where is putin's yacht

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Satellite image shows super yacht linked to Putin out of reach of sanctions

By Catherine Herridge, Michael Kaplan, Andrew Bast, Jessica Kegu

March 3, 2022 / 7:30 AM EST / CBS News

As Europe and the U.S. bear down with a raft of aggressive sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, the super yacht he is believed to own has found safe harbor in a highly militarized port in Russian territorial waters. In new satellite imagery obtained by CBS News, the yacht can be seen docked in a port in Kaliningrad, near Russia's nuclear weapons operations. 

Experts say Putin's luxury vessel has become a symbol not only of his vast hidden wealth, but also of how challenging that money has been to find. 

"He's a KGB agent, so he's crafty. He knows how to hide when he needs to," said John Smith, former director of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers and enforces all foreign sanctions.

Data from MarineTraffic, a global intelligence group, shows Putin's alleged yacht, the Graceful, left Germany two weeks before the invasion of Ukraine . 

Putin's government salary is said to be about $140,000, but that doesn't begin to explain the mansions, million-dollar watch collection and over-the-top yacht. 

"It would be fair to say he's among the richest men in the world," Smith said. 

Though he sells himself as a man of the people, his wealth is estimated to be more than $100 billion. 

Putin's critics allege he also has a cliffside palace that includes an amphitheater and a personal tunnel to the beach that doubles as a security bunker. 

"Of course, he doesn't acknowledge it as being his own," Smith said. "It doesn't fit with the public persona that he's trying to create to actually acknowledge it." 

Putin relies on his oligarch friends to shield his fortune from sanctions, Smith said. 

"So if he asked them to do something, they do it in terms of hiding assets, squirreling them in different parts of the globe, they will do what he needs," he said. 

Those who have tried to expose Putin's fortune have done so at great personal risk. 

Putin critic Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015. Sergei Magnitsky died in 2009 under questionable circumstances in prison after he exposed $230 million in fraud by Putin's friends. Putin publicly condemned Nemtsov's murder and claimed Magnitsky died of a heart attack.  

His most recent No. 1 critic, Alexei Navalny , who helped expose Putin's lavish palace, emerged as a political rival and found himself repeatedly jailed. He nearly died after being poisoned two years ago, though Putin has denied responsibility for the poisoning. 

"Putin's wealth is one of the most dangerous topics," said Russian journalist Roman Badanin, who spent two decades investigating Putin's financial web. 

Badanin said Russian authorities sought to intimidate and silence his reporting team. Six months ago, he reached his breaking point. 

"I fled the country. My apartment was searched twice. I have like three criminal charges against me back in Russia," he said. 

In his State of the Union address, President Biden said the U.S. and its allies are waging economic war on Putin and Russian oligarchs. 

"We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments and your private jets," Biden said. 

On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced the formation of a new task force that would target Russian oligarchs. 

"Russia is not a transparent economy," Smith said. "The U.S. and our allies have decent information on some of [Putin's] assets, I think a lot will remain a mystery for a long time in the future." 

The biggest financial hit for Putin would be sanctions on the energy sector, which Smith says the Russian president has used to build up his wealth for years. So far, Washington and the Europeans have been hesitant to do that. 

• Vladimir Putin

Catherine Herridge is a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News covering national security and intelligence based in Washington, D.C.

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Vladimir Putin’s Superyacht Graceful Has A New Name: “Killer Whale”

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Vladimir Putin's yacht Kosatka, formerly named Graceful, off the coast of Estonia on September 25.

The Russian president’s superyacht was spotted off the coast of Estonia, escorted by a Russian Coast Guard vessel.

Vladimir Putin’s second-largest superyacht is on the move. More than seven months after hastily departing Germany for the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, the Russian president’s $119 million, 267-foot Graceful was spotted off the coast of Estonia—with a new name.

Photos seen by Forbes that were taken on September 25 by Carl Groll, a contributing photographer for TheYachtPhoto.com, reveal that Graceful has a new name: Kosatka , Russian for “killer whale.” Forbes, which was tipped off by TheYachtPhoto.com’s managing director and longtime yacht watcher Peter Seyfferth, compared photos of Graceful available on yacht industry websites with the photo of Kosatka that appear to confirm the match.

The yacht was traveling northbound in the Baltic sea to the west of the Estonian island of Saaremaa; the pictures show it being escorted by an armed Russian Coast Guard vessel, possibly en route to St. Petersburg. It’s unclear when Graceful changed its name to Kosatka or when it departed Kaliningrad, a Russian territory sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland: the yacht’s transponder has been turned off since at least August 30, according to ship tracking service MarineTraffic, when it was still in Kaliningrad. A spokesperson for the Russian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kosatka —then named Graceful —departed the German port of Hamburg on February 7, seventeen days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine. It left for Russia after a five-month refit at the shipyards of Blohm+Voss, the company that built the yacht in 2014. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Graceful —along with three other yachts linked to Putin—on June 2.

Kosatka moored at the port of Sochi, Russia in July 2015, when it was still named Graceful and before its refit in 2022.

Registered in Russia, Kosatka features an indoor swimming pool that turns into a theater and a dance floor, a helipad and suites for up to 12 guests. The ship also boasts pool towel storage cabinets that double as vodka bars and an owner's suite with a wine cave that can store up to 400 bottles; the yacht was delivered to "her closely-collaborating owner" in 2014, according to Lürssen, which owns Blohm+Voss.

According to a BBC News investigation published in March, the yacht is currently owned by Moscow-based JSC Argument, which the U.S. Treasury sanctioned along with its sole shareholder, Andrei Gasilov, on June 2. The BBC investigation found that JSC Argument had in the past agreed to a loan from one of the management companies involved in the construction of "Putin's Palace,” an opulent, 190,000-square-foot estate near the resort town of Gelendzhik on the Black Sea coast. JSC Argument did not respond to phone calls for comment from the BBC.

According to yacht valuation experts VesselsValue and reporting from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Graceful was previously owned by British Virgin Islands-based Olneil Assets Corp. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned a company in the Cayman Islands with a similar name—O’Neill Assets Corporation—on June 2, for "having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, Vladimir Putin."

Besides Kosatka , Putin has been linked to at least five more yachts: the $507 million, 459-foot Scheherazade , which is technically owned by oil & gas billionaire Eduard Khudainatov but is believed to be held on behalf of Putin ; the $22 million, 187-foot Olympia ; the $18 million, 177-foot Chayka , which means “seagull” in Russian; the $17 million, 151-foot Shellest; and the 105-foot Nega. Olympia and Kosatka , then named Graceful , were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on June 2 as “blocked property in which President Vladimir Putin has an interest” while Shellest and Nega were targeted as “two additional yachts linked to Putin.” Altogether, Putin’s fleet of yachts is worth at least $680 million, according to VesselsValue.

Except for Scheherazade , which was frozen by Italian authorities in the port of Marina di Carrara on May 6 and recently re-registered to Malaysia, and Olympia , which is registered in the Cayman Islands, the other yachts are all registered in Russia. All of the other yachts, except for Scheherazade , also appear to be in Russia now: Olympia was last tracked in Lake Ladoga, near St. Petersburg, on July 31, 2021; Chayka was last tracked in the Black Sea port of Sochi on March 29, 2021; Shellest was last tracked off the coast of Gelendzhik on September 13; and Nega was last tracked in Lake Ladoga on August 14.

The links between the six yachts and the leader of the Kremlin are complex. According to the U.S. Justice Department, Eduard Khudainatov— a former CEO of Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft and a longtime associate of Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s current boss and Putin’s right-hand man —acted as a “clean, unsanctioned straw owner” for Scheherazade , owning it through Marshall Islands-based Bielor Assets Ltd. A spokesperson for Khudainatov did not respond to a request for comment regarding Scheherazade when Forbes reached out in June.

