Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin discussed Ukraine and other international matters during a call on Tuesday. What do the two leaders have in common? A shared worldview alone no longer explains it.
Tag: oligarchs
Boris Yeltsin had a technique for not stopping certain top Russian officials from eliminating their opponents. Vladimir Putin refined the practice. So ingrained in the country’s politics, it’s a formula for murder borrowed from mafia dons.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, political commentators have consistently returned to the question of Putin’s successor. Russia expert Andreas Umland foreshadows a potentially tumultuous transition, resulting in a new power regime. Whether this is more or less democratic than the current Putinist system, is difficult to predict.
The invasion of Russia has forced Ukraine to confront a domestic enemy: corruption and economic control by an insular and unethical elite.
After the annexation of Crimea, the peninsula’s prized resources were identified and distributed among Russian oligarchs with connections to the Russian President, handing out everything from wine vineyards to hockey clubs to steelworks.
Russia’s proxies in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions announced that referendums on joining Russia had begun that Ukrainian and Western officials have denounced as shams. [shortcode-Subscribe-to-Ukraine-daily-box] For four days, “voting” will be held at people’s homes “for security reasons,” Russian state-controlled news agency RIA Novosti wrote. On the last day of the “referendums,” on […]
High on the agenda of the Prague summit of Europe’s foreign ministers this week was a proposal to ban tourist visas for Russians, as punishment for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But it is ultimately a way to change the subject, and recalls Zelensky’s iconic remark after the war began.
Ukraine has long had an issue with oligarchs standing in the way of progress, and they have almost always been linked to the Kremlin. Now in the context of the war with Russia, President Zelensky has no choice but to tackle this problem.
For 200 years, the Black Forest spa town of Baden-Baden has been the destination of choice for Russian tourists, with oligarchs shopping in the luxury boutiques and buying up swathes of property. Now Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all that and the town’s once-bustling streets are empty.
According to the EU Commission, the amount of confiscated Russian assets has doubled since April, German daily Die Welt reveals, including yachts, real estate, artwork and more.
Oligarchs of the ‘Second Gilded Age’ in the like of Elon Musk are already able to influence the public’s minds through media ownership. But getting a hand on Twitter means having access to its users’ data and exploiting it for financial purposes.
Chalets in Courchevel, villas on the Cap d’Antibes peninsula, yachts and valuable paintings are in the sights of the Ministry of Economy’s task force. But in this game of cat and mouse through a maze of offshore companies, nominees and trusts, oligarchs are often one step ahead.
Estimates are that more than 200,000 people have already crossed Russian borders since Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine. It looks to be the start of a mass exodus of well-to-do and middle class Russians that could further decimate the economy.
The likely defection of Russian tourists this summer is clouding the prospects of tourism professionals in the South of France, whose activity is still recovering from the pandemic. An emblematic snapshot of the after-effects of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russian pop starts, artists and athletes are speaking out against the war in Ukraine, with some already suffering the consequences.
MOSCOW — Last month, the Interior Minister of Cyprus Constantinos Petrides announced the revocation of 26 “citizenships by investment” that had been granted before stricter criteria of this program was introduced in 2018. Though Petrides refused to name those who had lost their so-called “golden passports’, Kommersant has recently revealed some of the names on […]
NICOSIA – The Cyprus Parliament’s initial rejection of the terms of the European Union bailout plan is bad news for Russia. The opposition to the required taxes on bank deposits means the risk is rising of a long-term freezing of corporate assets in Cyprus. Meanwhile new proposals for taxes on depositors in the island could […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) BBC Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin is back in the middle of the oil business. Putin met this week with the head of Rosneft, a partially state-owned oil company, as well as the president of BP and a representative from the British multinational’s board of directors to see if a partnership […]