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There’s an expression known by everyone in Russia, “the only thing that’s free is the cheese in the mousetrap.” It seems that Donald Trump Jr, 48 years old, had not heard of this saying when he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in largesse from a Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, to finance parts of his extravagant wedding in the Bahamas earlier this year.
Who is this oligarch? What is his relationship to the eldest son of the President of the United States? And, perhaps most importantly, what did he want in return?
Umar Kremlev was born Umar Lutfollyev, under that name he has criminal convictions for extortion and for battery. With that kind of record of course he was a natural fit for sliding into the power structure that currently governs Russia, which is a hybrid merger between state thuggery and mafia clans. His route into positions of influence, and the wealth that comes along with that in Russia, was through a notorious biker gang called the Night Wolves. The Russian President himself likes to be seen with that group, though he can’t actually ride a motorcycle and so in his appearances (including in occupied Crimea) with the gang, Putin rides a motorised tricycle.
Through his involvement with the Night Wolves, Kremlev became acquainted with the head of Putin’s presidential security service, Alexei Rubezhnoi. From there all kinds of doors opened up for him. In 2017 he became the head of the Russian Boxing Federation, and that became a springboard for him to assume leadership of the International Boxing Association (IBA).
The IBA, under Kremlev, attracted tens of millions of dollars of sponsorship from the Russian state-owned gas company, Gazprom. While the International Olympic Committee disassociated themselves from the IBA in the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, not everyone has distanced themselves from this entity. Readers may not be aware, but they have likely seen footage from a recent IBA event, one in Miami, Florida. It was outside the venue of this event that Andrew Tate was arrested two months ago. Tate had been brought in to host the event; he was taken out in handcuffs to face extradition to the UK.
It is said that Trump Jr and Kremlev have forged a friendship over a shared love of sports, they appear to share an apparent affinity for people charged with sex crimes too.
It’s important to note, before moving on to more of this story, that Kremlev is not just another wealthy Russia with millions of (state-derived) dollars to splash about. In April of this year, he was personally presented with the Order of Friendship by Putin. He then travelled with Putin’s entourage on a trip to China a month later, a trip that happened just days before Kremlev then attended the lavish nuptials of Mr Trump Jr and his new bride Bettina.
Since the story of Kremlev bankrolling this wedding broke, many figures have sought to distance themselves from the Russian. Eric Trump, younger brother of the groom, for instance has stated that he “has absolutely no clue who this person is” through a spokesperson. Mrs Bettina Trump, however, has decided to defend the involvement of the oligarch in her wedding celebration.
In a post on Instagram the new Mrs Trump has called Kremlev “our dear friend Umar” but in the same paragraph she has said that the “extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend” for which they “were and remain incredibly grateful” was for celebrations “AFTER” the wedding, not the actual wedding itself, as if that makes some kind of difference.
Bettina Trump, who signed her post from “Don & Bettina” as a joint statement, was keen to point out that “friendship doesn’t require a political motive,” and “generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda,” and “sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.” Future pages of dictionary.com may well list this under examples of naivety.
Does Mr Kremlev, awarded and enriched by Putin, have a political motive? Did he have an agenda? While he hasn’t directly expressed either if Mrs Trump is to be believed, without doubt he has both motive and agenda.
If Mrs Trump is expressing her confidence that nobody is going to uncover some direct quid-pro-quo here, she may be overlooking the fact that Mr Kremlev bought himself access, in an intimate setting, to the brother-in-law of the bride and groom, Jared Kushner. The man who is, in theory at least, leading efforts to find a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Cheap, if that access cost just a couple of hundred thousand bucks.
Perhaps the larger question here, if we zoom out from a man with an estimated net wealth of about $300 million having someone else pay for his party, is, why is it always Russia? Or, as Trump Senior likes to say, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It is not only reasonable, but also logical, to conclude that the younger Trump sees nothing wrong with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Russian oligarch because his upbringing has normalised that kind of behaviour for him.
According to a theory called Hanlon’s Razor, we are advised to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” While the aforementioned Instagram post may well be adequately explained by stupidity, when it comes to Trump and Russia there is sufficient evidence pointing towards malice. For starters, malice is the baseline motivation behind almost every action by the Russian state ever since Vladimir Putin ascended to the Tsar’s throne. And then there’s the way in which Trump, having ascended to his own Oval Office throne, is always, without exception, coming to the aid of or making excuses for Russia and Putin.
Most recently, Trump going in to bat for Putin has involved him demanding that Ukraine stop dismantling through long-range drone strikes Russian facilities for refining diesel fuel. This, a topic I have covered for Byline Times previously, is a legitimate tactic to turn off the supply of money that feeds the Kremlin’s war machine. Trump has claimed that high US diesel prices have resulted from the operation. As former chess grand master turned Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has pointed out, is blatantly untrue.
The United States does not import diesel fuel from Russia, not since a moratorium on the import of Russian energy products was imposed by the then President Joe Biden in March of 2022. But you know who is very badly in need of Russian diesel? The Russian military.
Trump has a habit of repeating things a thousand times as if that makes them magically come true. He has often claimed that the “Russia, Russia, Russia” thing was proven to be some kind of elaborate hoax. For the record, nobody has ever proven a hoax of any kind in relation to the ties between Trump, his campaign, and entities working for Russia. The only “hoax” being perpetrated in this regard is in Trump himself claiming it was disproven.
This latest story is just another chapter, albeit involving another generation, of the ever evolving, and quite real, Russiagate scandal.
