Russia's Establishments and Globalist Opposition
Contents
- Russia's establishments
The Putin years - The takeover of Putin and his "St. Petersburgers"
- Putin's economic reforms of the early 2000s
- Putin's dismantling of Russia's globalist NGO network
- Putin's undermining and killing of globalist-backed political opposition
- Russia-Ukraine War: a struggle to control natural resources
- Globalist think tanks in Ukraine opposing Putin's Russia
- Anti-Putin, Jewish mafia-oligarch network in Ukraine tied in with the CIA and globalists
- Putin or the globalists: what is better for your country?
- Early "Davos man" Putin a quiet globalist?
Timelines - 1980s
- 1990s
- 2000s
- Notes
Russia's establishments
Readers who have paid attention to ISGP's Superclass Index will notice that there's a separate index for Russia. While the West has a liberal-globalist, conservative and Zionist superclass, with the conservative one being controlled opposition and also some questions to be asked in this regard about the Zionist one, Russia has 4 basic establishments - as far as can be discerned. These are:
- The traditional think tank elite, which has largely been ignored since Putin took power. They involve men as Yevgeny Primakov, Sergei Karaganov, Georgy and Alexei Arbatov, Andrei Kokoshin and Sergei Rogov, who historically have been involved in various Russian national security think tanks, as well as dealt with western elites through such NGOs as Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and other weapons of mass destruction-related groups, Ted Turner's Better World Society, various Carnegie Corporation commissions, the Dartmouth Conferences, the Russian United Nations Association, or as consultants to the Trilateral Commission.
In all fairness though, they likely have no power of their own. It just came from the Gorbachev and Yeltsin governments, and the influence of various western-minded oligarchs, as well as the long-term elite western ties that eventually were forged. Putin retained them as well, despite not exactly making full use of them it appears. - The oligarchs, with a surprisingly dominant Zionist element during the Yeltsin years. Key Jewish and Zionist oligarchs - and generally rather controversial - have included Boris Berezovsky, Berezovsky's old protege, Roman Abramovich; Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven, Anatoly Chubais, Michael Cherney and Bruce Rappaport.
Other controversial, influential oligarchs have included Badri Patarkatsishvili and the Uzbek Alisher Usmanov. Yet more have been Vagit Alekperov, Viktor Vekselberg and Rem Vyakhirev. - Putin's more nationalist "Petersburgers", who worked for him in the 1990s in the office of Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Saint Petersburg from 1991 to 1996. Names include Dmitry Medvedev, Alexey Miller, Igor Sechin, Andrey Kostin and Sergei Ivanov.
Sobchak and several of his aides, including Putin Andrey Kostin, and together with various oligarchs, ended up at regional Swiss-based Davos meetings in the 1990s. - An ultra-right/left-wing and nationalist military "Siloviki" aspect. During the first Yeltsin term these were represented by such men as defense minister Pavel Grachev and security head General Alexander Korzhakov. Putin purged these top-level Siloviki elements, but even five years into his presidency, he still was busy removing his bureaucracy of mid level Siloviki-thought. 2 In the process he was holding the middle ground between this group and the globalist-minded oligarchs.
In this sense, ISGP, despite expanding the model to "unmentionable" globalist and Zionist elites operating across borders, would have to agree with Stratfor's analysis of the situation in Russia in the early 2000s:
"For a few years now, STRATFOR has seen two types of power players at the core of Russian national politics: the business and more reform-minded oligarchs, and the nationalist, more conservative siloviki. [They are] from either St. Petersburg, where Russian President Vladimir Putin hails from, or anywhere else. Since coming to power, Putin has sought to balance the competing interests of the oligarchs and siloviki while gradually installing an increasing number of known and trusted St. Petersburgers into key positions of influence." 3
In the end, Putin and his security services suppressed all other establishments, including the Zionist-oriented Solntsevskaya mafia that has apparently been quite close with many oligarchs and some think tank elitists. The boards of the Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845; and the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) quite quickly show who the oligarchs and other persons are who have sworn loyalty to Putin.
THE PUTIN YEARS
The takeover of Putin and his "St. Petersburgers"
From May 7, 2000, when Putin was instated as president of Russia, he and his "St. Petersburg clique" quickly put their people into oil and gas companies Gazprom and Rosneft, if only to make sure that profits would go to the state instead of being siphoned off by the oligarch elite.
Gazprom was headed from 2000 on by "St. Petersburger" Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's alter-ego for years to come; and "St. Petersburger" Alexey Miller. "St. Petersburger" Andrey Kostin joined the board of Rosneft no later than 2002. "St. Petersburger" Igor Sechin became supervisory chair of Rosneft in 2004, and executive chair in 2012.
The most well-known story is the one of Yukos chairman and majority owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. On October 25, 2003 Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested. Famously, in a pre-negotiated, secret deal, Khodorkovsky shares in Yukos were automatically transferred to Lord Rothschild upon his arrest by Putin. 4 There was more to Khodorkovsky than met the eye though. A pro-globalist political opponent of Putin, he, together with Zbigniew Brzezinski, had joined the board of George Soros' International Crisis Group in mid 2002 5. Also in 2002 he founded the small, exclusive Open Russia Foundation with Lord Jacob Rothschild and Henry Kissinger. 6
Putin and his "St. Petersburgers" also found it necessary to immediately - in mid 2000 - to take control of Boris Berezovsky's Russian Public Television (ORT) and Vladimir Gusinsky's NTV, as these (Jewish) oligarchs (too) emerged as Putin critics. Not only did ORT and NTV attack Putin over the Kursk incident 7 or the War in Chechnya 8, on March 24, 2000, two days before the elections, NTV even aired an investigation into the Ryazan apartment bombing of the fall 1999 in its talk show Independent Investigation, suggesting that Putin and the FSB/KGB were responsible for the bombing. 9 Berezovsky co-financed an investigation into the Ryazan bombing 10 and appealed to international authorities to look into the incident 11, as would George Soros. 12
A third industry that Putin and his "St. Petersburgers" took over, and the most overlooked one it appears, is Russia's defense industry:
- One key firm is the United Aircraft Corporation, which, since 2006, controls famous military aircraft builders Sukhoi, MiG and Tupolev: "St. Petersburger" Sergei Ivanov was put in as chairman.
- Another key firm is Almaz-Antey, producer of the long-feared anti-aircraft SAM missile sites: the S-300, S-400 and S-500, as well as the Mach 2.5 Kalibr cruise missiles: "St. Petersburger" Viktor Ivanov was appointed chairman in 2002.
- In 2002 Putin also ordered the restructuring of Mashinostroyenia, developer of Russia's notorious hypersonic Oniks and eventual Zircon missiles, as well as India's hypersonic BrahMos and BrahMos II cruise missiles. All of these missiles form an extreme threat to western war ships and ground targets. Oniks reached speeds of Mach 2.5, the improved BrahMos reaches Mach 3, and the Zircon, first used during the Ukraine War (2022-) Mach 9. The stealthy BrahMos II is expected to reach a speed of Mach 8-9 as well.
Since the Russia-Ukraine War began in 2022, we have learned that the older missiles can be shot down by a variety of anti-air missiles. The Zircon can only be targeted for now with very expensive Patriot missiles.
Putin's economic reforms of the early 2000s
Until Putin's arrest of the pro-West, pro-globalist Yukos oil chieftain Mikhail Khodorkovsky in October 2003, economic think tanks funded by Khodorkovsky and allied oligarchs played a key role in reorganizing Russia's economy. The main-funded think tanks were the Gref Center for Strategic Problems, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Gaidar Institute, the Higher School of Economics, and the Carnegie Moscow Center . 13
Putin's own economic reforms though were largely based on reigning in of the power of the oligarchs. This first happened already at a key July 28, 2000 meeting, in which Putin met with 21 leading oligarch industrialists and a handful of bankers, excluding his enemies Berezovsky, Abramovich and Gusinsky. 14 Oligarchs who promised to pay their (low) taxes and wouldn't undermine Putin's rule, would be allowed to do business. All the others would have their businesses confiscated, be send to prison, or, as it appears, end up dead.
As for a more complete list of economic reforms Putin initiated:
- Only removed oligarchs who opposed him through media ownership or through political activism.
- Introduced a flat tax of 13% for everyone, where it used to be a progressive tax between 12 and 30%. This led to the rich actually paying their taxes, but taxes still increased for the poor by 1%. (meanwhile, it’s 15% tax for above 5 million p. 30% tax for foreigners on Russia-sourced income).
- Promoted a drop in the business tax from 35 percent to 24% to avoid tax evasion.
- Pushed for a law that allowed Russians to buy and sell land. Was blocked from being purchased by foreigners.
- Tried to increase commercial bank lending to small business.
- Vastly decrease government regulations to.
- Reduced the number of laws and tried to reduce the mammoth Soviet bureaucracy.
Putin's dismantling of Russia's globalist NGO network
It wasn't until 2012-2015, that Putin forced the closure in Russia of all "liberal CIA" and "foreign intervention" NGOs. This process already was started though in July 2000 when Putin told the oligarchs to stay out of politics and just stick to paying their taxes. 15 This message was repeated more forcefully in October 2003 with the arrest of key NGO financier and western think tank ally Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which effectively told all oligarchs to stop funding domestic think tanks and, once again, to stay out of politics. 16
In 2005-2006 this battle was stepped up with a new law that allowed increased financial oversight and harassment of foreign NGOs operating in Russia. This included measures against benign-sounding NGOs as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. These NGOs aren't that benign at all. They are antifa, pro-Third World immigration NGOs. Human Rights Watch's biggest donor with $100 million in just one gift is George Soros. 17 Amnesty International is financed as well by "liberal CIA" foundations as Rockefeller, Ford and Soros' Open Society, in addition to the U.S. State Department, the European Commission, and various European governments. That may not be something you want to have freely operating in your country. 18
In 2012 USAID - forever rumored to be a "CIA front" - was expelled. A likely immediate reason was USAID's funding of an activist group called "Golos, whose exposure of electoral fraud at last year's parliamentary elections helped spark huge anti-Kremlin street demonstrations." 19 In 2015 a much longer list of these NGOs was banned from Russia, with the accusation that these NGOs "carry out the policy of the U.S. State Department." 20:
- Soros' Open Society Foundations.
- Ford Foundation.
- MacArthur Foundation.
- Mott Foundation.
- Open Russia Foundation and Club.
- National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
- International Republican Institute (IRI).
- National Democratic Institute (NDI).
- Freedom House.
- Jamestown Foundation.
- Albert Einstein Institution.
- Education for Democracy Foundation.
- East European Democratic Center.
- Ukrainian World Congress.
- Ukrainian World Coordinating Council.
- Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights.
- Khodorkovsky Foundation. 21
A number of additional NGOs were banned in later years. The Black Sea Trust, for example, followed in 2017. 22 The Moscow Carnegie Center, already handicapped in previous years, was fully closed by the Russian authorities immediately after the start in 2022 of the Russia-Ukraine War. 23
ISGP is familiar with these NGOs as well. The Black Sea Trust deserves special mention. While not important enough to list separately in ISGP's NGO list, the trust is listed as a partner and financier of the Warsaw Security Forum in Poland, the Ky-iv Security Forum in Ukraine, and the New Europe Center in Kyiv, Ukraine, always alongside of all kinds of major globalist interests, regularly including Soros' Open Society Foundations.
Putin may not exactly have done it for the right reasons, but closing these "liberal CIA" and "foreign intervention" NGOs nevertheless is a first real step to prevent uncontrollable globalist interference in every aspect of your society.
