Oligarchs

Steve Bannon argued that the “oligarchs” close to President Trump will abandon Republicans the same way they did to Democrats.

Bannon was briefly interviewed by CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan on Wednesday, when he continued his case against tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

“You can tell President Trump doesn’t totally trust the oligarchs,” Bannon said.

One of Hunter Biden's former business associates -- now in prison -- has told Congress that Biden sought roughly $5 million from fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Firtash to help try to quash a U.S. indictment while his father was vice president and presiding over U.S.-Ukraine policy, according to an eyewitness to the testimony.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. His formula is justifiably famous, but it’s worth noting that it comes from an autobiographical essay titled “The Crack-Up”, which painfully detailed Fitzgerald’s inability to pass his own test, and resulting descent into alcoholic dysfunction.

Two dozen armed police and five FBI agents fanned out across the harbor here early one morning last year. They raided the Alfa Nero, a 270-foot megayacht believed to be owned by Andrey Grigoryevich Guryev, a Russian phosphates magnate sanctioned by the U.S. for links to President Vladimir Putin. 

Katie wrote about it yesterday. It might take a few weeks, maybe months, because the media is bound to salivate over the impending fourth indictment of Donald Trump in the Georgia 2020 election investigation. Still, they’ll have to return to the emerging Biden bribery scandal. There’s too much money and credible witness testimony to dismiss the Biden bribery scandal as a nothing burger. It’s not Russian disinformation. The establishment press and their intelligence community and social media allies tried that, only to be forced to admit that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine.

“Designed by the illustrious Italian design firm Nuvolari Lenard, the Lady M II sports a spectacular Art Deco prow figure in the form of a giant Jaguar,” the website clubyacht.net notes in an article on the roughly $60 million megayacht belonging to Russian oligarch Alexei Mordashov. Or rather, it used to belong to him.

A week after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, French officials trumpeted the impound of a $120 million ultra-luxurious yacht, which they said belonged to a sanctioned Kremlin insider. 

But there was a snag. The Monaco-based company that manages the yacht insisted the Kremlin insider in question, oil tycoon Igor Sechin, doesn’t own the vessel nor Kazimo, the company that it says owns the ship. 

We’re sanctioning Russian oligarchs up the wazoo, hoping it’s a way to get Putin to stop his deadly attack on Ukraine.

But for this tactic to work, two conditions must be met: first, the US and our allies must be able to locate and tie up Russian oligarchic wealth. Second, Russian oligarchs must have enough power to stop Putin.

Let’s take them one at a time:

Can we locate and tie up the wealth of Russian oligarchs?

More than a dozen Russian oligarch-owned yachts have been moved to remote ports to try to avoid their seizure after Western nations sanctioned their owners.

Sanctions on the oligarchs have increased as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine. Some of their vessels are being moved to or already are sitting in ports in other nations, according to the Associated Press.

While some oligarchs have already had their yachts seized, others are attempting to get their vessels out of the sanctioning countries' reach.