Olympia is owned by Cayman Islands-based Ironstone Marine Investments, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on June 2. According to the U.S. Treasury, Shellest and Nega are owned by the Russia-based Non-Profit Partnership Revival of Maritime Traditions and its subsidiary LLC Gelios; both entities were sanctioned on June 2. Putin’s ties to Chayka are clearer: the yacht is owned directly by the Russian government, according to VesselsValue.

An investigation by OCCRP published in June shed light on the murky relationship between Putin and his yachts. The firms that own Shellest and Nega are tied to "LLCInvest," a network of interconnected companies and nonprofits that holds a collective $4.5 billion in assets, including Putin's palatial complex on the Black Sea. The group is also linked to another yacht, the $9 million, 121-foot Aldoga , owned by a firm held by Svetlana Krivonogikh, rumored to be the mother of one of Putin's daughters.

The investigation also revealed how Putin appears to use the yachts: Shellest makes frequent trips between Gelendzhik—the site of “Putin’s Palace”—and Sochi, while Nega travels between several homes owned by LLCInvest companies, including a villa known as the “Fisherman’s Hut” on Lake Ladoga and Villa Sellgren, a mansion on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. OCCRP reached out to more than 100 LLC Invest email addresses and made phone calls to five representatives of LLC Invest companies for comment; none of the emails received replies to the questions and four of the people called did not respond, while a fifth claimed he did not know who owned the companies.

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Italy won't say who's paying for the care of a $700 million superyacht tied to Putin

Dustin Jones

The Scheherazade, a 460-foot superyacht, has been held in Italy since May 2022 in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It is believed to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Laura Lezza/Getty Images hide caption

The Scheherazade, a 460-foot superyacht, has been held in Italy since May 2022 in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It is believed to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Scheherazade superyacht was impounded by the Italian government in May 2022 in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Instead of falling into disrepair, Italy has allowed its owner to maintain and refit the vessel, but it won't disclose who is footing the bill.

The Financial Times reported on Sunday that the vessel has been held at port in Marina di Carrara, located almost 90 miles northwest of Florence, since it was impounded by authorities in the spring of 2022. For over a year, the Italian government has permitted the owner to continue paying for the ship's staff, its maintenance and refitting of the vessel. But Italy won't identify the owner.

Italy's Finance Ministry said in a May 2022 news release that the superyacht had "significant economic and business links" with "prominent elements of the Russian government" but didn't name the owner of the ship.

Ukraine invasion — explained

Ravaged by russian troops, bucha rises from the ashes.

According to the website SuperYachtFan , the 460-foot superyacht belongs to Russian billionaire Eduard Khudainatov. However, Bloomberg News reported in 2022 that he is a "straw owner" of the superyacht — as well as another ship — and that the Scheherazade actually belongs to Putin.

The Financial Times reported that the Scheherazade has 22 cabins, two helicopter decks and a spa and that it's being refitted by the Italian Sea Group. NPR reached out to the Italian Sea Group for comment but did not hear back before publication.

The United States created Task Force KleptoCapture in the wake of Putin's war against Ukraine, aiming to hold Russian oligarchs accountable for evading sanctions. In its one year of operation, the task force has brought charges to at least 35 individuals and entities, NPR previously reported.

Part of those efforts included seizing luxury items belonging to billionaires with ties to the Kremlin. This includes items like a 348-foot yacht seized in Fiji in May 2022, which is valued at about $300 million and is now sitting in San Diego.

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‘Mysterious’: the $700m superyacht in Italy some say belongs to Putin

Activists linked to Alexei Navalny believe the Scheherazade is owned by the Russian president

F or several months, the mysterious 140-metre-long, six-floor superyacht has towered over the smaller boats in the shipyard in Marina di Carrara, a town on Italy’s Tuscan coast, arousing chatter among its people over the identity of its wealthy owner.

“It’s the largest yacht I’ve ever seen here,” said Suzy Dimitrova, who owns a boat in the marina. “There are people cleaning it all the time. The last time I saw it leave [the shipyard] was last year. We’re all wondering who the owner is.”

The Scheherazade, said to be worth $700m (£528m), is under investigation by Italian authorities for potential links to sanctioned Russians. And activists working with the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny are in no doubt that the yacht is owned by the Russian president Vladimir Putin .

On Monday, investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh and anti-corruption activist Georgy Alburov said that all crew members, obtained from a list dating December 2020, were Russian, apart from the captain. In a video published on YouTube, they claimed that some of the yacht’s staff worked for the Russia’s Federal Protective Service (FSO), an agency that manages security for high-ranking officials including Putin.

The activists, who have urged Italian authorities to seize the yacht, said this information proves it belongs to Putin. “They are Russian state employees, military personnel, and they regularly travel to Italy as a group to work on the mysterious yacht,” Pevchikh wrote on Twitter.

The interior of the vessel was described as being equipped with a spa, swimming pools, two helipads, a wood-burning fireplace and a pool table designed to tilt so as to reduce the impact of the waves.

In an address to the Italian parliament on Tuesday, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Italy to seize the yacht, adding that Putin and his wealthy supporters often holidayed in Italy and should have their assets blocked.

“Don’t be a resort for murderers,” he said. “Lock all their real estate, accounts and yachts – from the Scheherazade to the smallest ones.”

Putin’s last official visit to Italy was in 2019, at the invitation of the former prime minister, Giuseppe Conte. He also held talks with Pope Francis at the Vatican during the visit.

Marina di Carrara is close to Forte dei Marmi, a favourite holiday destination for Russian oligarchs, many of whom have bought villas and beach resorts.

In early March, Italian police seized a yacht owned by Alexei Mordashov, the richest man in Russia before being blacklisted by the European Union, and another owned by Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire with close ties to Putin , in the Ligurian port of Imperia.

The yacht can only be seen through a fence, where it is continuing to undergo a refit, scheduled to be completed next year, in a shipyard owned by The Italian Sea Group, a company that refits and builds luxury yachts.

The mystery over its owner gathered momentum in early March, when finance police in Carrara boarded the yacht as EU sanctions against Russian oligarchs kicked in over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .

The police seized ownership documents from the yacht’s British captain, Guy Bennett-Pearce. At the time, US officials told the New York Times that they were also investigating whether the yacht belonged to Putin.

The Italian Sea Group said in a statement that it was continuing to work on the ship’s €6m (£5m) refit and maintenance despite the EU’s sanctions and that, according to documents in its possession, the vessel “is not attributable to the property of the Russian president Vladimir Putin”, and neither is it owned by a Russian on the sanction list.

A source at the finance police unit in Carrara said that they are now aware who the owner is and will soon make an announcement.

An investigation by La Stampa newspaper earlier this month had linked the vessel to Eduard Yurievich Khudainatov, the former president of the Russian state oil firm Rosneft, via a shell company registered in the Marshall Islands.

But Italian police are reportedly certain that Khudainatov is not the yacht’s real owner. “He seems to be a man connected with Putin’s inner circle but not so rich as to own a yacht like the Scheherazade,” said Jacopo Iacoboni, the journalist for La Stampa who carried out the investigation.

Until the Italian police reveal their findings, the people of Marina di Carrara continue to ponder, even if its presence causes concern. “Putin is the presumed owner, and looking at it now causes me a lot of anxiety because of what he is doing in Ukraine,” said Maria Cristina.

However, there are no signs of protests being planned. “There are always a lot of words, but little action here,” said Dimitrova.

• Vladimir Putin

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How can a $700 million superyacht sitting in an Italian port ‘belong to no one’? Russian sleuths say it’s Putin’s

In the legend of Tales From the Thousand and One Nights , Scheherazade is a beautiful virgin who escapes being murdered by the king by telling him stories at night.