Putin's undermining and killing of globalist-backed political opposition
Some of his political opponents clearly also have represented western globalist forces. Grigory Yavlinsky ran for Russian president in 1996 against Yeltsin, and in 2000 against Putin, respectively capturing 7.3% and 5.8% of the vote. All this time Yavlinsky was George Soros' boy though, whom considered Yavlinsky the "only honest reformer among the candidates", and futile tried to convince Boris Berezovsky to support him at Davos 1996. 24 Soros put him on the board of trustees of his International Crisis Group in 2000, where Yavlinsky remained until 2006, when he moved to the advisory board. He only left this advisory board at the time of the 2012 Russian election, in which Putin blocked him from running, despite having collected the necessary 2 million signatures. 25
There are other political activists and presidential candidates in Russia that have been backed by western globalists. Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, martyred in the western press after his arguably tragic polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006, had been Boris Berezovsky's KGB/FSB contact, protector (also from the police in murder investigations), and potential handler since 1994 26, and played a role with Berezovsky in promoting Putin to head the FSB in 1998-1999. His 2001-2002 expose of the Ryazan apartment bombing - which he tied to Putin's FSB - was financed by Berezovsky and the other notorious pro-West Jewish media oligarch, Vladimir Gusinsky. 27 Litvinenko, his close ally Anna Politkovskaya, and witnesses as Khanpasha Terkibayev, may all have been assassinated on orders of Putin for having dug too deep into false flag FSB operations, the idea that for so long Litvinenko could have been protecting an obviously corrupt Berezovsky on behalf of the FSB, doesn't really jive with "independent operator".
Former Yeltsin minister of energy (1997) and deputy prime minister (1997-1998), Duma member (1999-2003) and political activist Boris Nemtsov, assassinated by Putin in 2015, already was part of the first "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" group of Davos in 1993, together with an absolutely shocking list of emerging globalists and future heads of state: Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, Jacob Wallenberg, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Bono of U2, Larry Summers, Jose Maria Aznar (PM Spain 1996-2004), Tony Blair (PM UK 1997-2007), Guy Verhofstadt (PM Belgium 1999-2008), Angela Merkel (chancellor of Germany 2005-2021), Gordon Brown (PM UK 2007-2010), Nicolas Sarkozy (president France 2007-2012), and even the future "alt right" Viktor Orban (PM Hungary 1998-2002, 2010-). 28 Certainly in 2003 he was invited an additional time to Davos.
In June 2013 the Freedom House-tied and Open Russia Foundation-tied Institute of Modern Russia, presided over by Mikhail Khodorkovsky's son Pavel, brought Nemtsov to the United States for a Congressional testimony. Khodorkovsky, of course, has a history with Davos ('93 and '96), with Henry Kissinger and Lord Jacob Rothschild through the Open Russia Foundation 29, and with George Soros and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the International Crisis Group for 1.5 years before his 2003 arrest in Russia by Putin. 30
At the moment this author has not researched Alexei Navalny yet, who was murdered by Putin in prison in 2024, but looking at the extreme support Navalny had in western media, likely a similar pattern is to be found. The only thing ISGP has at the moment is that a letter of Navalny was read at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2021, a result of his arrest in Russia in January 2021. 31 Apart from Freedom House 32, two long-time patrons of the Oslo Freedom Forum include Bilderberg steering committee billionaire Peter Thiel and Davos "Global Leader for Tomorrow" / "Young Global Leader" Google billionaire Sergey Brin 33, with speakers having included a variety of globalists and "liberal CIA"-type activists, including Russia's Pussy Riot members (2012), Mikhail Khodorkovsky (2014) 34, and Boris Nemtsov's daughter, Zhanna (2017). It should be clear what type of persons get an invitation: those that can be trusted upon to tow the globalist line.
Having a candidate as Ksenia Sobchak being a presidential candidate in 2018, might indicate that Putin too loves to run a little controlled opposition. Ksenia is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, Putin's key mentor as St. Petersburg mayor in the 1991-1996 period, and always has been very close to Putin.
This chapter could be expanded in the future, but the point is that many, if not all, of the candidates touted in western media as being "independent", "freedom-loving" opposition to Putin, are anything but that. They simply are agents of the globalist movement, and would never have had a camera pointed at them if they weren't. They might be better than Putin, certainly in the short-to-medium term, but they all are wolves in sheeps' clothing.
Russia-Ukraine War: a struggle to control natural resources
This site is not meant to be a "geopolitical analysis" center. However, it is quite hard to ignore the underlying reasons and strategies of Russia with regard to its 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea, and its subsequent invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Any 12-year-old who has played a 1990s or 2000s Command & Conquer game knows how absolutely vital the capturing and protecting of natural resources in a any war is. And yet, the mainstream media seldom bothers looking at this aspect. Unsurprisingly, a map of Ukraine's natural resources makes any "geopolitical analysis" relatively simple:
Sure, the Crimea is 90% ethnic Russian. And sure, the central government in Kyiv always neglected these ethnic Russians. After Russia took over in 2014 with barely any fighting, pensions and wages for Crimeans rapidly increased, and Russia quickly invested more into the Crimea than the central government in Kyiv had done in the two decades preceding it. Putin built a major airport, malls, theme parks, restored roads, and built the Crimean bridge. The only thing that really prevented the Crimea from economically taking off were Ukrainian food and water blockades, and western sanctions, which ran through globalist multinationals as Visa and Mastercard. 35 Hence, of course, even well after the Russian takeover, Crimeans were overwhelmingly happy about it:
"A total of 82.8% of Crimeans said yes. When broken down by ethnicity, 93.6% of ethnic Russians said they believed the vote to secede was legitimate, while 68.4% of [Crimean] Ukrainians felt so. Moreover, when asked if joining Russia will ultimately make life better for them and their family, 73.9% said yes while 5.5% said no." 36
Western media continued to largely unilaterally whine about the "occupied Crimea" in subsequent years, while effectively it was a "liberated Crimea". Fact is, by 2023-2024 Google was so censored you specifically had to search for "site:quora.com" for user reactions of people living the Crimea to get any sense of the "positives" of the Crimea "occupation". 37
Interestingly, "mainland" Ukrainians never cared about the Crimea being 90% Russian, or that even more than two-thirds of Crimean Ukrainians being happy with the Russian takeover. They just demanded it back. They also demanded all ethnically Russian regions in the eastern tip of Ukraine back, pretty much no matter how many Ukrainian lives such a war would cost:
"A poll by Gallup, conducted in early September and released on October 18, showed 70 percent of Ukrainians favor fighting until victory, while 91 percent who back the war define victory as retaking all territory seized by Russia, including Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014." 38
Support to continue fighting has been dwindling over the years. By late 2023 the will to fight among the Ukrainian population without compromise had dropped from 70 to 60%, with the assumption being that Putin will continue his "strategy of targeting infrastructure, power plants ... to exhaust the Ukrainian public" and force it into a compromise. 39 Despite a dwindling resilience, these hardline stances of the Ukrainian public only start to make sense upon looking at the natural resources map above. Sure, controlling the Crimea makes it much easier to choke Ukrainian shipping from the north of the Black Sea. Controlling much of Ukraine's southern coast makes it easier still. But it also makes it much easier to stop Ukraine from drilling Black Sea oil.
Furthermore, the natural resources map shows that 70% of all of Ukraine's oil, gas, coal and mineral riches are to be found in the east of the country, valued at about $15 trillion. The minerals include iron ore, titanium, manganese, gold, kaolinite, zirconium and uranium. As an expert at the Ukraine government's National Institute for Strategic Studies already explained:
"Moscow's political plan is primarily to destroy Ukraine's economic potential. To do that, it doesn't matter whether you seize resources or destroy them through shelling." 40
There's very little focus in the international media on this aspect. But it explains Russian strategy. Likely Putin tried to capture the entire eastern half of Ukraine first. If that went smooth, he probably would have ordered the capture of western Ukraine as a fast as possible too, if only to prevent NATO from staging an insurrection from her. When this strategy failed, the plan B became to hold onto as much Black Sea-bordering territory, while focusing on capturing mineral-rich parts of Eastern Ukraine.
It also starts to explain why Putin has been willing to sacrifice so tens of thousands soldiers over just a few miles of territory, such as in a tiny place as Avdiivka. The reason is that similar to the larger Bakhmut, it sits right on top of Ukraine's largest and seemingly only shale gas field, Yuzivska, for which Ukraine signed a $10 billion deal with Shell in 2013, no less at a place as Davos, with Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte - a Bilderberg veteran - accompanying the Shell CEO. 41 Russia conquering these places, also opens the way to more mineral riches, such a a multitude of conventional gas field right to the west and north of the Yuzivska field. In fact, it already was observed in 2015 that much of the fighting of Ukrainian battalions as Adair and Azov with Russian separatists was on top and around the Yuzivska shale gas field.
Looking over at the Ukrainian side, all of a sudden it makes much more sense why they don't care for independence of Russian-dominated regions. Not only is it highly likely that Russia will keep pushing for more once these territories are handed over - because it considers a NATO-backed Ukraine a threat - the main reason is that these areas are mineral-rich and/or highly strategic with regard to mining and shipping, and determine to what extent Ukraine will be independent, economically successful, and able to resist further Russian pressure. The Crimea also had a lot of rice and other agricultural exports, all of which was lost to Russia.
Well, Russia blowing up the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 to prevent a counter-offense from the Ukrainians, may well have doomed Crimean agriculture for the next century. But that's another story.
Globalist think tanks in Ukraine opposing Putin's Russia
Enough geopolitics, at least from a traditional sense. In 1999 and 2007, much of East Europe was added to NATO, followed in 2004 and 2007 with membership of the European Union. Ukraine was not among those expansionist waves.
The European Union and NATO merely are extensions of the globalist movement though. And the globalist movement largely works through multinationals and "charitable" foundations funding globalist-oriented think tanks and conferences. This network has been active in Ukraine for a long time. Apart from local chapters and operations of NGOs as Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), Atlantic Council, etc. - all NGOs banned by Putin from Russia in 2015 - a list of relevant NGOs for Ukraine includes:
- 1989: Vidrodzhennya charity, Kyiv, funded by Soros.
- 1989: International Management Institute, Kiev branch, funded by Soros.
- 1991: U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.
- 1994: American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee.
- 1995: Economics Education and Research Consortium, Kyiv.
- 1995: U.S.-Ukraine Business Council.
- 2004: Yalta European Strategy (YES), Ukraine.
- 2005: Orange Circle:
- Ukraine Business Forum.
- EnergyUkraine Round Table.
- 2006: Victor Pinchuk Foundation
- 2007: Open Ukraine Foundation.
- 2007: Kyiv Security Forum.
- 2015: New Europe Center, Kyiv.
- 2016: Babi Year / Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Ukraine.
Within these NGOs we repeatedly can find ISGP Superclass Index names as George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, Wallenberg ally Carl Bildt, and old Soros ally and Eastern European economic reformer Anders Aslund. Anything from Jimmy Carter to various leading neocons can also be found, so basically the entirety of the globalist movement has been looking to take over Ukraine and Russia. We also shouldn't forget that Davos has played a key role in Russian and East European politics as well, with countless businessmen and political leaders of these regions having been invited over the years.
The Orange Circle, founded in the wake of the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution with a senior director of the National Endowment for Democracy on its founding board, deserves special mention. Its founding 2005 dinner at Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room in New York City, an old Eastern Establishment meeting place, included Trilateral Commission founder Zbigniew Brzezinski; NDI head and Trilateral member Madeleine Albright, Carla Hills, a decades-long CSIS trustee and Trilateral Commission member; boxer Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv from 2014; and pro-West Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yushchenko, also the keynote speaker. 42 Prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (2005, 2007-2010) and Yushchenko's Georgetown University-educated chief of staff, Oleh Rybachuk, also "deputy prime minister on European Integration" at the time, were formally listed as "supporters" of the Orange Circle, who "have committed themselves to taking part in key initiative meetings over the coming year." 43 Brzezinski, Klitschko, Wallenberg ally Carl Bildt and the neocon Bruce Jackson were founding advisory board members of the Orange Circle.
This appears to be quite a decent summary of the globalist forces Putin has been up against in Ukraine alone. It should be clear that this globalist network will not simply cease its expansion at the border with Ukraine or Russia. It will bring Ukraine into NATO and the European Common Market, with Ukraine's natural resources being exploited with the aid of western multinationals, its defense systems build up with the aid of western multinationals, and its entire market opened up to western multinationals. And from there, Russia is next.
There's a natural balance between multinationals funding globalist think tanks, and eventually getting rewarded by being able to economically expand and grow.
Anti-Putin, Jewish mafia-oligarch network in Ukraine tied in with the CIA and globalists
Parallel to these globalist operations in Ukraine were the activities of notorious Ukrainian gangster oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi (or Igor Kolomoyskyi), a key financier of Orange Circle politicians Victor Yushchenko 44 and Yulia Tymoshenko. 45 In 2012 he was "perceived to be a central donor" to another Orange Circle veteran, Vitali Klitschko and his Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR) party. 46 The Klitschko tie apparently has never been verified though.
