In 2006, the company conducted its IPO and was valued at $1.9 billion.

Galitsky is one of many “Russian oligarchs” named in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, CAATSA, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2017.