Scheherazade is also President Vladimir Putin’s $700 million superyacht, according to Russian investigative journalists—and its ability to survive being seized by Western governments will require far more cunning than storytelling.

The yacht, currently moored in the Marina di Carrara on Italy’s Tuscany coast, is gargantuan, even by the outsize dimensions of Russian oligarchs’ superyachts. At about 459 feet long , it has six levels of decks, two helipads with a hidden helicopter hangar, a spa, huge living room and dining room, a swimming pool and three saunas, as well as an upper-level “owner’s area” that includes its own private spa.

“Belongs to no one”

For weeks, there have been questions about who owns the superyacht, which is registered in the Cayman Islands through a shell company. But on Monday, the group headed by jailed Russian activist Alexis Navalny claimed in a YouTube video that the vessel belongs to Putin himself.

“On paper, it belongs to no one, and sits quietly in an Italian port,” the video says in Russian. “Watch the video, and you will find out how Putin owns this yacht through figureheads, and how we can take this yacht away from him.”

The group obtained the all-Russian crew list for the yacht, and found that almost all of them were employed by Putin’s security detail, the Federal Protective Service, known by its Russian acronym FSO.

Earlier this month, the Scheherazade’ s British captain, Guy Bennett-Pearce, told the New York Times he was under “a watertight nondisclosure agreement” about who the superyacht’s true owners were, but claimed he had never seen Putin on board.

But Navalny’s group says the crew’s employment status suggests that the Russian leader owns the vessel. If that hunch is correct, it would be subject to immediate seizure under U.S., U.K., and European Union sanctions.

Superyachts have been one of the most visible signs of Russian oligarchs’ mammoth wealth—and, recently, one of the most often seized. French police seized a $120 million vessel allegedly owned by Igor Sechin, head of the Russian oil giant Rosneft, on the Mediterranean coast earlier this month . Spanish officials impounded  two more yachts, including the Crescent , a 443-foot superyacht also thought to belong to Sechin.

Another boat, owned by former KGB agent Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, was stranded in Norway when no one would sell it fuel. And on Monday, the 460-foot superyacht Solaris , owned by the sanctioned billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich, was spotted parked in the harbor of Bodrum, Turkey; that country has not implemented sanctions.

Putin’s $200 billion

Western governments face a daunting task in tracking down Putin’s true wealth, which could amount to some $200 billion, according to financier Bill Browder, who told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 that Putin’s inner circle of oligarchs split their billions 50-50 with the Russian president. The assets include a $1.3 billion mansion on the Black Sea, funded through a Russian health project in which Putin allies were vastly overpaid for medical supplies.

The Scheherazade , in fact, might not be Putin’s only superyacht. Last month, the vessel Graceful made a hurried departure from its berth in Hamburg as the EU was drafting tough new sanctions just days before Putin sent Russian tanks into Ukraine. Believed to be linked to Putin, that superyacht is thought to be worth $100 million .  

But untangling ownership details, and pinpointing them to Putin, will be immensely complicated.

In that, Navalny’s team has joined forces with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP, a Sarajevo-based group of investigative journalists, to create a database of oligarch wealth. It publishes its “ Russian Asset Tracker” in Russian , English, and Spanish.

The journalists say they are focusing on “a new generation of wealthy men obedient to Putin”—many of whom are now under Western sanctions and whose funds Western governments believe are crucial to funding the Ukraine war. The database lists mansions, superyachts, private planes, and other property, so far totaling about $17.5 billion. The group is sure that will grow, and invites people to send details of “anything we’ve missed.”

“Figuring out who owns what, and how much of it, is a tall order even for experienced police investigators,” the journalists say. “We decided to follow the trail.”

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Inside putin’s $700m yacht, complete with gold toilet paper holder.

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This yacht makes a Bond villain’s boat look like a dinghy.

Vladimir Putin, whose forces continue to attack Ukraine , spared no expense on his alleged $700 million superyacht, which comes complete with its own dance floor — and even golden toilet paper holders. Rumors that the boat belonged to him have been swirling since its construction; however, anti-Kremlin activists recently claimed that it is indeed Putin’s .

“It’s like a mini city,” an unnamed worker reportedly involved in its construction told the Sun of the 495-foot luxury vessel, which is moored in Marina di Carrara in Italy. “There are countless swimming pools, a spa, a sauna, a theatre, ballrooms, a gym, two helipads.” 

Known as Scheherazade — after the iconic Persian queen from literature — the opulent watercraft was reportedly estimated at £500 million ($6.6 million), although insider sources price it closer to £750 million ($990 million).

And it appears that Putin put his money where his boat is: Photos obtained by the Sun show the veritable maritime mansion and its six floors of swanky amenities. They include a 16-foot aquarium, multiple televisions — including a 15-foot beast spanning an entire wall — and a self-leveling pool table so that guests can play even when the sea turns turbulent.

There are also bathrooms outfitted with King Midas-evoking gold taps and toilet paper holders, plus a tile dance floor that converts into a pool. Scheherazade is thought to be one of only two ships in the world with that feature, the Sun reported; the other is Putin’s second yacht, Graceful.

Along with standard bling, the Russian president decked out the superyacht with personal touches, including a judo room with framed pictures of black belts, plus various books showcasing the autocrat’s worship of wealth.

“Every surface is either marble or gold,” an unnamed boatbuilder told the Sun of the glitzy vessel, which the worker finds especially obscene in light of current events.

“It is hard to swallow the fact that the most incredible ship in the world is owned by a man intent on bombing civilians in Ukraine,” he continued. “And it is an unimaginable amount of wealth when the average Russian’s salary is £5,000 a year, and people there are struggling to eat.”

The ritzy ship isn’t just built for pleasure cruises. Much like the baddie’s superyacht in the movie “Thunderball,” Scheherazade can supposedly transform from a party boat to a battleship in a flash with a state-of-the-art security system reportedly capable of shooting down drones.

If that wasn’t ostentatious enough, the superyacht-cum-aircraft-carrier also contains two helipads and a hangar than can house a helicopter, six Jet Skis, five dinghies and eight Seabob underwater scooters.

Scheherazade was built over two years ago. However, the vessel’s alleged ties to Putin came to light recently after activists affiliated with jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny claimed that some of the crewmembers worked for the Federal Security Service, which handles the Russian leader’s security.

“To sum up, a dozen of Vladimir Putin’s personal guards and servants are constantly maintaining one of the world’s largest yachts docked in an Italian port,” investigative journalist and Navalny ally Maria Pevchikh wrote on Twitter Monday.

Meanwhile, during a Tuesday address to the Italian parliament, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky implored Italy to confiscate the assets of Putin and his supporters, who he claimed frequently traveled to Italy, the Guardian reported .

“Don’t be a resort for murderers,” he said, urging Italian authorities to seize every yacht “from the Scheherazade to the smallest ones.”

The ship is currently being investigated by authorities for potential ties to sanctioned Russians.

See the full set of image at The Sun

Despite the accusations, the Scheherazade’s British captain, Guy Bennett-Pearce, has denied that Putin has ever owned or even set foot on the vessel.

“I have never seen him. I have never met him,”  he told the New York Times , adding that the vessel’s owner was not on any sanctions list.

Earlier in March, Italian officials seized several superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs, including Alexey Mordashov’s 213-foot vessel , Gennady Timchenko’s 132-foot watercraft and Audrey Melnichenko’s $578 million, 469-foot superyacht.

The seizures are among the latest efforts to hit Putin and those close to him over Russia’s brutal assault against Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24. 

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Why the U.S. put a $1 million bounty on a Russian yacht’s alleged manager

On Sept. 3, 2020, the staff of a $90 million yacht placed an order with a U.S. company for a set of luxury bathrobes that came to $2,624.35.