Kolomoyskyi also was the 70% owner of 1+1 Media Group, whose TV channel 1+1 aired 'Servant of the People', the 2015-2019 comedy series of (fellow Jew) Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Zelensky plays a head of state 47, who became president of Ukraine in 2019 and an international hero during the Russia-Ukraine War that started in 2022. Kolomoyskyi, who pushed Zelensky for president, was involved in money laundering with Zelensky, as well as Zelensky's future (Jewish) chief of staff and security service head, Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend of Zelensky. 48 In 2014 he was the second wealthiest oligarch in Ukraine, with fellow-Jew Victor Pinchuk listed number 4. 49 In 2021, Kolomoyskyi was listed number 7, behind the number 3, Victor Pinchuk, the top globalist political operative in Ukraine who by coincidence married the daughter of Leonid Kuchma, the not-uncontroversial 1994-2005 president of Ukraine. Funny detail: only 0.2% of Ukraine is Jewish.
Apart from being the covert operator of Ukraine's largest (conventional) gas field near Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine 50, Kolomoyskyi was an early benefactor of the 1990s voucher program, the owner of the looted and scandal-ridden PrivatBank 51, also tied to President Zelensky, including intimidation of government investigators of the bank 52; an investor in minerals and airlines, supervisory chairman of the Dnipro football club, and governor of the Dnipro Oblast (Province) from March 2014 to March 2015. At the time, the Dnipro Province immediately bordered the Donetsk province and indirectly the Luhansk province where referendums were held whether citizens wanted to belong to Russia or Ukraine. It also was the period that Russia annexed the Crimea.
More importantly, Kolomoyskyi has been a major covert founder and funder of anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine militias as the Dnepr 1 and Dnepr 2 battalions (Dnipro), the Aidar Battalion, accused of war crimes; the Azov Battalion, which was about 15% Nazi and also was accused of torture and war crimes; and Donbas volunteer battalions. 53
Maybe not too surprising, Kolomoyskyi developed at least one major CIA tie as well, while funding all these battalions. As the covert owner of Burisma Holdings since at least 2011 54, in 2013 the company's first CEO had a Harvard and McKinsey background, the company's first CFO had a Morgan Stanley London and McKinsey Moscow background. The company's first chair from May 2013 was a Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch veteran. In January 2014, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a 1994 Davos "Global Leader for Tomorrow" before even his 1995-2004 term as president of Poland, who afterwards became an international advisor of the Atlantic Council and a trustee of George Soros' International Crisis Group, was invited to the board. From April 2014 to April 2019, Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. vice president and future U.S. president Joe Biden, was listed as a director, overlapping with the term of Devon Archer, a senior adviser to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. 55 And last but not least, in January 2017, notorious CIA anti-terrorism chief at the time of 9/11, Cofer Black, joined the board of Burisma Holdings. 56 A good question to ask here is why all these prominent American and European globalists, and especially the latter-day Cofer Black, would get themselves involved with a company as Burisma, with its shady ownership, and extremely shady secret owner.
We could go on more still. Kolomoyskyi is devout Zionist. In that capacity he and Ukraine's more-openly-fellow-globalist oligarch Victor Pinchuk, have been named as members of the advisory board for Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky of the Chabad Lubavitcher movement / sect. 57 Pinchuk is the wealthiest oligarch of Ukraine and, among other things, founded the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conferences, a Bilderberg of East Europe. The Chabad is an obscure outfit about which little is known. It also involves Jews surrounding Russian president Putin, from oligarch Roman Abramovich to Russia's chief rabbi Berel Lazar. 58
In addition, Kolomoyskyi has been an extremely close ally in Jewish NGOs and business of Vadim Rabinovich. Rabinovich actually is the 1995 founder of the TV company "Studio 1+1" 59, which at least since 2006 was majority-owned by Kolomoyskyi 60 and still later produced the show of Zelensky. How far back their ties go though is not entirely known. What is known is Rabinovich and Kolomoyskyi's joint (and often organizing and reorganizing) involvement in hardline Zionist NGOs, such as the European Council of Jewish Communities, which Kolomoyskyi "putsched" in 2010, and reorganized from social activism in Europe to pro-Israel and anti-Iran activism with the apparent support of CPMAJO vice chair Malcolm Hoenlein from the United States 61; the United Jewish Community of Ukraine 62, the European Jewish Union 63, and the European Jewish Parliament. 64 From 1998 on, Rabinovich was chair of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, where Ukraine's chief rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich also was on the board, with Victor Pinchuk a financier.
However, Rabinovich, similar to his ally Kolomoyskyi, has always been controversial. Rabinovich is a person who already in 1996 was fingered in FBI documents of being a leading member and Ukrainian partner of the (Jewish) Mogilevich organization 65, in turn the long-time partner of Russia's most powerful mafia, Solntsevskaya; and was demonstrated to have had highest level ties to Ukrainian intelligence as well, similar as was reported about Semion Mogilevich at the time. In January 2002, Der Spiegel reported:
"Vadim Rabinovich, an Israeli citizen of Ukrainian origin, along with the former director of the Ukrainian secret service [under 1994-2005 president Leonid Kuchma] and his son sold a consignment of 150 to 200 T-55 and T-62 tanks to the Taliban. ... The deal was conducted through the Pakistani secret service... A Western intelligence source told the Public Integrity Center that Rabinovich's weapons had been airlifted by one of [arms dealer Victor] Bout's airfreight companies from his base in the UAE." 66
Strangely, Rabinovich has posed as a major political opponent of fellow-Jew Volodymyr Zelensky 67, who even in office remained a long-time ally Kolomoisky. Eventually, Zelensky and Kolomoisky fell out, after Ukrainian government all of a sudden saw problems with Kolomoisky's businesses. 68
Putin or the globalists: what is better for your country?
In the previous sections we discussed the overt (as far as the globalist movement has any "overt" aspects) and covert aspects of the globalist movement in surrounding and infiltrating Putin's Russia, and Putin doing his best to undermine these efforts - of course in his own peculiar ways.
In that sense it is quite interesting, if not depressing, to think about what exactly Ukrainians, or any other East European opponents of Putin's Russia, are fighting for. If they win, they will not live in a traditional dictatorship, with all its crude propaganda and physical repression. They get to keep their natural resources and shipping routes, they will avoid western boycotts, and likely will experience more economic prosperity. However, if the "freedom lovers" of Eastern Europe win, or even those in Russia itself, that also means that they slowly but surely will fall under the influence of the globalist superclass. And if NATO and the European Union, a.k.a. the globalist movement, wins, the above agenda will at some point be implemented in full force:
- Extremist Third World immigration with White Guilt and eventual White Replacement.
- Extremist feminism.
- Extremist LGBTQ rights.
- Veganism.
Eastern Europe still has a lot of resistance towards "refugees" from the Third World, but the globalist movement will break this down over the decades by controlling political candidates, the media, the activists on the ground, the movie and miniseries scripts, and the school cirriculums. Don't be surprised if by 2100 50% of Ukraine and Russia is black and Arab.
Of course, Putin sacrificing his young working classes 69 in a pointless war he can't win in the long run - because NATO countries are too technologically advanced and wealthy compared to Russia, and will forever keep pushing - is both impractical and immoral - if not outright Satanic. The only thing Putin can do is educate his population on the globalist movement, and for the rest try to be as benign a dictator as he can be, so he can avoid as many sanctions as possible. He doesn't seem to have an interest in that, which raises an additional set of questions.
Early "Davos man" Putin a quiet globalist?
Over the years questions have been raised by this author if Putin actually is operating fully independently from the seemingly-all-powerful globalist movement.
Some of his oligarchs were very pro-West and globalist-oriented. This mainly involved Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and arguably Boris Berezovsky, also the most prominent oligarchs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. These oligarchs were run out of the country by Putin, because they effectively tried to overthrow him.
More "mellow" oligarchs, from Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Potanin, Oleg Deripaska, and Roman Abramovich, have, despite being tolerated by Putin, been very "fluid" in their loyalties in this regard. So much is clear just by looking where they show up in globalist NGOs: from the CFR's international advisory board and Davos "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" classes, to Munich Security Conference meetings and Rothschild birthday parties. The idea that these oligarchs - who faced heavy sanctions during the Russia-Ukraine War starting in 2022 - operate merely as "contacts" and "fronts" for Putin within these globalist groups is not particularly credible. It is quite clear they'd switch sides in a heartbeat if they could do so without repercussions.
Russian think tank elites have similarly been very cozy with western globalist elites.
However, what about Putin himself? The "lone" leader of Russia?
Putin is far from alone in this regard. We have similar questions about almost all western and East European "populists" - which is why so many are listed in ISGP's "conservative CIA" oversight. For example, it really makes little sense that the anti-globalist, anti-Soros, and anti-immigration Viktor Orban of Hungary (prime minister 1998-2002, 2010-, still anno 2024), in 1988-1989 was sent to Oxford University on a Soros Foundation fellowship 70 to study under old Bill Clinton mentor and Hegelian Dialectic expert Zbigniew Pelczynski 71, only to subsequently be part of the first batch of "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" of Davos, together with an absolutely shocking list of emerging globalists and future heads of state: Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, Jacob Wallenberg, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Bono of U2, Larry Summers, Jose Maria Aznar (PM Spain 1996-2004), Tony Blair (PM UK 1997-2007), Guy Verhofstadt (PM Belgium 1999-2008), Angela Merkel (chancellor of Germany 2005-2021), Gordon Brown (PM UK 2007-2010), and Nicolas Sarkozy (president France 2007-2012). 72
You move to the other side of the globe, to the radical "alt right", "anti-globalist" Argentine president Javier Milei, and see that this person too has an early history at Davos and with various top globalists. On it goes, so these questions about Putin are not entirely out of context, to put it mildly.
Davos 1993 actually immediately brings back memories of Putin as well. Putin and his "St. Petersburg" group, and some of his allied oligarchs, have a history with Davos since 1991-1992. In 1991 Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg from 1991 to 1996 and Putin's chief mentor in this period, opened Davos' first regional meeting in Moscow. 73 It is not known if Putin was present at this meeting, or had any involvement in its organizing. However, Sobchak also hosted a Davos regional meeting in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1992, several months later. Putin most certainly was prominently present at this meeting. So was Alexei Kudrin, a "St. Petersburger" tasked with economic development and a 1998 "Global Leader for Tomorrow"; and Alexy Miller. 74, the "St. Petersburger" appointed to head of Gazprom (and Gazprom-Media) in 2001, a position Miller still held at the time of the Russia-Ukraine War in the mid 2020s.
What globalist connections Putin exactly made in this period is unknown. We do know he first met top new age globalist Ted Turner in the summer of 1994, when Turner organized his Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg 75, and also that, as an aide to Sobchak, continually, KGB-style, vetted and met anything from western royals to unidentified "businessmen". 76 At least on the surface, Putin adored Klaus Schwab and met with him in private until at least the 2022-initiated Russian-Ukraine War. 77 Bizarrely, Klaus Schwab has repeatedly bragged that Putin was one of his "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" / "Young Global Leaders", for which, in contrast to Orban, Merkel, Blair, Sarkozy, and a bunch of Russian business and political leaders, there is no evidence. But maybe it does denote that Putin had a deeper early involvement in Davos than is publicly known. 78
Meanwhile, "Putin's (alleged) brain", Alexander Dugin 79, engages in a whole lot of typical "Davos speak", equally mirroring the globalist agenda of secretive groups as the "Shadow G8" that for a long time have been pushing to expand the G7/G8 to the G20, followed by the G21 (all of Africa):
"New civilisations are on the rise, including Chinese, Islamic, Indian, African, and Latin American. ... The growing influence of the multipolar world order [is] signalling a weakening of Western hegemony, [with] the United States and Western powers ... resolutely clinging to the concept of unilateralism. ... Russia, under Putin's leadership, recognises that it cannot be one of just two poles in this world... Russia [is] rebuffing Western liberalism [though], including its promotion of the gay rights agenda and other Western ideological standards [note: why not mention Third World immigration?]..." 80
Dugin essentially mixes "alt-rightism" with a Soros- and Ford Foundation ("liberal CIA"), pro-Third World, anti-white, anti-Jew globalist agenda. Putin may not be all that different. He has attacked U.S. "cancel culture" and the LGBTQ agenda of the West from a traditional, Christian, dogmatic "conservative" standpoint 81, but at the same time annihilates his own white, young emerging working class in a pointless war with "human wave" tactics, and let the black Quincy Promes continue to play at Spartak Moscow, despite being charged in his home country, the Netherlands, for attempted murder and the trafficking of more than a ton of cocaine. War or no war? Extradition treaties or not? Any political leader even remotely sensible, moral, or anti-immigration would unlikely allow such a thing.
