Hey Everyone,
If you want to know why Don Jr. was forced to pay back Umar Kremlev, the Russian “friend of Putin” who paid for two afterparties for Don Jrs’ wedding to Bettina Anderson, you need to watch my live interview with Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author with the inside track.
Here is a link to Mikhail’s fabulous post on Kremlev, which is what spurred me to invite him to do an interview on Thursday. (It was after this, apparently, that Don Jr paid the money back to Kremlev).
Quick recap for anyone just catching up.
ProPublica reported on September 14 that Kremlev — head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports body financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom — footed hundreds of thousands of dollars in wedding expenses at the couple’s May wedding in the Bahamas.
Apparently Kremlev rented one of the private islands where the reception was held and where guests slept, covered the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event, paid through an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai. Kremlev himself was on the roughly 50-person guest list, as part of a group of Russian speakers whose presence puzzled other attendees. (Don Jr had said afterwards that the wedding had been very intimate. Just family and close friends.)
Last week Mikhail revealed biographical details about Kremlev that are frankly, stunning. The U.S. coverage has mostly referred to him a “Russian oligarch.” But, according to Mikhail, that’s only the half of it.
Kremlev is the “wallet” for Alexei Rubezhnoy, the current head of Putin’s Presidential Security Service — the man Mikhail describes as probably the first person to see Putin each morning and the last to say goodnight, “the most important person in the Kremlin.” Russian security officials aren’t supposed to own businesses. So, Mikhail says, they hold them through proxies. And guess who is Rubezhnoy’s “proxy”? Yes: Kremlev.
Kremlev’s empire — a monopoly on Russia’s legal sports-betting market (handed to his company after Putin signed a decree restricting licenses to a single operator), and Rolf, Russia’s largest auto dealership chain, seized from a dissident businessman who’d fled to Vienna after opposing the Crimea annexation — sits, in Mikhail’s telling, in Kremlev’s name but not in his control. “Kremlev is the front,” he said. “Rubezhnoy owns nothing. He cannot do it.”
Kremlev was not christened Kremlev. Born Umar Lutfuloev in Serpukhov, outside Moscow, he did two stretches in prison in his early twenties, worked as a boxing promoter, and at 28 changed his surname to Kremlev — a name that, as Mikhail pointed out, conveniently echoes “Kremlin.”
He was installed as head of the Russian Boxing Federation by its supervisory board — previously chaired by a past head of Putin’s security service, now chaired by Rubezhnoy — and rose from there.
It isn’t known how Kremlev and Don Jr met, but as IBA president, it was Kremlev who first raised questions about boxer Imane Khelif’s sex eligibility at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a controversy later amplified by Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, and Trump himself.
The Trumps’ well-documented boxing and UFC ties may be exactly how a man Mikhail flatly calls “mafia” ended up close enough to Don Jr. to bankroll his wedding weekend.
What I still cannot fathom is why Bettina Anderson would post on Instagram “NO CONSPIRACY, NO MYSTERY” and that “friendship doesn’t require a political motive” and that the couple would “never be embarrassed or apologetic” about being grateful for friends from all over the world.
With friends like this, as the saying goes, who needs enemies?
If Anderson didn’t get the problem of the optics of having this guy pay for her wedding festivities, it seems her father-in-law may have.
On Friday, President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that “as I understand it, he paid him back” — and a person close to Don Jr. confirmed the repayment to the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Congress has not sat on its laurels. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on House Oversight, opened an investigation this week seeking records on Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev and the payments, and Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on House Intelligence, asked FBI Director Kash Patel to examine the matter. Garcia’s framing was blunt: Kremlev, who has been sanctioned by the Ukrainian government, “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the President’s son. What did he get in return? We need answers.”
We do indeed.
Thank you Heather Le, Don Buckter, Kerry Shaw, Shannon Edrie, Carolynn Saracino, and many others for tuning into my live video with Mikhail Zygar! Join me for my next live video in the app.