For roughly two years before that, according to federal prosecutors, the yacht’s management had been falsely claiming it was working for a boat named “Fanta.” But the luxury bathrobes came embroidered with a monogram that, prosecutors said, revealed the yacht’s true identity: “Tango.”

That was a problem, officials say in court papers, because Tango was owned by a Russian billionaire under U.S. sanctions, and doing business on his behalf violated federal law.

Late last month, U.S. authorities unveiled a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and or conviction of the man they say was running the yacht staff and orchestrated the deception with the robes — Vladislav Osipov, 52, a Swiss-based businessman from Russia. In a new indictment , federal prosecutors say Osipov misled U.S. banks and companies into doing business with the Tango yacht despite the sanctions on the Russian owner, whom the Justice Department has identified as billionaire Viktor Vekselberg .

Osipov has denied the allegations. Osipov’s attorney has said that the government has failed to demonstrate that Vekselberg owned the yacht, and that its management was therefore not a sanctions violation.

The reward offer for Osipov reflects the latest stage in the evolution of the West’s broader financial war against Russia two years into the war in Ukraine, as the United States and its allies increasingly target intermediaries accused of enabling Russian oligarchs to circumvent sanctions.

Many Russians close to President Vladimir Putin have been under sanctions dating to 2014, when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and sent proxy forces into that country’s eastern Donbas region. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, President Biden vowed to deal a “crushing blow” with a barrage of new sanctions on financial institutions, industries, business executives and others tied to the Kremlin. But roughly two years later, Russia’s economy has proved surprisingly resilient after the nation poured tens of billions of dollars into ramping up its military industry. Moscow has also worked around the sanctions, finding new third parties to supply it with critical military and industrial hardware, as well as countries beyond Europe to buy its oil.

Now, the West is trying to increase the reach of its sanctions by digging deeper into Russian supply chains. Late last month, the Treasury Department announced more than 500 new sanctions targeting Russia , primarily on military and industrial suppliers. The Justice Department also announced charges against two U.S.-based “facilitators” of a Russian state banker who is under sanction, as well as the guilty plea of a dual national based in Atlanta who was accused of laundering $150 million through bank accounts and shell companies on behalf of Russian clients.

Prioritizing criminal charges against — and the arrests of — Western employees of Russia’s elites represents a new escalation of the U.S. financial war against Putin, experts say. One Moscow businessman, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said many influential Russians are concerned about the arrest of two associates of Andrey Kostin, the head of VTB, Russia’s second-biggest state bank. These associates, Vadim Wolfson and Gannon Bond, were charged with helping Kostin evade sanctions by maintaining a $12 million property in Aspen, Colo., for Kostin’s benefit while concealing his ownership. Kostin has said that the charges of sanctions evasion against him are “unfounded” and that he has not violated any laws . Bond has pleaded not guilty; Wolfson hasn’t made an initial court appearance yet.

Wolfson, also known as Vadim Belyaev, had been a Russian billionaire until the Russian government took over his bank in 2017. Bond, 49, is a U.S. citizen from Edgewater, N.J. For all Russians living abroad and working with people in Russia, the threat of criminal charges is a much more worrying prospect than the sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department last month against hundreds of individuals and entities, the businessman said, in part because sanctions are far easier to dodge than criminal charges.

“What you have seen through today’s public announcements are our efforts at really targeting the facilitators who possess the requisite skill set, access, connections that allow the Russian war machine [and] the Russian elites to continually have access to Western services and Western goods,” David Lim, co-director of the Justice Department’s KleptoCapture task force, which is tasked with enforcing U.S. sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, told reporters last month.

Thad McBride, an international trade partner at the law firm Bass Berry & Sims, said the crackdown on intermediaries reflected the natural evolution of the U.S. sanctions campaign in response to Russian adjustments.

“It seems to me they have gone through a comprehensive list of the oligarchs, and you can debate whether or not it’s had a meaningful impact on the Russian war effort,” McBride said. “Because they’re getting smarter about who’s who, they’re finding other people who play meaningful roles in these transactions, even though they’re not showing up in the headlines.”

The charges against Osipov related to his alleged management of the Tango yacht illustrate the mounting potential consequences for people in Europe and the United States who attempt to do business with Russians targeted by Western allies, as well as the opaque structures allegedly employed by those seeking to evade sanctions.

With a net worth estimated by Forbes in 2021 at $9 billion, Vekselberg, 66, has long drawn scrutiny from the West — and sought to safeguard his wealth. He made his initial fortune in aluminum and oil in Russia’s privatization of the 1990s and then expanded into industrial and financial assets in Europe, the United States and Africa, with Putin’s blessing. In addition to the yacht, federal prosecutors say, Vekselberg acquired $75 million worth of properties, including apartments on New York’s Park Avenue and an estate in the Long Island town of Southampton.

Vekselberg, who declined to comment for this article, has not been criminally charged by the Justice Department. In a 2019 interview with the Financial Times, he denounced the sanctions as arbitrary and harmful for international business, saying he had been targeted just because he was Russian and rich and knows Putin.

In April 2018, the Treasury Department under the Trump administration sanctioned Vekselberg and six other Russian oligarchs as part of broader financial penalties over the Kremlin’s invasion of Crimea, support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Vekselberg was also targeted for his work for the Kremlin as chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, an attempt to create Russia’s version of the Silicon Valley — evidence that appeared to undermine the Russian businessman’s claims that he operated independently of the Kremlin.

But with Vekselberg’s payments monitored by U.S. banks, according to the federal indictment , Osipov used shell companies and intermediaries to avert the bite of sanctions. Vekselberg kept other major assets out of the reach of U.S. authorities by making use of the Treasury Department’s 50 percent ownership rule, which stipulates that it is illegal to transact with firms only if an owner under sanction controls more than 50 percent of the business.

For example, a month after Treasury imposed sanctions on Vekselberg in April 2018, his Renova Innovation Technologies sold its 48.5 percent stake in Swiss engineering giant Sulzer to Tiwel Holding AG, a group that is nevertheless still “beneficially owned” — meaning, owned in practice — by Vekselberg through Columbus Trust, a Cayman Islands trust, according to Sulzer’s corporate filing. Vekselberg’s longtime right-hand man at Renova, Alexei Moskov, replaced one of Vekselberg’s direct representatives on the board. Moskov told The Washington Post that he stepped down from all his executive positions at Renova Group in 2018 after U.S. sanctions were first imposed and from that moment ceased to be Vekselberg’s employee.

The attempts to circumvent the sanctions appear to have found some success in the U.S. legal system. Columbus Nova, a U.S.-based asset management fund controlling more than $100 million in assets in the U.S. financial and tech industry, is run by Vekselberg’s cousin, Andrew Intrater. The firm battled for more than two years to lift a freeze on Columbus Nova’s assets, imposed by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control because of the sanctions on Vekselberg, and won, reaching a settlement agreement with the Treasury Department. After renaming itself Sparrow Capital LLC, Columbus Nova successfully argued that Intrater — not Vekselberg — owns the fund. Intrater argued that the company was 100 percent owned by U.S. citizens and that no individual or entity under sanction held any interest in it. Intrater said Columbus Nova had earned fees for managing investment funds owned by Renova. He said he had repeatedly told Treasury he would not distribute any funds to Vekselberg.

Now Osipov, the alleged manager of Vekselberg’s $90 million yacht, is attempting a similar argument as U.S. authorities seek his arrest on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and violations of sanctions law.

The federal indictment states that the Tango was owned by a shell corporation registered in the British Virgin Islands that was in turn owned by several other companies. The Virgin Islands shell company, authorities say, was controlled by Osipov, who also served in senior roles for multiple companies controlled by Vekselberg. U.S. officials also say Vekselberg ultimately controlled the other companies that owned the Virgin Islands shell company.