Russia's "state-controlled" media as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik also quite heavily fall into the the trap of "conservative CIA", "anti-woke" rhetoric. In 2022, while fully banned by western internet providers during the Russia-Ukraine War, RT's frontpage was adorned with "conservative CIA"-type propaganda on Canada's trucker protests. 82 Noticing this ban has been lifted as of April 1, 2024, the frontpage of Russia Today is adorned by Scott Ritter. 83 Conventionally known as a United Nations weapons of mass destruction inspector in Iraq in 1991-1998, in later years Ritter emerged as a "liberal CIA"-type anti-neocon propagandist who surrounded himself even with 9/11-no-plane disinformers. In that sense, clearly nothing changed at RT since 2013, when 9/11-no-planer and "liberal CIA"-tied Abby Martin first brought on nothing but heavy-duty western conspiracy disinformers and "liberal CIA" propagandists on her RT show 'Breaking The Set': from Mike Ruppert to Graham Hancock and Steven Greer. 84
We could discuss Sputnik News too, but it's not particularly impressive as a new agency either. Then there is the "commercial" Pravda.ru, which is deeply tied to the Far West Ltd. clique of Russian-Ukrainian covert operatives - with CIA and 9/11 ties - that used to push all kinds of conspiracy disinformation articles, including on numerology tied to events as 9/11 and such. 85
Let's not forget too in this regard that China's dominant Baidu search engine has banned ISGP much more severely (it literally does not exist in any way, shape, or form) than anti-China-type conspiracy disinformers Alex Jones and Jeff Rense - yet another peculiarity. A lot of questions can be asked about governments around the world in terms of truly opposing the globalist agenda.
*****
Timeline: 1980s
These timelines still are very incomplete, both with entries and sources. It won't be productive to write a summarizing article until all the different establishments, other players, and important events have been mapped. The transition of Russia from the Soviet Union to the Putin era is an extraordinarily complex historical period.
March 11, 1985 | Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the leader of the Soviet Union, elected by the Politburo. He is a very moderate leader, forbidding the display of pictures of himself in public and speaks to people in the streets. His wife is his closest advisor. Through various promotions, including of Boris Yeltsin, within a year Gorbachev is able to establish a dominant position within the Politburo. Hence, by 1986, he starts speaking more and more of "perestroika", a set of reforms of society and the economy to combat the Soviet Union's low productivity, poor work ethic, and inferior quality goods. |
June 1985 | Ted Turner establishes the Better World Society, or in any case reveals its existence to the world. Maurice Strong is founding president. 86 United Nations under-secretary general Yasushi Akashi is a founding board member. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Soviet Central Committee member Dr. Georgy Arbatov join the board within a number of months. Arbatov becomes the first to introduce Ted Turner to Mikhail Gorbachev. They meet in Moscow to discuss a way to end the Cold War, some time before the July 1986 Goodwill Games. 87 |
Mid 1985 | Ted Turner visits the Soviet Union, including Soviet Georgia and goes climbing and hunting in the Caucasus, bagging a mountain goat. 88 It is likely that during this trip or surrounding it, he was first introduced to Mikhail Gorbachev. It is actually not clear to this author when exactly in 1985 Turner visited, but looking at how cold Russia is in winter, we can guesstimate. |
Early 1986 | Yeltsin begins attacking Gorbachev at Politburo meetings, complaining that his reforms aren't quick- and far-reaching enough. Gorbachev mainly considers Yeltsin a self-promoter. At the same time, on the right, communist hardliners are becoming increasingly wary of Gorbachev. |
July 5-20, 1986 | Mikhail Gorbachev gives the opening speech at Ted Turner's Goodwill Games in Moscow, calling for peace and warning against nuclear war. Future top oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky creates a cultural program for the games and acts as a stage director. 89 As the US and USSR have been boycotting the 1980 and 1984 Olympics, this event marks the first time in ten years that athletes from Soviet Union and United States compete against each other. The Russians bans U.S.-allies Israel and South Korea, however. Financially the event is not successful and Turner loses over $10 million on it. |
Sep. 1986 | Gorbachev makes a speech in which he embraces limited market economy. |
1987 | Gorbachev adds "glasnost" ("openness") to his policy, which includes the release of all political dissidents, stimulating political debate in the media, opening archives to past state secrets, and a softer approach to the West. |
1987 | Future top oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky sets up INFEKS in partnership with U.S. PR firm APCO, owned by law firm Arnold & Porter. INFEKS is aimed at consulting foreign companies looking to invest in Russia. A year later, Gusinsky sets up his Most Bank/Group, again in partnership with APCO. |
1987 | George Soros sets up an Open Society Institute branch in the Soviet Union. The name is unknown to this author at the moment. |
1988 | Emerging privatization czar and future oligarch builder Anatoly Chubais meets with (radical, pro-big business monopolist) Western neoliberal economists at the 1988 conference of the Centre for Research into Communist Economies (CRCE), a project of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London that promotes the work of Friedrich von Hayek, Thomas Friedman and Sir Anthony Fisher in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Within a year, these men also get in touch with Yegor Gaidar and "practically all the [emerging] reformers in the Soviet Union." |
1988 | With Gorbachev and perestroika on its way, George Soros proposes to set up an international task force to try and set up a limited market sector in the Soviet economy, which over time would then be gradually expanded. Prime minister Vladimir Ryzhkov ordered the heads of Gosplan, Gosnab and other major institutions to participate. Romano Prodi was part of the European side of the commission. Eventually it becomes clear to Soros that the Soviet system is "too diseased" to nurture any kind of free market embryo. |
1989 | Vladimir Yakovlev sets up Russia's first private newspaper, Kommersant, heading it until 1999. He ends up a director of Sistema and getting involved with a variety of oligarchs. |
Timeline: 1990s
These timelines still are very incomplete, both with entries and sources. It won't be productive to write a summarizing article until all the different establishments, other players, and important events have been mapped. The transition of Russia from the Soviet Union to the Putin era is an extraordinarily complex historical period.
Aug. 1990 | Publication of the Soros-backed Shatalin Plan. It calls for a radical, quick transition to a market economy for the Soviet Union within 500 days, market prices, mass privatization, integration with the world economic system, and a release of the Soviet Union's East European vassal states. The plan is proposed by the Soros-supported Grigory Yavlinsky - later a trustee and advisor of Soros' International Crisis Group - and further developed by Stanislav Shatalin, an economic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev. To promote the plan, Soros has Yavlinsky and Shatalin fly over to the 1990 IMF/World Bank meeting. Yeltsin is fully supportive, but Gorbachev and the Supreme Soviet eventually opting for a more gradual approach. |
1990 | Formation of Trans Commodities, Inc. by Sam Kislin and Michael Cherney / Mikhail Chernoi. It serves as an early vehicle for the takeover of the metals industry, most notably aluminum, as it is being privatized. By 1994 the FBI will suspect the men of being connected to Russian-American crime boss Vyacheslav Ivankov. 90 Other suspicions are that Kislin and Chernoi are tied to the Azmailovskaya Gang, in turn also supposedly connected to Oleg Deripaska, Iskander Makhmudov and even Putin. |
Sep. 1991 | The WEF organizes a conference in St. Petersburg, chaired by mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin's mentor at the time. This is 10 days after the failed coup. 91 |
Oct. 1991 | Chubais becomes chair of the newly-formed State Committee on the Management of State Property (GKI). Price liberalization and control of the government's budget are the top two priorities. Privatization is still an issue of debate, as many think it's best to first fix macroeconomic problems, and maybe legal frameworks. |
Spring 1992 | Mayor Anatoly Sobchak hosts a Davos regional meeting in St. Petersburg. Putin is prominently present at this meeting. 92 |
Nov. 1992 | Chubais sets up the Moscow-based Russian Privatization Center (RPC). Soros-backed Bilderberg and Davos economist Anders Aslund and Harvard's Andrei Shleifer become a directors. USAID, the European Union, European governments and the Japanese government provided this institute with millions. It effectively served as a governmental economic policy unit, set up by Yeltsin's presidential decree, over which the Russian Duma had no say. Harvard's HIID under Jeffrey Sachs is its American branch. |
Jan.? 1993 | Anatoly Chubais and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are visiting their first World Economic Forum in Davos meeting. At this point George Soros is not part of the meetings yet. |
Feb. 23, 1993 | Vladimir Gusinsky sets up Segodnya, the second private newspaper in Russia after Kommersant. |
Sep. 1993 | Over 20% of Russian industrial workers are employed by privatized firms. Service firms are even more widely privatized. Over 60% of Russia's population support privatization. |
Oct. 1993 | Vladimir Gusinsky sets up the NTV television channel. The channel is critical of the amount of violence used by the Russians in the First Chechen War. It heavily favored the reelection of Yeltsin in 1996. By 1999 NTV had an audience of 102 million, covering about 70% of Russia's territory, and was available in various former Soviet republics. It opposed the Putin campaign in 2000. In fact, on March 24, 2000, two days before the elections, NTV aired an investigation of the Ryazan apartment bombing of the fall 1999 in its talk show Independent Investigation, suggesting Putin and the FSB/KGB were responsible for the bombing. |
Jan.? 1994 | Anatoly Chubais is at his second Davos meeting in Switzerland. |
Apr. 5, 1994 | Assassination of Georgian crime boss Otari Kvantrishvili by a sniper, later found to belong to the Orekhovskaya gang, at the time the junior partner in an alliance with Solntsevskaya since 1989. At the time of his death, Kvantrishvili was working to undermine the giant aluminum export company Trans-World Group, belonging to Jewish oligarchs Michael Cherney (a.k.a. Mikhail Chernoy) and his brother Lev. Anton Malevsky, head of the Izmailovskaya gang, is a partner of the Cherneys. Future top oligarch Oleg Deripaska is a protege of the Cherneys in the aluminum business and also a partner with Malevsky. The Cherneys reportedly receive Mossad protection. The Cherneys and Anton Malevsky will flee to Israel in 1994 after an investigation is opened against them in Russia. Cherney is allowed to remain an Israeli citizen, but Malevsky will be deprived of citizenship in 1998. Sam Kislin is a U.S.-based money launderer for the Cherneys in this period. According to Russian authorities, the Cherneys in the early 1990s defrauded the Russian Central Bank of more than $100 million through an elaborate scam involving dozens of fictitious companies. The brothers then used the funds as seed money as they and a London-based holding company, Trans World Group, through a maze of offshore companies and alliances, rapidly gained control of Russia's aluminum industry and acquired a large stake in the processing and distribution of other metals and petroleum products. "The Aluminum Wars" by the Russian press, as many businessmen, most of whom opposed the Cherneys takeover, were killed. Kislin said that the brothers obtained licenses "to buy the aluminum for $10 and sell it for $1,500" by bribing top Russian officials. "The corruption is unbelievable," he said. And, he said, he severed his business relation with Mikhail Cherney. Lev Cherney has used three Arik Kislin residences as addresses on at least three different occasions from June 1993 to April 1997. Michael Cherney also used those same residences as addresses at least four times from April 1993 to March 1997. 93 |
July 23 - Aug. 7, 1994 | Ted Turner stages his Goodwill Games in Saint Petersburg. It is the first time that he meets Putin 94, who serves as a key aide to Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak. |
Jan.? 1995 | Putin's boss, Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, visits Davos as well this year. During the 1991-1996 Putin continually serves as the most important aide of Sobchak, even becoming known as "a real shadow mayor, because he signed all the decrees when Sobchak was absent, and Sobchak was gone a lot." 95 In Saint Petersburg Putin continually welcomes western businessmen, as well as individuals as Queen Elizabeth II, Ted Turner and actress Jane Fonda. Putin twice visits the U.S. with Sobchak's wife, with whom he also once was spotted in a Monaco elevator with "an elderly relative of Prince Rainier’s." 96 |
Jan.? 1995 | Boris Berezovsky is at his first World Economic Forum in Davos meeting. Anatoly Chubais has been visiting annually since 1993. |
Feb. 12, 1995 | The Washington Post reports that "liberal CIA"-funded outfit Internews Network is reaching out to local news stations across Russia, setting up "seminars in journalism, business planning, advertising and technical issues" and flying "selected managers to the United States for additional training." The article specifically mentions Soros and USAID as "primary" financiers of Internews. |
