The Repulsive Obscenity of Vladimir V. Putin's Ill-Gotten Wealth

There are no words to describe his sociopathic thirst for more, at any cost.

Vladimir V. Putin, discussing business with his Cabinet. A student of history, he knows that his greatest vulnerability isn’t assassination at the hands of a foreign power, but by those closest to him.

We here at Cappuccino think it safe to say that at no time in history has the rule of law favored the people. Not since Cleopatra floated down the Nile in one of her opulent barges, gently fanned by servants. Not since the atrocities committed against Black slaves in the antebellum South.

From the dawn of civilization, society has existed as a fiefdom, top-down, a hierarchy of oppressors and the oppressed. Wealth is passed from one generation to the next. The rich get richer, and the poor are left with a dwindling number of resources, from polluted air to contaminated water, from poorly funded schools to prohibitively expensive higher education, from a deadly lack of access to healthcare to a privatized, for-profit correctional system that has been spring-loaded to snap down on every Black neck it can find.

It’s true in the U.S. And it’s true in Russia.

No one in Russia is allowed to prosper without kissing the ring of one man, and that man is President Vladimir V. Putin. His personal wealth, which is north of 200 billion dollars, wasn’t earned by his annual $140,000 salary. His publicly disclosed assets include an 800-square foot apartment, a trailer, and three cars. Yes, he’s that audacious a liar.

Few things in life are more heartwarming than an uber-wealthy dictator who has murdered thousands of people lounging in his sterile, charmless conference room at a long table that in no way screams “Don’t kill me.”

By some extraordinary legerdemain, or what Tucker Carlson might refer to as “fake news,” there are multiple photos of Vladimir Putin wearing Patek Philippe’s Perpetual Calendar watch—worth $60,000, or slightly less than half his alleged salary. He is also rumored to own a 190,000 square-foot mansion overlooking the Black Sea affectionately known as “Putin’s Country Cottage.” It’s the largest private residence in Russia. Again, by some remarkable confluence of luck or circumstance, it has frescoed ceilings, a vast pool festooned with statues of Greek gods, a music room, an amphitheater, a state-of-the-art ice hockey rink, a teahouse, a Vegas-style casino, a nightclub decorated with stripper poles, a 27,000 square-foot guest house, and over $100,000 in wine and spirits, including a subterranean tasting room overlooking the water.

But the most beautiful part of Putin’s Country Cottage is that he didn’t have to dip into his own stash to build it. Instead, he fleeced his country’s healthcare system in an elaborate scam. Starting in 2005, Putin engineered a vast plan to bolster Russia’s decayed healthcare facilities—well, at least on paper. In point of fact, suppliers were charging hospitals two or even three times too much for essential healthcare machinery, such as high-tech medical scanners.

Putin’s charming little summer house.

“Suspects,” 104 of them, were dispatched to various gulags across the country. Remarkably, two profiteers suffered no penalty: Nikolai Shamalov and Dmitry Gorelov, intimates of Putin, who had engaged in the same profiteering racket. Records show that the two men sent about 56 million to Swiss bank accounts belonging to a company in Belize. The Belize account transferred 48 million to an account linked to Medea Investment, a company controlled by Lanfranco Cirillo, the crooked Italian architect who built Putin’s “cottage.”

In addition to his Black Sea dacha, Putin has 19 other houses and over 700 cars. Among his squee-worthy collection of 58 aircraft and helicopters is a 716 million dollar plane dubbed “The Flying Kremlin,” that has—you guessed it—a toilet (created after the style of dictator chic everywhere) made of pure, hammered gold. Moored somewhere in Russia is a 100-million dollar megayacht designed by a nuclear submarine maker from the Russian navy.  

If there is a single defining characteristic of Putin’s phlegethon of lies, it is this: they are clumsy and easily disproven. Childhood chum and oligarch Arkady Rotenberg has publicly stated that the Black Sea estate is his, not Putin’s. This is, of course, patently absurd. No Russian businessman can own property guarded by the FSB (Russia’s federal security service) with its own no-fly zone.

Putin’s response to accusations that he lives like … well, a Russian tsar, while his people exist in penury, is a study in psychosis: “I am the wealthiest man, not just in Europe but in the whole world: I collect emotions. I am wealthy in that the people of Russia have twice entrusted me with the leadership of a great nation such as Russia. I believe that is my greatest wealth."

18 million people in Russia live below the poverty line. 60% of those living between poor and impoverished are families with children.

Putin’s usual modus operandi to make money was to wait until a privately held company went profitable, and then seize all its assets in the name of the state. Now, however, he finds it less messy and more lucrative to tap into the vast flow of business the state does with the private sector. In other words, demand a substantial vig be paid to him via his hand-picked circle of kleptocratic oligarchs.

Vladimir Putin’s fortune amounts to blackmail, not just morally, but by its legal definition. During testimony given to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, financier Bill Browder stated that Putin amassed his wealth after 2003, when he jailed oligarch Mikhail Khordorkovsky for tax evasion:

"After Khodorkovsky's conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, it appeared that Putin's answer was, "50%" He wasn't saying 50% for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50% for Vladimir Putin personally."

With those kinds of resources, I’d say we stand a zero-percent chance of taking Putin down. But we can light a fire under the collective derrieres of his greedy class of underling kleptocrats whose long-simmering resentments might induce them to take action against their master. Devaluing the ruble and seizing yachts, assets, houses, is a good start. Sanctions work, although not fast enough to save thousands of Ukrainians that, even as this article is written, are starving to death, freezing to death, fleeing.

Shocking and now iconic photo of a pregnant Ukrainian woman who, along with her child, are dead.

No, one of grossest injustices is knowing that while this pregnant Ukrainian woman and her child were brutally murdered, Vladimir V. Putin was likely drifting around his cottage in a satin bathrobe, trying to decide whether to have his eggs sunny-side up, or how best to use chemical weapons against civilians.

Despite all the damning evidence stacked against him, he continues to prosper while the world burns.

In further reading: here, here, and here.

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