According to the indictment, a Tango official instructed a boat management company in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, to use a false name for the yacht — “Fanta” — to disguise its true identity from U.S. financial institutions and firms, which try to avoid doing business with an entity or person under sanction.

Working at Osipov’s direction, according to the indictment, employees for Tango bought more than $8,000 worth of goods for the yacht that were unwittingly but illegally processed by U.S. firms and U.S. financial institutions, including navigation software, leather basket magazine holders provided by a bespoke silversmith, and web and computing services. The management company running Tango, run by Osipov, also paid invoices worth more than $180,000 to a U.S. internet service provider, federal prosecutors say.

The Tango was seized by the FBI and Spanish authorities in the Mediterranean not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and Osipov was first indicted last year. The owner of the Spanish yacht management company hired by Osipov, Richard Masters, 52, of Britain, was criminally charged last year by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating federal sanctions law. A request for comment sent to Masters’ firm was not returned.

But in recent court documents, Osipov’s attorney argues that the yacht was not more than 50 percent owned by Vekselberg, and that the government hasn’t demonstrated it was. Barry J. Pollack, an attorney at Harris, St. Laurent and Wechsler, also says the government never warned Osipov of its novel and “unconstitutional” application of federal sanctions law.

“The government points to no precedent that supports its extraordinary interpretation and cites no authority that allows the traditional rules of statutory construction to be turned on their head,” Pollack wrote in a defense filing. The filing adds: “[Osipov] is not a fugitive because he did not engage in any of the allegedly criminal conduct while in the United States, has never resided in the United States, did not flee from the United States, and has not concealed himself.”

Still, the State Department’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program has said it will provide up to $1 million for information leading to Osipov’s arrest, warning that he may visit Herrliberg, Switzerland; Majorca, Spain; or Moscow.

The case demonstrates the extent of the U.S. commitment to tighten the screws on those seen as aiding Russian elites, even if they themselves are not closely tied to the Kremlin.

“When DOJ levels legal action against an individual or entity, they have quite a bit of evidence, especially because the threshold to press charges for money-laundering and sanctions evasion is so high,” said Kim Donovan, director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. “We’ve had quite a bit of experience targeting Russia directly, and what you’re starting to see is the U.S. go after the facilitators enabling sanctions evasion. That’s where the U.S. is focusing its efforts right now.”

Russia's newest robber barons are taking luxury to next level

MOSCOW — The billboard appears at mile 3 of the post-Soviet boulevard of big-ticket dreams that is the Rublyovka Highway. "Any house," the sign by a prestigious homebuilder proclaims. "Helicopter as a bonus."

Only in the millionaires' suburb of Rublyovka are houses so pricey that a helicopter is thrown in like a carpet upgrade.

How elite is Rublyovka? So tony that real-estate prices have streaked skyward even on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the "Rublyovka adjacent" avenue in northwest Moscow — presumably because people who drive along it, as almost anyone who is anyone in Russia does, are probably on their way to Rublyovka.

The Rublyovka Highway shuts down twice each day as President Vladimir Putin is chauffeured between work and his Rublyovka estate in his black Mercedes 600 Pullman, prompting an elite traffic jam that locals love to fume about to acquaintances consigned to lesser bottlenecks.

Russians throughout history have lived large, from the gilded palaces and Fabergé eggs of the czars to the epic miseries of World War II.

Today's prosperity is no exception. Fourteen years after the arrival of capitalism, Forbes magazine's annual survey of the wealthy last year found Moscow with more billionaires than any other city on Earth. (But a new survey shows the city dipping slightly below New York, thanks to the Yukos Oil prosecution's disastrous effect on the company's stock.)

Crass consumerism gone

The net worth of the nation's 36 richest men and women, according to Forbes' calculations, is more than $110 billion, equal to 24 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

In some cases, the new "new Russians" are the same businesspeople who got rich in the shady privatizations of the 1990s. Now, most have reached their late 30s and 40s, and they've moved their businesses toward legitimate operations. They own oil companies and huge metal mining operations, cellphone companies and real-estate development enterprises.

And after more than a decade of traveling among Paris, London, New York and Moscow, they have begun to expect at home — in districts such as Rublyovka and a growing number of other high-end Moscow neighborhoods — the kind of amenities they have long enjoyed abroad.

Rublyovka, once the exclusive retreat of Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders, has become the subject of a best-selling new novel, "Casual," the first-ever portrayal of the privileged lifestyle behind its towering, closely guarded walls.

Lots in the community are being snatched at the equivalent of $5 million apiece, and miles of forest are falling under the bulldozers to make way for $10 million homes, some with elaborate turrets, Russian Empire facade styling, private chapels and, in one case, a motorboat grotto. But the trail of Russia's millionaires doesn't end there.

Crocus City, on the north side of Moscow, bills itself as the largest luxury mall in the world — and that's before construction begins on an expansion that will double the size of the shopping center and include 15 high-rise office buildings, a yacht mooring terminal, helipad, 1,000-room hotel, 216,000-square-foot casino and 16-screen movie theater.

Meanwhile, Gucci, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and Armani are ensconced fewer than 10 miles away, in a cobblestone nook off fashionable Tverskaya Street downtown. They are within walking distance of an array of high-end clubs and restaurants distinguished mainly by the scowling bodyguards standing beside cars with tinted windows outside and the jewel-and-mink-draped beauties inside — often until 5 or 6 in the morning.

Café Galleria, this year's hot spot, requires a weeklong wait for reservations to dine in its sleek, yellow-and-black-columned halls. Even then, it won't admit those who might "spoil the atmosphere," as owner Arkady Novikov puts it.

California rolls — in a city suddenly mad for sushi, not a single fashionable restaurant can afford to be without it — go for $17 each. A hunk of creamy burrata cheese with cherry tomatoes costs $24. "Practically every restaurant in Moscow has to have this cheese now. Russians can't live without it," Novikov says of the coveted mozzarella, which must be flown in fresh from Italy.

Novikov owns a network of eateries that have at one time or another been at the center of Moscow's social beehive, including the tiny but tony Vogue Cafe downtown and the popular Czar's Hunt and Veranda u Dachi restaurants in Rublyovka. He operates 15 acres of greenhouses outside the city to keep his clients in arugula and wild strawberries throughout the Russian winter.

"People are becoming more sophisticated," he says. "The attitude of people with money had changed toward many things, first of all toward the money itself. Now the money is no longer falling on your head from the sky, like before, and the culture of the people has changed for the better.

"We learned a lot of things from the West, including how to dress, how to behave and how to eat."

Poor little rich girl

Ksenia Sobchak, Russia's 23-year-old answer to Paris Hilton, grew up far from underprivileged circumstances — her father was mayor of St. Petersburg — but insists she's no spoiled debutante.

"Me myself, I never considered myself to be rich, though I get a real big salary. So how did I get this image of this golden rich girl?" wonders Sobchak, who hosts a reality television show and lives with her millionaire fiancé in an apartment on Tverskaya Street.

Then she answers her own question: "I really am a socialite. I don't like to spend time at home in a cozy armchair. I really enjoy going to cinemas, visiting friends, going to restaurants. For me, Moscow is the best city in the world. If you want to have fun for 24 hours, you can have fun."

This summer, Sobchak is preparing for the "it" marriage of the season, to Russian-American businessman Alexander Shustorovich, a Harvard graduate who helped broker a $2 billion business deal when he was 30. Sobchak is planning a "simple" and "nice" wedding, at a resort near St. Petersburg, for 300 people.