March 1, 1995 | The new director of Russian Public Television (ORT), revolutionary Perestroika-era TV host Vladislav Listyev, is gunned down, immediately after he makes work of cutting out all "middlemen" from ORT's ad publication. |
1995 | 40,000 people are murdered in Russia this year, with another 70,000 having disappeared. This a murder rate over three times higher than New York City. 97 |
1995 | Rothschild and ING Barings are consulted by the Yeltsin government to sell Sviazinvest. The offer is withdrawn due to criticism foreigners might take over this Russian asset. |
Aug. 5, 1995 | Businessman Ivan Kivelidi, the 1993 founder and head of the Russian Business Round Table (RBRT), dies after having been poisoned with Novichok a few days before. This hyper-potent, top-secret chemical warfare nerve agent is later found to have been illegally sold to mafia elements by top chemical warfare researcher Leonid Rink. According to RBRT ethics panel head and former Gorbachev economics minister, Vladimir Sherbakov, the RBRT blocked 10 companies from joining their group just a month earlier, because they "are connected to the criminal world." Over 1994-1995 in total nine members of the RBRT are killed, all suspected to have been the result of the association's anti-mafia stance. 98 |
Aug. 8, 1995 | MP and well-known television journalist Aleksandr Lyubimov, who is present at Kivelidi's funeral, says to the media, "The state does nothing to defend people who are a little bit better off than others. The police only come around to collect taxes. I can't rely on them. I have to pay for my own personal security." |
Nov. 3, 1995 | Surgutneftegaz, Russia's 5th largest oil company, is auctioned in the remote Siberian town of Surgut to the company's own pension fund. Only two bidders are present, after a third applicant was disqualified over paper work and the town's airport mysteriously shut down that day. |
Dec. 1995 | Group Menatep of Mikhail Khodorkovsky snatches up the Yukos oil company for $310 million in a two-stage rigged auction in which Bank Menatep also is one of the managers. Yukos, in reality, is worth about $5 billion. Previously, Khodorkovsky, apart from his business enterprises, was chairman of the Investment Fund for Assistance to the Fuel and Oil Industry (in 1992) and deputy minister of the Ministry of Fuel and Energy (briefly in 1993). |
Dec. 1995 | Boris Berezovsky's Finance Oil Corp. (FNK) is able to gain control of the freshly created oil company Sibneft for $100 million. At the time, the real value of the company is estimated around $600 million. Roman Abramovich is Berezovsky's partner in buying Sibneft. In May 1997 FNK is able to fend off a take over of Vladimir Potanin's Oneximbank, after which ownership becomes more official. |
Early Feb. 1996 | Russian oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Potanin and Anatoly Chubais all are part of the World Economic Meeting in Davos. George Soros, who supports reformist candidate Grigory Yavlinsky, tells Berezovsky that he and the oligarchs might actually be killed if Victor Cherm is elected instead of Yeltsin. In part because of these statements, as Berezovsky later recalls, he and the other oligarchs present form the "Davos Pact" in which they start to heavily finance Yeltsin's campaign. 99 Others support the latter notion, but give more credit to Berezovsky as the main organizer in January, which makes sense looking at how the entire oligarch clique came to Davos in the first place. 100 In this period, Putin is a campaigner for Yeltsin as well, and also serving other duties: "More than once [Putin] translated when Boris Yeltsin met high-ranking Germans in St. Petersburg" 101 |
Apr. 27, 1996 | Publication of the "Letter of Thirteen" in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, an event which even anno Dec. 2021 doesn't have an English Wikipedia... The letter is addressed to presidential candidate Boris Yeltsin, asks for a degree of political compromise with the left, and contains 8 points aimed at overcoming the country's crises. Furthermore, it calls for "freedom, citizenship, justice, law and truth" and is signed by:
|
Jul. 3, 1996 | Yeltsin wins the re-elections due to the enormous help of the oligarchs. |
Oct. 30, 1996 | In a (very) obscure interview with the Financial Times, Boris Berezovsky explains that "the group of seven" who kept Yeltsin in power consists of himself, Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky of the Menatep Group and Yukos Oil, Peter Aven and Mikhail Fridman of Alfa Group, and Alexander Smolensky of Stolichny Bank. 102 According to Berezevsky, their enterprises "control about 50 per cent of the [Russian] economy." Berezovsky explained, "We hired Anatoly Chubais 103, who appears to feel he has no real choice with getting along with the privatization schemes. 104 |
Nov. 1996 | Boris Berezovsky is host to a party celebrating the opening of a Red Square boutique of Estée Lauder cosmetics. Ronald Lauder, a globalist billionaire Zionist; top superclass member Thomas Pickering, and President Boris Yeltsin's wife attend the party. |
April 1997 | Boris Nemtsov calls together the "big 7" oligarchs and tells them that there will be no more rigging of auctions. |
July 1997: | Boris Nemtsov auctions Sviazinvest, but insists on relatively high price, because the Yeltsin government needs to pay 4.4 billion in wages, especially those of an increasingly disgruntled military. The two top bidders, Vladimir Gusinsky and Vladimir Potanin, went to meet Chubais to work out a lower price. Worried that Potanin was becoming a threat to his own business empire, Berezovsky was present as well, although officially as Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, there to "guard" against criminal or foreign influences on the auction. Chubais, generally considered more compromising, refused to intervene though and the auction continues with the original price set by Nemtsov. Eventually the goes to Potanin's Oneximbank and his partners Morgan Stanley, Morgan Grenfell in Germany, and George Soros' Quantum Fund. Gusinsky, allied with Alfa Bank, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Telefonica de Espana S.A. lose. The immediate result is a media war in which Gusinsky, aided by the ORT news station-owning Berezovsky, uses his Segodnya newspaper and NTV news station to attack Potanin, Nemtsov, Chubais, and Chubais' protege in privatization, Alfred Koch. Potanin retaliates through his Komsomolskaia Pravda with articles as 'Enough of Bandit Capitalism', somewhat hypocritically explaining how the schemes of Gusinsky and Berezovsky were pushing the Russian masses back towards radical, Soviet-type, anti-capitalist forces. 105 |
Aug. 5, 1997 | Vladimir Potanin's Oneximbank wins the government auction of Norilsk Nickel. Considerable international criticism erupts, because a subsidiary of Oneximbank managed the bids, with foreign corporations excluded, and "only one competitor, a little-known Russian industrial consortium." 106 The reason that the domestic criticism was so much less compared to the auction of Sviazinvest the month before, is due to the fact that neither Berezovsky nor Gusinsky were interested in the "problem-ridden mining and smelting giant" 107, and therefore saw no reason to use their media empires to attack the sale. |
Nov. 5, 1997 | Boris Berezovsky is dismissed from his Security Council. |
Aug. 1998 | A major stock market crash takes place. The media and other holdings of Berezovsky and Gusinsky soon are worth only a fraction of what it was before the crash. Potanin's Oneximbank is forced to close shop. Soros sees his $1 billion investment in Sviazinvest crash to just $100 million, soon referring to it as "the worst investment he had ever made." Chubais was able to be appointed as CEO of UES, Russia’s electrical monopoly, became an oligarch of his own as a result, and was about the only one better off after the crash. 108 |
Feb. 1999 | Oct. 2000 issue, Vanity Fair: "Last February, while Putin was acting president, three Family-friendly oligarchs—Roman Abramovich, a principal owner of Sibneft Oil, media mogul Boris Berezovsky, acting through his company Logovaz, and a Siberian magnate—ended up with more than 60 percent of Russia’s multibillion-dollar aluminum reserve in a questionable takeover that was found not to violate the country’s anti-monopoly laws." 109 |
Dec. 1999 | Participants of a meeting at the Herots Hotel in Eilat Israel include: Solntsevskaya mafia ally Semion Mogilevich; aluminum kingpin oligarch Michael Cherney and his protege in the aluminum business Oleg Deripaska, who essentially have been leaders for years of the Izmailovskaya mafia; Mogilevich lieutenant Vadim Rabinovich, a leading Zionist activist from Ukraine; Oleg Taranov, head of the Ukrainia National Agency for the Management of State Property; and Andrey Derkach, son of the head of the security service of Ukraine, Leonid Derkach [under Kuchma]. 110 |
Dec. 14, 1999 | It is reported that the now-New York City-based Sam Kislin, suspected of Russian mafia ties in FBI files, has been funding politicians as the Clinton-Gore election campaign, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, Chuck Schumer, and most notably Rudy Giuliani - while sitting on the New York City Economic Development Board. To the media Kislin confirms he employed Michael Cherney as a manager at Trans Commodities in 1988-1992, calling him, "the best man I ever knew." He confirms other shady connections to the media, for which he had been investigated by the FBI in the past. 111 |
Timeline: 2000s
These timelines still are very incomplete, both with entries and sources. It won't be productive to write a summarizing article until all the different establishments, other players, and important events have been mapped. The transition of Russia from the Soviet Union to the Putin era is an extraordinarily complex historical period.
March 26, 2000 | Putin, as the official protege of Yeltsin, is elected the new president of Russia with 55.5% of the votes. The Soros-supported Grigory Yavlinsky - almost immediately after a trustee and advisor of Soros' International Crisis Group - only receives 6% of the votes. |
May 7, 2000 | Putin officially becomes president of Russia. |
May 2000 | Ted Turner and Putin both attended the opening of the Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential library in Moscow. 112 |
Late May, 2000 | Boris Berezovsky resigns from the Duma, complaining about Putin's rapid centralization of power, saying he does "not want to be involved in the country's ruin and the restoration of an authoritarian regime." In reality Berezovsky is worried more about Putin's criticism and eventual crackdown on the oligarch system of the 1990s. 113 |
Jun. 13, 2000 | Vladimir Gusinsky is arrested in Russia. Putin is on vacation and claims to have no knowledge of the arrest. Gorbachev claims to the media that it must be an act op people looking to discredit Putin. Meanwhile, in a letter to Russia's prosecutor-general 17 businessmen call for the immediate release of Gusinsky:
|
July 28, 2000 | Putin's notorious summit with the oligarchs in which he told them to pay their taxes and stay out of politics. According to key organizer Boris Nemtsov, the meeting marks "the end of the oligarchy." 114 Those present included Gazprom chief Rem Vyakhirev, Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Siberian-Ural Aluminum Co. owner Viktor Vekselberg, and Lukoil's Vagit Alekperov. Berezovsky and Gusinsky were taken off the original list of invitees; so was Roman Abramovich. 115 |
Aug. 2000 | Berezovsky's ORT news station criticizes Putin over his handling of the Kursk submarine sinking. Putin tells Boris Berezovsky to sell his ORT or prepare to go to prison. |
Jan. 2001 | Berezovsky sells his 49% ownership of ORT to his former protege, Roman Abramovich, who has remained loyal to Putin. |
Apr. 2001 | Take-over of Vladimir Gusinky's NTV. |
2001 | Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Lord Jacob Rothschild and Henry Kissinger are three of five founding trustees of the Open Russia Foundation. Leonid Nevzlin considers himself a co-founder as well. |
Mid 2002 | Zbigniew Brzezinski and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Group Menatep and the Yukos oil concern, both join the board of trustees of George Soros' International Crisis Group. Khodorkovsky would disappear here after his 2003 arrest by Putin. |
2003 | After Putin has Mikhail Khodorkovsky arrested, Khodorkovsky's Yukos shares are automatically passed on to Lord Jacob Rothschild. Both men, including Henry Kissinger, set up the Open Russia Foundation in 2001. |
2011 | Leonid Nevzlin, the former deputy of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Yukos and a co-founder with Henry Kissinger and Lord Jacob Rothschild in the Open Russia Foundation back in 2001, buys a 20% stake in Haaretz, the most "lefty", pro-Palestine newspaper in Israel. |
Notes
- May 20, 1999, Moscow Times, 'Season of Discontent: Stepashin Is A Hard-Liner For All Seasons': "Chubais, who has emerged from the shadows and been extraordinarily active lately, characterized Stepashin this way: "A doctor of science, a professor, a trained lawyer, a genuine Petersburg intellectual." Chubais possesses an amazing capacity to lie convincingly and with inspiration for whatever strikes him as politically expedient at a given moment. As for Stepashin, I remember this "Petersburg intellectual," absurdly dressed in loose overalls, at the memorable "drunken" news conference in Grozny in January 1995, during which Defense Minister Pavel Grachev uttered the monstrous phrase: "Seventeen-year-old boys are dying with happy smiles on their faces." And Stepashin, obsequiously addressing Grachev, stated: "And now our air force is carrying out the whole program, paying no mind to the peacemakers in Moscow, isn't that right, Pavel Sergeyevich?" The air force carried out Stepashin's whole program and Russia lost tens of thousands of citizens. For how much of this can Yeltsin alone be asked to answer?"