Today's wealthy Russians, she says, are sensitive to the issues that have sent thousands of pensioners into the streets to protest the partial loss of their benefits. There are 25 million Russians who live on less than $87 a month, and the average monthly wage is less than $240. Many of the well-to-do, the young celebrity says, remember what it's like to have nothing.

"I was a Pioneer," Sobchak recalls, referring to the old Communist youth groups. "I remember the songs about Lenin. I remember those huge lines. I remember buying kilos of green bananas and putting them under the bed to ripen, because you didn't know when you'd be able to get bananas again."

Russia's wealthiest classes, says Eduard Dorozhkin, editor of Rublyovka's local newspaper, Na Rublyovkye, "know they made mistakes in the past, and their mistake was to show how rich they are. It's impolite to look rich in a country with so many poor people."

At the same time, many say, the memory of penury is what inspires an abundance of wealthy Russians to spend with abandon.

"If Americans have $1 million, they're not going to spend $200,000 on a car," said Alla Verber, vice president of Mercury Ltd., which operates luxury shopping centers in downtown Moscow. "The Russians, they will. The Russians think, 'You only live once, and God knows what's going to happen in five years.' "

These days, though, most ostentation is anonymous — a phenomenon attributable as much to nervousness about government tax crackdowns and the ever-present possibility of Mafia violence as to a lingering sense from the Soviet years that being splendidly rich is anything but politically correct.

The city's many Humvees and their even-more-fortified Russian equivalent, the $144,000 Kombat, have tinted windows. Neighbors often have no idea who lives in the gated palace at the end of their street. The magazine Arkhidom, Russia's equivalent of Architectural Digest, features glossy pages of ornately decorated mansions and penthouse apartments but not a word about who owns them.

Oksana Robski's "Casual," which sold 50,000 copies in the first 10 days after publication, provided ordinary Muscovites with another peek at life in Rublyovka, which even in the Soviet era was the storied enclave of Politburo members, nuclear scientists and presidents. Today, former Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev have homes there; so does Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The world Robski portrays, however, is mostly about Rublyovka wives: the thin, carefully coiffed, Dior-clad women who were lucky enough to snag a business mogul, then spend much of the rest of their lives plotting to keep from being dumped for a younger woman.

"These women in the book, they exist," says Roman Kondratov, a stylist at the Place in the Sun hair salon in Zhukovka, one of several elite neighborhoods that make up the district known as Rublyovka.

He says, "Let's see. The typical Zhukovka woman: First, she gets up at 2 p.m. Then gym, spa, hair. They come in here and some of them look like Christmas trees, jewels everywhere. And the things they talk about, they're mind-boggling for me.

"Where they're going on vacation. What they're going to buy. Mostly, they think about clothes. What they're wearing, what their friends are wearing, where they're going to buy the clothes they want, where they're going to fly to buy them. The kind of money they talk about spending is almost incomprehensible to me. And plastic surgery, endless talk about plastic surgery. Most of them go to the States, to the guy who did all Michael Jackson's work."

"It was important for me to portray this world not as it is reflected in tabloids and magazines. It's interesting to show that these people not only go to hairdressers and get manicures, but they live there," says Robski. "They live their lives and lose their loved ones and die of incurable diseases. They fall in love and get betrayed. I think it's stupid to say that only those people who possess nothing have feelings inside."

Robski knew whereof she wrote when her heroine's husband was killed in a contract hit. Her second husband died the same way.

Her next book will deal with Rublyovka as well, but it will take readers far into the world beyond it. Robski plans to write about the female bodyguard agency she once ran, providing stylish armed protectors to wealthy businessmen throughout Russia.

Indeed, for a growing number of wealthy Russians, even Rublyovka is too confining — especially now, when tawdry new dachas are lined up on the roadside and Putin's traffic jams are simply impossible.

US intelligence officials believe a $700 million superyacht that's docked in Italy could belong to Russian President Vladimir Putin, reports say

• US officials say a superyacht docked in Italy could belong to Russian President Vladimir Putin. 
• People briefed on the intelligence, however, said no set conclusions have been made, per The NYT. 
• The $700 million superyacht is currently docked on the Tuscan coast of Italy. 

US authorities believe a $700 million superyacht that's docked in Italy could belong to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The New York Times reported the news, citing several people briefed on the information.

The superyacht, called the Scheherazade, which is currently situated on the Tuscan coast of Italy first came to light after The Times reported Tuesday that Italian authorities were examining the 459-foot-long vessel. 

While some believed it could belong to a Russian oligarch, locals told The Times they nicknamed it "Putin's yacht." 

Following the invasion of Ukraine , Russia has been hit with wide-ranging sanctions targeting oligarchs and their luxury assets . Superyachts have come under particular scrutiny in recent weeks.

Related stories

US intelligence officials have not concluded who owns the Scheherazade but said they found initial indications that it was associated with Putin, per The Times.

The people with knowledge of the matter would not describe what information led them to believe the superyacht was linked to the Russian President, according to the publication. 

The ship's captain, Guy Bennett-Pearce, told reporters earlier this week that Putin was not the owner of the ship and that he had never been on the yacht. He didn't, however, rule out the possibility of the owner being Russian. 

Meanwhile, the US and the other countries are doubling down on efforts to confiscate oligarchs' high-end assets.

"We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets," President Joe Biden said  in his State of The Union address on March 1. "We are coming for your ill-begotten gains."

Some oligarchs have scrambled to try and escape the sanctions against them, taking their private jets and ships to places like Dubai and the Maldives . 

Others like Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich are resorting to selling off their assets .

The Scheherazade has been undergoing repairs since June 2020 in the small Italian town of Marina di Carrara. Its features include a helicopter landing pad, a large pool, a cinema, and a drone crashing system, according to Superyacht Fan . 

• Main content

In Russia’s election, there are no doubts about the result and no rivals to Putin’s rule

President Vladimir Putin ‘s rule over Russia , set to be extended in an effectively uncontested election over the next few days, has never been more total — from the Arctic penal colony where the man who posed the greatest challenge to that rule died , to the field north of Moscow where a rebellious mercenary chief was killed in a fiery plane crash .

Putin will begin another six years in power with his domestic opponents either dead, jailed or exiled. His war in Ukraine has recast life at home and intensified a clash with the West now shadowed by the uncertainty of America’s own election. Russia’s military is advancing on the battlefield and its economy has shown surprising resilience in the face of global sanctions. 

The victory orchestrated by the Kremlin, however, will bely signs of fragility behind that choreographed show.

Despite an atmosphere of repression not seen since the Soviet era, there have been sprouts of internal dissent and external attacks ahead of the election that have pierced the picture of unity and stability the Kremlin has cultivated.

“The results have been announced in advance,” said Nikolai Rybakov, chairman of Russia’s liberal political party Yabloko, which decided not to join the race this year. “It’s painful, unpleasant and shameful but you have to admit that you can’t influence the results right now,” he said in a phone interview from Moscow this week.

“We see that people have an internal demand for peace and changes for the better. But it’s hard for people to resist the ever-present propaganda of hate and anti-Westernism. And on the other hand, people see what criticism of the government can lead to,” he added. “People are afraid for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, and you can’t blame them.”

War and repression

Six years ago, Putin’s victory in the 2018 election was also a foregone conclusion. But his army was not waging a brutal full-scale war across the border, opposition leader Alexei Navalny was still a free man investigating official corruption, some independent press could still operate inside the country and Russia was preparing to welcome the world for the men’s soccer World Cup. 

Back then, Putin’s regime was repressive but more wary of how it was perceived. The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has changed that. 

But Putin appears to be in a stronger position than at any point in his 24 years in power. 

His approval rating remains high at 86% , with 76% of Russians supporting his war in Ukraine , according to the independent pollster Levada Center. 

Of course gauging public opinion is difficult in Russia, with relentless propaganda boosting the Kremlin’s narrative and people often too afraid to speak freely.

Perhaps one crucial factor is that the country’s economy has largely weathered international sanctions. 

Western brands have been replaced by Russian ones, and closer ties with Asia, particularly China , have helped fill some gaps.

Inflation is higher than 7% , meaning that prices have soared for some everyday goods — including eggs, leading to a high-profile shortage that forced Kremlin intervention. But official statistics show wages are rising and, in general, there has been little economically to shake Russians from their everyday lives.

There is no one to oppose Putin on the ballot anyway. Russia’s opposition has been decimated, with Navalny’s death last month just the latest devastating blow. 

“The political field has been cleared out,” Yekaterina Duntsova, a former regional legislator and journalist who tried running for president this year, told NBC News. 

“Fundamentally, the country has changed for the worse in the last six years,” she said in a phone interview from Moscow earlier this month. She was one of two candidates with an anti-war message barred from running against Putin, while three Kremlin-approved candidates will be on the ballot alongside the Russian leader.

“People live in a state of aggression — finding out who is for and who is against, looking for some virtual enemies and the fifth column,” Duntsova said.

Russian elites with anti-war views have been forced into exile, and those remaining in Russia have been kept in check. Independent media fled the country, and any form of protest has become impossible without risking arrest. 

History textbooks have been altered to extol the virtues of the war, basic military training is now part of the curriculum for high school seniors, and public spaces are filled with posters summoning Russian men to join the army. The so-called “Western values” of freedom of expression and respect for human rights have been banished, resulting in the outlawing of the LGTBQ+ “movement” and persecution of human rights advocates. 

Politically motivated arrests and the detention of foreigners, including Americans , are also becoming routine. 

“Russian society is at a point right now where it’s experiencing the largest scale of political repressions — particularly for expressing one’s opinion or exercising one’s rights and freedoms,” said Denis Shedov, a board member for the Memorial Human Rights Defense Center, heir to the human rights group Memorial, which was shut down in Russia in late 2021 . “We have not seen the likes of this in the history of modern Russia.” 

What changed over the last six years is that many Russians now live with a “palpable fear and anxiety” about repression, he said, unclear about what actions or mere words could land them in trouble.

That has spiraled out of control since the war started, Shedov said. His organization has documented the cases of 682 political prisoners , but that number is likely much greater, he said, as limited resources mean that his colleagues sometimes “can’t keep up with reality.”

Diplomacy and dissent

Putin’s standing has been evident on the global stage in recent weeks, too.

He has renewed his nuclear saber-rattling and repeatedly inserted himself into the U.S. election campaign, exploiting splits in the Western alliance that may be amplified by the return of former President Donald Trump .

Putin has stated his preference for President Joe Biden to remain in the White House, a mischievous intervention that may hint at his confidence in the geopolitical winds.

The Kremlin’s military has been advancing on the battlefield in Ukraine, taking advantage of stalled U.S. aid and Kyiv’s dire shortages of soldiers. 

But he has not had it all his own way.

Less than a year ago, the Russian leader faced the gravest challenge to his rule , in the shape of Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin . And while he saw off that short-lived mutiny, it was a sign of the unpredictable forces that the war in Ukraine has unleashed.

For all his army’s recent progress, Putin has fallen far short of his hopes for a rapid campaign that would force Ukraine’s capitulation. Instead, two years in, Russian border towns and villages are frequently targeted by Ukrainian shelling and even incursions by anti-Kremlin fighters . Deeper into Russia, the country’s energy infrastructure has faced the dual threat of a growing wave of Ukrainian drone attacks and its own Soviet-era frailties, which caused a utilities collapse this winter .

And while Putin has tried to keep the war a distant concept for the public, the attritional fight has fueled anger from an unexpected source. 

The wives of men mobilized to fight in Ukraine have publicly called him out for failing to return their loved ones home and end the war, wielding white scarves and flowers in protest. They have now called on Russians to spoil their ballots because they say no candidate has answered their pleas.

This simmering sentiment led two people with an anti-war message to emerge during the election cycle. Duntsova was rapidly barred, but seasoned politician Boris Nadezhdin drew people from across Russia to line up and give their signatures in support of his anti-war candidacy. He was swiftly barred, too.

And the Kremlin’s narrative was further muddied by the thousands of people who turned out for Navalny’s funeral, or lined up for days to pay their respects at his grave despite warnings from authorities. 

His wife and potential successor as opposition leader, Yulia Navalnaya, urged the West in an op-ed this week to not recognize Putin as the legitimate president, which she said would send an important signal to Russian society and elites still loyal to the Kremlin. 

But any pressure from outside has done little to stop Putin from crafting a Russia that is increasingly his.

“We want to hope for the best,” Duntsova said. “But we prepare for the worst.” 

Yuliya Talmazan is a reporter for NBC News Digital, based in London.

• Nation & World
• Nation & World Politics

Putin says lifting sanctions on Moscow will benefit all

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VIENNA (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin says Western sanctions against Russia haven’t worked and both Moscow and the West would benefit from lifting them.

Putin, speaking on a visit to Austria on Tuesday, said the restrictions are “harmful for everyone — those who initiated them and those who are targeted by them.”

The United States, the European Union and other Western allies introduced a slew of sanctions against Moscow over its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and for its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Coupled with a drop in oil prices, the sanctions contributed to Russia’s two-year recession.

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The Russian economy has rebounded, however, and Putin emphasized that lifting the sanctions would answer common interests. He said both Russia and the EU would benefit from resuming full-scale cooperation.

White House: Russian President Vladimir Putin's election to fifth term was 'preordained'

WASHINGTON – The White House said Monday the outcome of Russia’s presidential election was “preordained” and that nothing about the process that handed Vladimir Putin a fifth term in office was “free or fair.”

“Nothing about the election outcome was unpredictable,” said Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser.

Sullivan noted Putin had locked up his political opponents and that some had died tragic deaths ahead of this week’s elections. Most prominently, opposition leader Alexei Navalny died last month at an Arctic Circle prison camp.

Still, Putin is Russia’s president, and the U.S. is prepared for another six years of fraught relations, Sullivan said.

“We’ve had to deal with that reality throughout the war in Ukraine , throughout the other aggression Russia has undertaken, throughout the other steps contrary to U.S. national interests that we have seen from this president and from the Russian federation under his leadership,” Sullivan said.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

But, “that reality doesn't deny the fact that this election was not something that met any kind of benchmark of being free or fair,” he said.

Putin gets fifth term: Russia leader declared winner in vote with no credible opposition

Russia's Central Election Commission said Monday that Putin, the country's longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, had won by a landslide in an election in which he faced no credible opposition and cracked down on free speech.

With nearly 100% of all precincts counted, Putin received 87.29% of the vote, Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova said. Nearly 76 million voters cast their ballots for Putin, his highest vote tally ever, Pamfilova said.

Putin hailed the results as a clear indication of Russia's "trust" and "hope" in him. But his many critics saw them as another illustration of the preordained nature of the election.

Putin's fiercest political foe, Navalny , died in an Arctic prison last month. Other Putin opponents are either in jail or in exile.

Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @mcollinsNEWS.

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• Pavlo Vyshkovsky, Il Martirio della Chiesa Cattolica in Ucraina, Roma: Associazione Luci sull´Est, 2007, p.15.
• Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “Católicos, cismáticos, comunistas - II,” Legionário, n. 621, July 1944. See here .
• Cf. Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in South Russia , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 165.
• Cf. Ion Mihai Pacepa and. Ronald J. Rychlak. Desinformação – Ex-Chefe de Espionage Revela Estratégias Secretas para Solapar a Liberdade, Atacar a Religião e Promover o Terrorismo, trans. by Ronald Robson. Campinas: Vide Editorial, 2015, p. 86. Original title: Disinformation – Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, WND Books Inc. 2013.
• Ibid. p. 159.
• Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “Católicos, cismáticos, comunistas - II,” ibid., See here .
• Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira, “Sobre Pimen,” Fôlha de S. Paulo, September 12, 1971. See here.