- May 21, 2005, Stratfor, 'Russia: A Merger Fails, A Power Struggle Is Revealed -- Part 2': " Though Putin has managed to get like-minded siloviki into positions of power inside the Kremlin, sources in the administration say he has yet to do the same at mid-level government positions. The middle ranks are full of siloviki opposed to Putin's Westernizing approach and his political concessions to the West."
- Ibid.
- Nov. 2, 2003, The Times, 'Rothschild is the new power behind Yukos'.
- May 4, 2004, International Crisis Group Africa Report report no. 79, 'Biting the Somali Bullet', p. 24, Appendix D (not the first board where Brzezinski and (the in Oct. 2003 arrested) Khodorkovsky jointly appear, which goes back to 2002): "ICG Board of Trustees: ... Zbigniew Brzezinski ... Mikhail Khodorkovsky ... Martti Ahtisaari, Chairman. ... Stephen Solarz, Vice-Chairman. ... Gareth Evans, President & CEO. ... Morton Abramowitz ... Richard [A.] Allen ... Victor Chu ... [Gen.] Wesley Clark ... Carla Hills ... Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ... Wim Kok..."
- openrussiafoundation.org/ Board_of_Trustees.asp (accessed: Dec. 3, 2003; website up mid 2003 - Dec. 2005): "The Board of Trustees: [5 total:] Mikhail B.Khodorkovsky. The Honourable Henry Kissinger ... Lord Jacob Rothschild, OM GBE... held a meeting on June 17, 2003... the previous Board of Trustees meeting in September 2002.".
- Aug. 25, 2000, The Guardian, 'Putin aims Kursk fury at media: Television moguls blamed for disinformation as public anger over tragedy fails to abate' (The Guardian is very pro-oligarch in this case): "Putin made barely veiled threats against ... Boris Berezovsky, who controls the main state channel, ORT, and Vladimir Gusinsky, who owns the biggest private channel, NTV ... accusing the two top television moguls of seeking to exploit the Kursk submarine disaster... In a clear reference to Mr Berezovsky and Mr Gusinsky, he said: "They'd better sell their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France or Spain. Then they might have to explain why all this property is registered in false names under front law-firms. Perhaps we would ask them where they got the money.""
- In 1996 Yeltsin was forced to fire Korzhakov, Grachev and other allies in order to get support from the oligarchs controlling the main TV channels and the economy at that point.
- *) 2002, NTV, TV-6 and Boris Berezovsky-financed film (based on Alexander Litvinenko's 2002 book 'Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within', who worked as a consultant on the film), 'Assassination of Russia' / 'Blowing up Russia', 7:20: "The NTV television channel, then still independent, took an interest in the Ryazan case. In March 2000 it broadcasted an open debate with everyone involved in the affair in its show, Independent Inquiry."
*) Feb. 21, 2017, National Post (premier Canadian newspaper), 'Arkady Ostrovsky: How Putin built his new Russia with KGB tactics and television': "On March 24, 2000, just two days before Putin was elected president, NTV aired a talk show called Independent Investigation that questioned the official version of the apartment building explosions in the autumn of 1999. It focused on the foiled bombing in Ryazan. The program’s host interviewed former and present FSB officers and tenants who had discovered the bags of the white substance that was first identified as hexogen but that the FSB later claimed was sugar. While the program did not prove anything definitively, it certainly raised the strong suspicion that the FSB was concealing the truth and had actually intended to blow up the apartments. Putin saw this as a deliberate and subversive attack timed for the elections." - Ibid.
- March 6, 2002, CNN, 'Moscow behind bombings - tycoon'.
- April 16, 2000, George Soros for The Guardian, 'The means to an end'.
- Dec. 18, 2012, Anders Aslund and Moscow Times, 'Rise and Fall of Russia's Economic Think Tanks'.
- July 7, 2000, Radio Free Europe, 'Why Putin's Pet Oligarch Is Stirring the Pot'; July 29, 2000, Los Angeles Times, 'Putin Reaches Out to Oligarchs': "The president pledged not to reverse Russia’s controversial privatizations of the 1990s... In return, Putin asked them to support his plans to streamline taxes and gain Russian admission to the World Trade Organization. And he got that support, as well as an unusual promise to uphold Russia’s “state” interests. ... Nemtsov proclaimed the meeting a huge success, saying it marks “the end of the oligarchy.”"
- July 29, 2000, Los Angeles Times, 'Putin Reaches Out to Oligarchs'.
- Dec. 18, 2012, Anders Aslund (Bilderberg 1990, 1992, 1996, 1999) and Moscow Times, 'Rise and Fall of Russia's Economic Think Tanks'
- Sep. 7, 2010, The Guardian, 'George Soros gives $100 million to Human Rights Watch'.
- Oct. 19, 2006, Washington Post, 'Russia Halts Activities of Many Groups From Abroad'.
- *) Sep. 19, 2012, BBC, 'Russia expels USAID development agency'.
- July 10, 2015, Yahoo Finance, 'Dissent in Putin’s Russia Just Got More Dangerous'.
- July 9, 2015, TASS (Russian state media), 'Russia’s ‘stop list’ of undesirable NGOs may be expanded to 20 — reports' (translated title).
- July 4, 2017, balkaninsight.com, 'Russia Bans Romanian-American Democracy Organisation'..
- April 18, 2022, carnegieendowment.org, 'Statement on the Closing of the Carnegie Moscow Center'.
- April 17, 2000, George Soros for The Guardian, 'The means to an end'.
- Jan. 27, 2012, Reuters, 'Putin critic banned from Russian vote'.).
- Jan. 2016, House of Commons (chaired by Sir Robert Owen), 'The Litvinenko Inquiry: Report into the death of Alexander Litvinenko', pp. 17-18: "[Boris Berezovsky:] "I first met Alexander Litvinenko, also known as Sasha Litvinenko, in 1994 when he was an FSB officer for the Russian security services (KGB). He came to my offices as he had orders to look into the workings of my company. It was not to investigate me personally, but an investigation into how my business was operating. This was because at the time the FSB were trying to establish how Russia was being transformed.
In June 1994 I was subject to a terror attack against me in Moscow. It was a car bomb. When I left my office the car exploded. My driver was killed, my bodyguard and I were both injured and I spent two weeks in hospital in Switzerland. This incident resulted in Litvinenko and I becoming close friends." ...
Marina Litvinenko recalled that at that time Mr Litvinenko had a number of meetings with Mr Berezovsky, and that he accompanied Mr Berezovsky on a trip to Switzerland in 1995. Her evidence was that Mr Litvinenko travelled on that occasion on a diplomatic passport provided by the FSB; so it would appear that the trip had the blessing of his superiors. ...
A second important incident in the development of the relationship between the two men took place in March 1995, following the murder in Moscow of a man named Vlad Listyev. Mr Listyev was at that time the most popular TV presenter in Russia; he was also the head of the independent television station ORT, which was controlled by Mr Berezovsky. Marina Litvinenko’s account of this episode was that police cameto Mr Berezovsky’s office to arrest him for Mr Listyev’s murder; Mr Berezovsky got a message to Mr Litvinenko, who came to the office and prevented the police from taking Mr Berezovsky away. She explained that both Mr Berezovsky and Mr Litvinenko feared that Mr Berezovsky might be murdered in police custody had he been arrested. In Mr Berezovsky’s account of this incident, he said that Mr Litvinenko had taken out his gun and said to the police, “If you try to catch him now I’ll kill you.” 17 Marina Litvinenko emphasised that Mr Litvinenko’s intervention on behalf of Mr Berezovsky had been authorised by at least one of his superiors, namely General Anatoly Trofimov, who was then the head of the Moscow regional directorate of the FSK. ...
As Marina Litvinenko put it during her oral evidence, “After that, Boris Berezovsky said many times Sasha saved his life, and he was very grateful.” 18" - 2002, NTV, TV-6 and Boris Berezovsky-financed film (based on Alexander Litvinenko's 2002 book 'Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within', who worked as a consultant on the film), 'Assassination of Russia' / 'Blowing up Russia', 7:20: "The NTV television channel, then still independent, took an interest in the Ryazan case. In March 2000 it broadcasted an open debate with everyone involved in the affair in its show, Independent Inquiry."
- www3.weforum.org/docs/ WEF_GLT_ClassOf1993.pdf (accessed: Oct. 20, 2003; PDF backup from given url): "Baird, Zoe ... Aznar, José María ... Barroso, José Manuel ... Blair, Tony ... Bolloré, Vincent ... Bono: Lead singer of U2... Branson, Richard ... Bronfman, Edgar ... Brown, Gordon: [future] Prime Minister... Chubais, Anatoly B. ... Dell, Michael S. ... Desmarais, Paul ... Gates, William H. ["Bill"]: Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation... Huntsman, Jon M. ... Kennedy, Joseph P.: Chairman and President, Citizens Energy Corporation ... Kirloskar, Atul ... Koc, Mustafa V. ... Ma, Yo-Yo ... McNealy, Scott G.: Chairman, Sun Microsystems Inc. ... Merkel, Angela: [future] Federal Chancellor ... Nemtsov, Boris ... Orban, Viktor: [future] Prime Minister of Hungary ... Sahlin, Mona [Swedish PM 1982-1996, 2002-2011; deputy PM Sweden 1994-1995, leader of the Social Democratic Party 2007-2011] ... Santos, Juan Manuel: [future] President of Colombia ... Sarkozy, Nicolas: [future] President of France ... Shokhin Alexander ... Stephanopoulos, George ... Summers, Lawrence H. ... Verhofstadt, Guy [future Belgium prime minister] ... Wallenberg, Jacob..."
- openrussiafoundation.org/ Board_of_Trustees.asp (accessed: Dec. 3, 2003; website up mid 2003 - Dec. 2005).
- crisisweb.org/about/board.cfm (accessed: Feb. 5, 2001 - Oct. 1, 2003; infrequent updates: July 2000, July 2001, July 2002 and Sep. 2003 boards).
- oslofreedomforum.com/speaker/alexey-navalny/ (accessed: April 8, 2024): "In 2021, Maria Pevchikh, the chief of staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and a close associate of Navalny read his letter from prison at the Oslo Freedom Forum.".
- oslofreedomforum.com/about.html (accessed: May 27, 2012): "The Freedom Forum has garnered support from Amnesty International Norway, ... Freedom House, ... the John Templeton Foundation, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, the Thiel Foundation...".
- oslofreedomforum.com/supporters (accessed: Nov. 14, 2014): "Brin Wojcicki Foundation. The Thiel Foundation".
- Oct. 29, 2024 upload by 'Oslo Freedom Forum', 'Mikhail Khodorkovsky | Ходорко́вский - For Your and Our Freedom 1968-2014': "Mikhail Khodorkovsky's speech at the 2014 Oslo Freedom Forum."
youtube.com/watch?v=VUyCAIqwy6Y (accessed: April 8, 2024). - *) quora.com/What-is-the-quality-of-life-in-Crimea-like-post-Russian-annexation-Is-it-better-or-worse (accessed: April 8, 2024; example posters from Crimea): "
- [2023:] Elena Petrova, Lives in Sevastepol, Crimea: "On the one hand, Russia has invested lots of money in Crimea, especially in Sevastopol. We've got new roads, many amazing parks and playgrounds. All that can be checked on the Internet (Park Pobedy, Park Achmatovoi and so on). ... there are some things I disapprove of. Some laws. And the main dish of 2022, of course." ...
- [2018:] Vsevolod Pelipas, IT guy from Sevastopol, Crimea: ... "As for the quality of life - it became better due to serious state investments in public infrastructure, such as roads, public transport, state services and so on. Energy supply issues were resolved by the Energy Bridge from mainland Russia and I cannot remember any serious blackouts last years. Some power plants is being built now as well. ... There are still some minor logistical issues due to the dependence on Kerch strait ferries, and we’re waiting for Crimean Bridge completion (current plan is May 2018) to improve our transportation connectivity with the mainland. So, we’re happy. Besides the quality of life part - it just feels like we have finally came back home after a 20+ years living in exile, what else could we want?"
- [2018:] David Stickney, Lives in Russia (1996–present): ... "Greetings from Crimea. ... Russia has invested heavily, probably more in the first 2 years than Ukraine had in the previous 20. They’ve really done a lot of the way of public transport, they’re building a republic wide autobahn, just finished a new international airport, have built 2 new multi megawatt state of the art electrical powerplants, repaved a lot of roads and other community programs like parks and courtyards." ...
- [2018 and 2019:] Alex Ladov, Born and raised in Crime: ..."Russia builds and invests in Crimea billions and billions, so our unemployment is VERY low and our salaries and pensions became much higher than Ukrainian and close to average Russian level. ... We expected a bit more considering much better Russian pensions and salaries, but because ruble was devalued 2 times and because Ukraine blocked cheap food supply, our economic situation improved less that we hoped - but still improved quite a bit, especially in comparison with Ukraine where people now really suffer. ... Of course we could develop a bit faster without sanctions but we are OK with sanctions too, not a big problem." - March 20, 2015, Forbes, 'One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev'.
- See 2 notes back.
- rferl.org/a/32091265.html.
- October 9, 2023, Voice of America, 'New Poll Reveals How Ukrainians Feel About War, Future'.
- Aug. 28, 2024, Deutsche Welle (DW.com), 'Russia plundering Ukraine's natural resources'.
- Jan. 24, 2013, Reuters, 'Ukraine signs landmark $10 billion shale gas deal with Shell': "Ukraine's Fuel Minister Eduard Stavitsky, Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich, Netherlands' Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Peter Voser CEO of Royal Dutch Shell (L-R) shake hands after exchanging a signed agreement at a meeting during the annual meeting of World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos January 24, 2013."
- Sep. 20, 2005, Ukrainian Community Press Releases (Brama.com), 'President Viktor Yushchenko endorses Orange Circle; Delivers Keynote Address at Founding Dinner of New Initiative'.
- Sep. 7, 2005, Kyiv Post, 'Diaspora figure starts Orange Circle, advocacy group for Ukraine'.
- 2008, Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), 'BTI 2008 | Ukraine Country Report', p. 13: "Yushchenko has gathered oligarchic allies, including the Industrial Union of Donbas (Hayduk, Chaly), Pryvat (Ihor Kolomoyskyi) and Interpipe (Viktor Pinchuk).".
- *) Summer 2014, New Politics magazine (since 1986), 'Contradictions of the Ruling Class in Ukraine': "Between 2005-2010, the financial sector was also largely behind Tymoshenko’s Bloc, including the brothers Buriak (owners of the Brokbiznes Bank, one of Ukraine’s largest financial institutions) and Kostyantyn Zhevago, who heads the Finance and Credit Group. Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Henadiy Boholyubov of the Privat Group, who own Ukraine’s largest bank, alternately backed different wings of the Orange coalition depending on their needs."
*) July 19, 2016, AtlanticCouncil.org, 'Tymoshenko and Kolomoyskyi Score Wins in Ukraine’s Special Elections'. - Feb. 21, 2014, Times of Israel, 'Ukraine protest speaker urges Jewish oligarchs to use influence'.
- April 1, 1999, BBC, 'Ukraine election: Comedian leads presidential contest': "[Since at least 2010] Mr. Kolomoisky is the owner of TV channel 1+1 - which has given fulsome support to Mr Zelensky. The oligarch, who lives in self-imposed exile, faces numerous investigations in Ukraine into his business dealings. But Mr Zelensky has insisted he is "no puppet" of Mr Kolomoisky. ...
With half the ballots counted, Volodymyr Zelensky - who plays the president on TV - got about 30%, with current leader Petro Poroshenko on 16%. ... Mr Poroshenko, a chocolate magnate and one of Ukraine's wealthiest people...". - October 3, 2018, OCCRP.org (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Center; article linked to by the Kyiv Post), 'Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle': "The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky... Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank. [These] accusations have never been proven. But the Pandora Papers show that at least some of the details in this alleged scheme correspond to reality. ...
Two of Zelensky’s associates in the offshore network, who were also part of his TV production company, now hold powerful positions. [Jewish film producer, who survived an assassination attempt in 2021] Serhiy Shefir is Zelensky’s top presidential aide, while Ivan Bakanov heads the Security Service of Ukraine.". - Nov. 1, 2015, Kyiv Post, 'New ranking of richest Ukrainians shows Poroshenko getting richer'.
- *) burisma.com (accessed: July 26, 2013; translated): "Founded in 2006 [the front page of 2014 reads: "Since 2002..."]... Among the main Burisma projects currently being implemented are investments in ... Ukrainian oil and gas condensate fields developed by PARI LLC and Energy Service Company ESKO-PIVNICH LLC. ... About company: PARI LLC. Energy service company "ESCO-PIVNICH"."
*) Aug. 26, 2012, antac.org.ua, 'Kings of Ukrainian Gas' (antac.org.ua/2012/08/kings-of-ukrainian-gas/): "Our investigation began with a scandal. In order to find out who has been receiving the largest gas deposits during Yanukovych's presidency, we sent a request to the State Service of Geology and Mineral Resources. The official response of Derzhgeonadr was somewhat unexpected. The list of companies that was returned to us included only state entities. But ... no private ones or persons. ...
As "Slidstvo.Info" soon discovered... "You're wasting your time waiting for them to answer".- told us the head of a department at the State Service of Geology and Mineral Resources in a private conversation- "As soon as Stavytsky was appointed Minister of Environment and Natural Resources [April - Dec. 2012, under President Yanukovych], we were ordered to conceal all information on reserves and owners of gas deposits as much as possible. Moreover, even if you get true information officially, you actually cannot use it [read: "It's useless"]. Because totally different persons and companies are really behind the official owner. For example, Oleksandr Yanukovych, the President's son doesn't get licenses for his company directly, but through the Zasyadko mine." ..."
The tastiest and largest morsels (gas fields) were obtained not by the president’s son, but by a more experienced businessman – Ihor Kolomoisky. ...
Pari LLC and Esko-Pivnich LLC ... belonged to Mykola Zlochevsky and his deceased partner [who died in a traffic accident in 2011], Mykola Lisin some time ago. They controlled them through a Cypriot company - Burisma Holdings Limited. The website of the US Securities and Exchange Commission still mentions it.
But, Burisma changed owners last year [in 2011]: ... the company was taken over by a Cypriot off-shore enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd. Pari [LLC] and Esko-Pivnich [LLC] also changed their address: they moved from Kateryny Bilokur Street to 10a Rylyeyeva Street in Kyiv. A third company was already waiting for them in the same building - the above-mentioned Ukrnaftoburinnya.
If these three companies were brought together under one roof, it’s logical to assume that they were all owned by one person. At least "Slidstvo.Info" managed to find out the name of the owner of Ukrnaftoburinnya. According to the SMIDA state system, 90% of Ukrnaftoburinnya [controls the largest gas field in Ukraine] is owned by a Cypriot company, Deripon Commercial Ltd. ... The end owner of Deripon Commercial Ltd. is a company based in the British Virgin Islands - Burrad Financial Corp. [Shows a document of Burrad owning Deripon, with "Last Date of Changes" dating to "29/12/2009"] This company has often been involved in various financial schemes of the Privat Group and especially with Ihor Kolomoisky. ...
The owners of Ukrnaftoburinnya, Pari, and Esko-Pivnich were finally confirmed through first-hand sources. Oleh Kanivets worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya for two years. He confirmed who actually controlled the above-mentioned companies to "Slidstvo.Info". "- The Privat Group is the immediate owner."" - Kolomoyskyi was accused and under investigation for laundering $5.5 billion from his own Privatbank and stashing it in places as Switzerland and the U.S. He founded Privatbank in 1992, and was accused from the start of corruption and taking over businesses in violent and illegal manners, colluding with the authorities in the process.
- *) Ex-chair of the National Bank of Ukraine, Valeria Gontareva, who privatized PrivatBank in 2016, was knocked down by a car in London in August 2019 and had her house burned down in a month later. In Kyiv a car registered to her daughter-in-law was set on fire.
*) October 21, 2019, AP, 'Outcry in Ukraine over song mocking ex-central bank chief': "Several Ukrainian officials and prominent politicians on Monday publicly condemned the song performed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's former comedy show that made fun of a recent arson attack on the home of Valeria Gontareva.
Gontareva's house in Kyiv was firebombed last month in an attack that many said was retribution over leadership in nationalizing PrivatBank from its oligarch owner Ihor Kolomoisky. Last month, Gontareva was hit by a car in London, where she now lives.
Former comedian Zelenskiy had business dealings with Kolomoyskyi's media holdings..." - *) Sep. 10, 2014, Newsweek, 'Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing 'ISIS-Style' War Crimes' (reference of Amnesty INternational to Aidar): "There are over 30 pro-nationalist, volunteer battalions similar to Aidar, such as Ukraina, DND Metinvest and Kiev 1, all funded by private investors. The Aidar battalion is publicly backed by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who also allegedly funds the Azov, Donbas, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2 volunteer battalions, operating under orders from Kiev. Last spring Kolomoyskyi offered a bounty of $10,000 of his own money for each captured Russian "saboteur". A warrant for Kolomoyskyi's arrest was issued in Russia in July for "organising the killing of civilians," through his sponsorship of volunteer militants."
*) March 25, 2015, Business Insider, 'Meet the private army controlled by sacked Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky': "His Dnipro Battalion, also known as Dnipro-1, includes around 2,000 heavily armed fighters. The unit is reported to have cost the banking billionaire $10 million to set up. They helped play a key role in halting the advance of the Moscow-backed rebels from their strongholds in the neighbouring Donetsk and Luhansk.
However, there are doubts about where the troops' ultimate loyalties lie — to the government in Ukraine or to their regional paymaster. Last week, armed men in masks stormed the headquarters of state-owned oil company UkrTransNafta in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, following the sacking of its director Oleksander Lazorko, a key ally of Kolomoisky.
On Tuesday, Poroshenko fired Kolomoisky and now this private could become a major problem for the Ukrainian authorities. ...
The battalion was equipped with new SUVs, armoured cars, machine guns and grenade launchers, body armour and new uniforms at a reported cost of $10 million. It was widely seen as being better equipped than Ukraine government forces and National Guard units. In total the Dnipro Battalion was reported to number 2,000 combat ready troops with a further 20,000 reserves. In other words, it became a sizable private army."
*) May 10, 2015, Reuters, 'In the battle between Ukraine and Russian separatists, shady private armies take the field': "The Azov battalion, partially funded by Taruta and Kolomoisky, uses the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, and many of its members openly espouse neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic views. The battalion members have spoken about “bringing the war to Kiev,” and said that Ukraine needs “a strong dictator to come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process.” ...
Amnesty International has reported that the Aidar battalion — also partially funded by Kolomoisky — committed war crimes, including illegal abductions, unlawful detention, robbery, extortion and even possible executions. ...
Ukraine’s [pro-West] President Petro Poroshenko has made clear his intention to rein in Ukraine’s volunteer warriors. Days after Kolomoisky’s soldiers appeared at UkrTransNafta, he said that he would not tolerate oligarchs with “pocket armies” and then fired Kolomoisky from his perch as the governor of Dnipropetrovsk." - *) burisma.com (accessed: July 26, 2013; translated): see a few notes above for relevant citations.
*) Aug. 26, 2012, antac.org.ua, 'Kings of Ukrainian Gas' (antac.org.ua/2012/08/kings-of-ukrainian-gas/): see a few notes above for relevant citations.