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As Putin Pitches His Vision, Voters Avert Their Gaze From the War

Vladimir V. Putin, casting himself as the only leader able to end the war in Ukraine, is all but assured another term in a rubber-stamp election this weekend.

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By Valerie Hopkins

Reporting from Moscow

Vladimir V. Putin’s vision of Russia — successful, innovative and borderless — is on display at one of Moscow’s biggest tourist attractions, a Stalin-era exhibition center that currently houses a sleek showcase called Russia 2024. The exhibition promotes what the Kremlin portrays as Russia’s achievements in the past two decades, roughly the period Mr. Putin has been in power, and his promises for the future after he secures another six-year term in rubber-stamp elections this weekend.

The exhibition is in many ways a microcosm of a country whose people largely — at least in public — avert their gaze from the big and bloody war in Ukraine that Mr. Putin started more than two years ago.

The centerpiece is a grand hall housing pavilions featuring all the Russian regions, including five illegally annexed from Ukraine. Visitors to one pavilion are greeted by two LED screens displaying tulip fields that portray the region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, as calm and peaceful.

That is increasingly at odds with the reality of regular air raid sirens and deadly Ukrainian missile and drone strikes on the city, including one on Thursday that killed two people and injured 19.

At the Crimea pavilion, throngs of visitors pose with men dressed as Roman legionnaires next to a video boasting about the bridge connecting the peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014, to the Russian mainland. There is no mention of the Ukrainian attack in 2022 that blew a hole in the bridge, or the frequent threats that lead to the closing of the bridge for hours at a time.

It is a cognitive dissonance many Russians have adopted, celebrating the motherland and accepting the government’s triumphal narrative — even as Mr. Putin has become a pariah in much of the Western world, domestic prices rise and the Russian army suffers a staggering number of casualties in Ukraine.

“People have spent these two years in this weird state where you basically have to choose to ignore a major tragedy,” said Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist and research scholar at Princeton University. “Most people understand what is going on but they still have to pretend nothing is happening. This is a deeply traumatic experience.”

Neither the war nor the recently annexed Ukrainian territories were mentioned by expo visitors approached by a New York Times journalist on a recent visit.

“It’s maybe not a masterpiece, but it showed Russia just as it is,” said Maria, a 42-year-old water-sanitation engineer attending the exhibit with her colleague Elena, 63. Both women were effusive about what they saw, but they were hesitant to share their full names with a foreign journalist for fear of reprisal.

Mr. Putin, 71, has visited the exhibition four times, and his presence is everywhere in quotations displayed across many of the pavilions.

“The borders of Russia don’t end anywhere,” read one quote at the exhibit for the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine. On a recent afternoon, a woman posed in front of the quote, flexing her biceps as a man photographed her.

With the Russian election apparatus controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Putin is assured of being declared the landslide victor over three other candidates in voting that began Friday and ends on Sunday night. Already in power since 1999, if he serves his term to completion, Mr. Putin will become the longest-serving Russian leader since Empress Catherine the Great in the 1700s.

The vote comes as Russians are winning on the battlefield amid waning support for Ukraine in the United States. Mr. Putin has of late adopted a tone of confidence, reassuring Russians that life will be normal while taking an increasingly antagonistic posture toward the West, which he portrays as a threat to Russia’s very existence.

But Friday was marked by a number of high-profile instances of tension as Russians turned out to vote. Mr. Putin accused Ukraine of trying to disrupt the election by deploying 2,500 troops to the Belgorod region on the border of Ukraine. Elsewhere in Russia, voters protested by pouring dye into ballot boxes and throwing Molotov cocktails at polling stations.

The Russia 2024 exhibit is part of what leaked Kremlin documents obtained by Delfi, an Estonian news outlet, refer to as a domestic “information war,” whose budget is at least $690 million.

The documents, shared with The Times and other news organizations, reveal extensive expenditures on media and film projects intended to build support for the war, known in Russia as the “special military operation,” and the occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine.

For now, the Kremlin’s “information war” seems to be reaping dividends. Attendees expressed awe and joy at the exhibition, a sign that the selective vision of Russia pushed by the Kremlin two years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine still has traction with many ordinary citizens.

Last month, in a poll by the independent Levada Center, 75 percent of respondents said that the country was moving in the right direction — more than at any time since the question was first asked in 1996.

Another poll by Levada showed that fewer than one in five Russians “believe they have the power to change anything” in their country. Still, most Russians “still believe they are living in a democracy,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Moscow.

One of the few reminders of the war at Russia 2024 was a pavilion that married two of the Kremlin’s core policy priorities: the militarization of society and “patriotic education” for school-age youth.

“The Army for Children” welcomed kids with cartoon animals in uniform. Children were invited to practice operating state-of-the-art drones, sit in a virtual-reality flight simulator and play a video game called Counter-Strike.

Nationwide, the Kremlin has sought to turn both the trauma and the drama of the war into opportunities. Military parades and school programs featuring war veterans have been staged to boost national pride and a patriotic spirit.

Mr. Putin has promised to prioritize servicemen and women, announcing a new program called “Time of Heroes” in his annual state-of-the-union address last month. Its goal is to give veterans and soldiers a chance to become part of a “special personnel training program” for developing professionals.

As Russia reorients its economy to serve the war, the Kremlin is “creating a new middle class,” Mr. Kolesnikov, the Carnegie analyst, said.

Still, Russians remain anxious about the war, said Mr. Yudin, the Princeton sociologist. It is an uncertainty that oddly has the effect of drawing voters to Mr. Putin.

“There are fears about what will happen if we don’t win: We will be humiliated, everyone will be prosecuted, we will have to pay huge reparations — and basically put under foreign control,” Mr. Yudin said. “These fears are fueled by Putin, who has also positioned himself as the only one who can end the war.”

That is in large part because the Kremlin has suppressed every candidate who has called for an end to the war. One of them, Yekaterina Duntsova, a former TV host, was disqualified from running late last year. Boris B. Nadezhdin , another antiwar candidate, garnered more than 100,000 signatures of support but was disqualified for what the election commission called “irregularities.”

The vote this weekend will also take place without any independent oversight; the country’s primary election-monitoring group, Golos, has been designated a “foreign agent” by the Ministry of Justice, and its co-founder, Grigory Melkonyants, has been jailed.

Mr. Putin’s biggest rival, the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, died on Feb. 16 in an Arctic penal colony under mysterious circumstances.

His gravesite on the outskirts of Moscow has become a pilgrimage destination for an estimated tens of thousands of Russians who preferred his vision for the “beautiful Russia of the future” over Mr. Putin’s war, mobilization and nuclear threats.

Many antiwar Russians, at home and in exile abroad, are unsure whether to take part in a sham election that is neither free nor fair.

Before his death, Mr. Navalny called on opposition-minded people to go to their polling station on Sunday at noon to protest. The turnout will be the first test of his legacy and of the anger and momentum accumulating since his funeral — whether the desire to protest outweighs the fear of reprisal.

On Thursday, the Moscow prosecutor’s office warned that the protests were illegal and that organizing or participating in them would be considered acts punishable by up to five years in prison.

Back at the Russia 2024 exhibition, Elena, the water-sanitation engineer, said she was ambivalent about voting. “Maybe I’ll vote, because things are going really well right now,” she said, before quickly stopping herself.

“But of course, we hope that all of this will end well,” she said in an oblique reference to the war. “The people really want this to end.”

Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow. More about Valerie Hopkins