*) - burisma.com/en/ (accessed: Sep. 3, 2016; shows the 4 directors, plus moments they joined): "Board of Directors:
-- Alan Apter, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Has 27 year experience in investment banking, including Merrill Lynch, Renaissance Capital, Troika Dialog and Morgan Stanley. Appointed: May 2013.
-- Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Director. The President of the Republic of Poland in 1995-2005. Member of the Board of Trustees of [Soros'] International Crisis Group. Appointed: January 2014.
-- Hunter Biden, Director: Counsel to Boies, Schilller, Flexner, LLP, Chairman of the United Nations, World Food Program (WFP). Appointed: April 2014
-- Devon Archer, Director: Co-Founder of Rosemont Capital, LLC. Appointed: April 2014." - Feb. 22, 2017, Huffington Post, 'Former CIA Director Joins Burisma, and It Is Good News'.
- Jan. 1, 2008, 'Chief Rabbi of Ukraine's Largest Jewish Community Named Among Top Foreigner': "Three of whom [also named] are members of Rabbi Kaminezki’s advisory board: Igor Kolomoisky and Victor Pinchuk [[and] Gennady Bogolubov..."
- April 9, 2017, Politico, 'The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin': "Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”"
- ejp.eu/members/vadim-rabinovich/ (accessed: March 1, 2022): "In 1995 created TV company "Studio 1+1" [majority-owned by fellow media baron Kolomoisky since 2010], the first independent TV company in Ukraine. In 1998 created “CN – Capital News "Stolichnye Novosti". In 2000 created Media International Group (MIG) company, that embraces a number of printed, online and Internet media in Ukraine, Russia, Israel and USA."
- *Oct. 29, 2010, Jerusalem Post, 'A necessary putsch?': "Kolomoisky [gave] an interview to a film crew flown in from the Ukrainian TV Channel 1 + 1 News, in which he bought a majority interest of in 2006."
- *) ejp.eu/members/vadim-rabinovich/ (accessed: March 1, 2022): "In [April] 2008 became the Vice-President of the European Council of Jewish Communities [until 2011]..."
*) Oct. 29, 2010, Jerusalem Post, 'A necessary putsch?': ""This was a hostile takeover," a female attendee from Turin, Italy, said at the close of the European Council of Jewish Communities conference in Berlin on Tuesday, the day after the organization made the surprise announcement that Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky had been chosen as its new president – without an election or consultation with the organization’s board. ...
Many also noted that for an organization that has traditionally focused on social issues affecting Jewish communities in Europe, the conference had an unusually strong emphasis on Israel and Iran’s nuclear program, and hosted a number of Israeli ambassadors and politicians, including Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar. They were joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations [CPMAJO]. ... The most prominent Eastern European Jews at the conference, other than Kolomoisky, included Ukrainian oligarch and president of the Ukrainian Jewish Congress Vadim Rabinovich and Kazakh mining and minerals magnate President of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Alexander Machkevich. ...
Rabinovich, vice president of the ECJC and no stranger to controversy or police investigations himself, addressed the conference at the second night’s banquet held at Berlin’s iconic five-star Hotel Adlon. He gave a meandering speech that called for “a war on anti-Semitism” and proposed hiring an army of lawyers to prosecute offenders. He also suggested taking journalists to bunkers in Ashkelon under bombardment by Kassam rockets “to show them about tolerance.”" - *) jew.org.ua/eng/leaders (accessed: March 1, 2022; official website that lists Kolomoyskyi as president: "He was elected the President of the UJCU on the Fifth congress of "the United Jewish community of Ukraine" in Kiev in 2008.");
*) ejp.eu/members/vadim-rabinovich/ (accessed: March 1, 2022): "From 1999 till 2009 headed the United Jewish Community of Ukraine (OEOU), and remains its Vice-President." - March 22, 2015, Jerusalem Post, 'Ukrainian oligarch under fire after night raid on state oil firm UkrTransNafta': "Kolomyski, together with fellow Ukrainian tycoon Vadim Rabinovich, founded the European Jewish Union. He has a home in Herzliya Pituah and has given to charities in Israel, including Yad Vashem..."
- Nov. 4, 2011, Jweekly.com, 'European Jewish Parliament off to a semi-comedic start': "[It's] the brainchild of billionaires Igor Kolomoyskyi and Vadim Rabinovich."
- 1996 FBI report on Solntsevskaya, p. 35: "Semion Mogilevich attended a summit meeting of Russian OC [Organized Crime] figures in Tel Aviv, Israel, from October 10-19, 1995. Participants included [Solntsevskaya heads] Sergei Mikhailov [and] Viktor Averin [with] Vadim Rabinovich... The subjects met in Boris Birshtein's office in the diamond center of Tel Aviv. The subject of the meeting was the sharing of interests in Ukraine..."
- Feb. 23, 2006, Village Voice, 'Ports: All 'Bout a Dealer Named Bout'.
- Russia's "human meat waves" have been documented to some extent. An example: July 30, 2024, Daily Mail YouTube upload, 'One Year Inside Ukraine's Brutal Trenches | Frontline Marathon | Daily Mail', words of Sergeant Oleg Leheza in a trench on the frontline: "Our artillery and mortars work first on the enemy trench, and then special forces and infantry go in. But the Russians send in their infantry first, like a wave of meat. I saw the weapons with which these first groups marched. They had weapons from the 1950s, covered with rust. It was very strange to watch the half-shell-shocked people who came forward toward us and shot at us without hiding. It was disturbing to watch. ... They were like zombies and we killed them all. One hundred percent. After that, the second group followed. The third group. The fourth group. Only after we destroyed these waves, did they use artillery on us."
- parlament.hu/kepviselo/elet/o320.htm (accessed: March 6, 2018): "Dr. Orbán Viktor: ... From April 1988, supported by the Soros Foundation... From September 1989 supported by the Soros Foundation with a scholarship at Oxford's Pembroke College to study the history of liberal political philosophy [with Hegelian political philosopher Zbigniew Pelczynski, who also taught Bill Clinton and Walter Isaacson];"
- 2013, US-UK Fulbright Commission and Oxford Thinking, 'Extending the Fulbright Legacy', p. 4: "Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and current Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski [Bilderberg steering committee anno 2020] ... received tutorials from Dr Zbigniew Pelczynski, who also taught former President Bill Clinton while he was studying at Oxford."
- www3.weforum.org/docs/ WEF_GLT_ClassOf1993.pdf (accessed: Oct. 20, 2003; PDF backup from given url).
- 2009, WEF, 'The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History - 1971–2020', pp. 119-120.
- Ibid., p. 130.
- March 5, 2001, Fortune, 'Turner's New Game: Russian Roulette': "... the two have met twice before, once when Turner staged the [July-August 1994] Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg (Putin was then a key aide to the city's governor) and again last May, when Turner attended the opening of Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential library.".
- Oct. 2000 issue, Vanity Fair, 'Russia's Dark Master'.
- Nov. 27, 2019, Kremlin.ru, 'Meeting with President of the World Economic Forum Klaus Martin Schwab' (kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62145 (accessed: Aug. 3, 2020)).
-
*) Sep. 20, 2017, Klaus Schwab at the The John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics (iop.harvard.edu), 'Strengthening Collaboration in a Fractured World-Featuring Special Guest, Yo-Yo Ma' ("Speakers: Klaus Schwab"; interview (again) done by David Gergen): "[SCHWAB:] I mention now names as Mrs. Merkel, even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum."
*) 2019 documentary, 'Das Forum - Rettet Davos die Welt?', behind-the-scenes Davos 2019 footage of Schwab talking to 2018-2022 Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada: "[ALVARADO:] We will be part of the Young Leaders Initiative. [SCHWAB:] Yes! Mrs. Merkel, Tony Blair were all - even President Putin - they were all Young Global Leaders before.". - Aug. 21, 2022, The Guardian, 'Alexander Dugin: who is Putin ally and apparent car bombing target? Ideologue’s views helped shape ideas behind Ukraine invasion, but his influence on Putin is disputed'.
- Nov. 7, 2023, en.majalla.com, 'Aleksandr Dugin: My vision for the new world order and Gaza war').
- Oct. 22, 2021, Washington Post, 'Putin slams ‘cancel culture’ and trans rights, calling teaching gender fluidity ‘crime against humanity’'.
- Personally spotted around March 2022 while looking at Russia Today, after circumventing western internet bans. NO time/desire to try
- russiatoday.ru (accessed: April 1, 2024; link to an RT TV program): "'Scott Ritter: The West began to morally prepare for negotiations with Russia - and concessions to her'.".
- imdb.com/title/tt3098562/ (accessed: Sep. 11, 2023; 'Breaking the Set: TV Series: 2013–').
- Spotted somewhere in the 2010s while looking at Pravda.ru. Haven't tried to find the article again.
- June 24, 2001, Time, 'Less Than Goodwill Games'.
- Oct. 5, 1998, Baltimore Sun, 'Russia's oligarchy tumbles downward': "Vladimir Gusinsky, a one-time theater director, produced a cultural program for the 1986 Goodwill Games and in 1989 put his experience to use setting up Most Bank."
- publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/fbi-tracked-alleged-russian-mob-ties-of-giuliani-campaign-supporter/ (accessed: Sep. 23, 2024; published: Dec. 4, 1999).
- 2009, WEF, 'The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History - 1971–2020', pp. 119-120.
- 2009, WEF, 'The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History - 1971–2020', p. 130.
- Dec. 14, 1999, Knut Royce for the Center for Public Integrity, 'FBI Tracked Alleged Russian Mob Ties of Giuliani Campaign Supporter'; publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=323 (accessed: March 13, 2006).
- March 5, 2001, Fortune, 'Turner's New Game: Russian Roulette': "... the two have met twice before, once when Turner staged the Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg (Putin was then a key aide to the city's governor) and again last May, when Turner attended the opening of Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential library."
- October 2000 issue, Vanity Fair, 'Russia's Dark Master': "According to former city-council chairman Alexei Belyaev, "[Putin] became a real shadow mayor..."".
- Ibid.
- Dec. 30, 1996, Forbes, 'Godfather of the Kremlin?'.
- Aug. 9, 1995, New York Times, 'Moscow Journal; To the Business Risks in Russia, Add Poisoning'; 2005, Richard Wright and Mitchell Miller , 'Encyclopedia of Criminology: Volume I', p. 1454; April 10, 2018, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project / occrp.org, 'Novichok Has Already Killed'.
- April 16, 2000, George Soros for The Guardian, 'The means to an end'.
- March 17, 1999, Scotland Herald, 'Rise and fall of the last Russian oligarch': "It was Berezovsky who, in January 1996, summoned the six other most powerful oligarchs - Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Vinogradov, Mikhail Friedman, Aleksandr Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky - to a "support Yeltsin" meeting at Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum ... to prevent Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov [from being elected]."
- October 2000 issue, Vanity Fair, 'Russia's Dark Master'.
- Nov. 1, 1996, Financial Times, 'Moscow's Group of Seven' (PDF).
- Cited in Andre Piontkovsky, 'What Went Wrong: Asian Flu or Russian Pneumonia?' Prism 5, no. 12 (1999): jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=6&issue_id=376&article_id=3669 (accessed September 4, 2008).
- Nov. 1, 1996, Financial Times, 'Moscow's Group of Seven' (PDF).
- Aug. 6, 1997, New York Times, 'Russian Bank With Sway Wins Auction'; 2003, Marshall I. Goldman, 'The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry'.
- Aug. 6, 1997, New York Times, 'Russian Bank With Sway Wins Auction'.
- Ibid.
- 2003, Marshall I. Goldman, 'The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry'.
- Oct. 2000 issue, Vanity Fair, 'Russia's Dark Master'.
- April 6, 2004, Compromat.ru (original from Stringer-agency.ru), ('The last fight?').
- publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/fbi-tracked-alleged-russian-mob-ties-of-giuliani-campaign-supporter/ (accessed: Sep. 23, 2024; published: Dec. 4, 1999).
- March 5, 2001, Fortune, 'Turner's New Game: Russian Roulette'.
- July 18, 2000, Time magazine, 'Why Putin's Pet Oligarch Is Stirring the Pot'.
- July 29, 2000, Los Angeles Times, 'Putin Reaches Out to Oligarchs'.
- Ibid. July 7, 2000, Radio Free Europe, 'Why Putin's Pet Oligarch Is Stirring the Pot'.