• Allero@lemmy.today
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    11 hours ago

    There’s no citation of the files, though. Did anyone find a confirmation? For all known previously, Epstein attempted to make ties with Russian government officials, including Putin, but it wasn’t known that Epstein actually was working for Putin.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      58 minutes ago

      There’s no citation of the files, though. Did anyone find a confirmation?

      Nice try Tankie, but we’re not falling for it

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        50 minutes ago

        Huh? Sensational claims on a hot topic are always better fact-checked, regardless of what they support.

        If you’re ready to spread whatever you hear as long as it supports your views, here you are: Trump eats an infant every morning to deal with impotency. Go ahead, make a headline.

        Or, a tankie version: Xi Jinping personally installed 150GW of solar power yesterday as he ruled closing of coal plants across the country.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          31 minutes ago

          Sensational claims on a hot topic are always better fact-checked, regardless of what they support.

          Better for whom?

          Listen, we’re at war with an existential foreign evil. And I believe anything negative we can say about that foreign power furthers the war effort. Therefore, we MUST believe it, whether or not it is true.

          Trump eats an infant every morning to deal with impotency.

          You joke, but we did this one already, back in 2016. “Torturing children to eat them for their magic youth chemicals” was a popular mythology for the Alex Jones crowd.

          And we believed it, God damnit, because we needed to beat the Chinese Communist plant Hillary Clinton.

          Or, a tankie version: Xi Jinping personally installed 150GW of solar power yesterday as he ruled closing of coal plants across the country.

          Obviously, solar power is itself a hoax perpetrated by anti-American climate activists. So it’s exactly the kind of lie a Chinese Communist Tankie would spread.

          I believe Xi Jinping’s fake degenerate solar panels are undermining Western Civilization. If he’s installing them, he must be stopped at all costs.

          If you see a solar panel, it is your duty to smash it. Fuck the CCP!

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    21 hours ago

    Officially, Putin collects a modest salary, though a financier alleged to Congress in 2017 that the Russian president “has accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains” through corruption and criminal activity

    He’s been running Russia for decades, I would highly doubt that his net worth is less than a trillion dollars. He is in that rare atmosphere of wealth that travels ABOVE mere billionaires like Musk. He’s up there with the people that are NOT included in the Forbes list, those who are so wealthy and powerful that Forbes knows not to mention their names in some gauche rich guy competition. That includes certain monarchs, Sheikhs, the Rothschilds, etc. Usually long generational wealth that is so large, there almost isn’t even a category for it. Putin is in THAT club. Musk WISHES he could get in that club.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      21 hours ago

      Valid. Good perspective.

      We still haven’t figured out exactly what Epstein was up to. We don’t know if he was working for Israel, Russia, somebody else, or was a free agent, collecting material.amd selling to any and all buyers. We think about politics, but he was probably selling info to corporate interests as well.

      We know something was up, the smoke is as thick and choking as any political tire fire in recent world history, but we just don’t know the source. Blackmail is the usual assumption, but as far as I know, nothing has ever turned up in the files that indicates any hint of a blackmail plot from either side.

      Perhaps they were just careful? SOMEBODY would have slipped, somewhere in all those years. Perhaps MAGA is keeping them all hidden? Plausible, but MAGA is notorious for being virtuosically incompetent, and they would have accidentally let slip a few clues and hints, or even downright proof.

      So, perhaps Putin was somewhat “forced” to use Epstein in some way, through some currently unknown mechanism, but Putin would have kept him fairly quarantined.

      And Epstein was known to play up his connections to influential people he barely knew, portraying them as close friends, if he thought it would ingratiate himself to a new prospect.

      • borkborkbork@piefed.social
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        12 hours ago

        We don’t know if he was working for Israel, Russia, somebody else, or was a free agent, collecting material.amd selling to any and all buyers.

        I can’t help but feel the CIA is on that list due to the lack of interference from US law enforcement time and time again.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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          11 hours ago

          Exactly, another boss, or another paying customer? He seems to be basically freelance, but could anyone stay freelance with so many lethal clients without having some protector somewhere? Who is that protector? Mossad? CIA?

        • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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          12 hours ago

          What if “Epstein Class” is more on the nose than people seem to realize?

          What if what Epstein was actually an expert at was manipulating human behavior, and his role in the world above all was helping suppress the lower classes through economics and psychological operations? To me, some of the stuff in the Epstein files looks like some of the stuff in the MK ultra files. After all, isn’t being able to manipulate the masses what makes all that money so powerfully dangerous?

            • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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              11 hours ago

              There’s a lot of child abuse in the MK Ultra files with the goal seeming to be programming human behavior. They’d abuse kids to try and split their personalities and then bury ideas with in different personalities and that sort of thing, so people would act on trigger words and then not remember when they’d come to. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the files (some are publicly available after being discovered in an accounting wing of the CIA), but as I recall there’s an instance where they use a trigger word to get a child to shoot a blank at their friend and when they come to they don’t remember firing the weapon. It’s extremely fucked up shit, and most of it was covered up and destroyed, so the extent to which it was successful and or continued is relatively unknown, but if you think about how much technology has advanced since the 60-70s and how much data they’ve collected, there are probably experts at this, and I’d imagine they wouldn’t have an official government position, but would be very well connected. Obviously, this is a lot of speculation on my part.

  • RedRibbonArmy@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    The guy was Mossad/Israeli CIA. His accomplice Maxwell was the daughter of an Israeli spy. He had a map of a fantasy country called “greater Israel” on his wall in his home. He was best friends with former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak and let him live in one of his apartments. He called people “goyims,” which come to find out is an Israeli supremacist term to refer to non-Jewish people. The whole US government is compromised with blackmail by Israel and/or bribed by Israel via AIPAC so that the US funds their wars and attack our own people for speaking out against genocide. Only online media will tell you this while the entire billionaire-owned corporate media covers for Israel.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      56 minutes ago

      Okay, but we’re talking about how Russia is bad right now. Can you stay on message? Or are you one of those Pro-Putin accounts?

    • teslekova@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      All true. If you know all this, you must know that Israel and Russia have been very close when it suits them to be. It’s quite possible that Epstein had connections to lots of Russian powerful people.

    • tackleberry@thelemmy.club
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      21 hours ago

      The editors of that article want to spin the story that Jeffrey Epstein is a Russian agent. 😂 maybe the folks on Reddit will believe it. They should post it there first

    • gnutrino@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      He called people “goyims,” which come to find out is an Israeli supremacist term to refer to non-Jewish people

      You need to lay off the conspiracy theories and go touch grass. “Goy” (plural goyim not goyims) is just the Hebrew/Yiddish term for non-jews (gentiles in English), it’s not “Israeli supremacist”.

      • kreskin@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        If you were even remotely honest you’d acknowledge that in yiddish its frequently used to mean someone stupid, not just a nonbeleiver. goyishe kopf means goy head, aka stupid.

        Theres a list of them in the wikipedia for goy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goy search for the word “derogatory”.

        Saying its just means “non jewish” is like saying (pick your supremacist ethnic slur here) simply means “of a certain ethnicity and nothing more” . Its a pure BS propaganda answer. I for one am tired of supremacist propoganda in the world-- its poison and it needs to effing end. People who pursue it need to be put in their place. Enough is enough.

        Terms which categorically pit one group against another cause big problems. And people like yourself that deny any problem are also the problem.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        And “boy” just means a young man. Except when it’s used as a racist epithet against black men.

        Almost as if context matters.

      • Yeather@lemmy.ca
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        23 hours ago

        You’re either jewish or it sounds like you need to lay on the conspiracy theories. You’re defending a group of people that fundamentally hate you.

        • FatCrab@slrpnk.net
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          A bunch of Arabic schools are calling their students taliban. Obviously they’re islamofascist. Or maybe languages have words for things you poorly educated fuckwit.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      Jeffrey Epstein was a Russian working in Russia for Vladimir Putin personally and nobody in the US was involved and if you suggest otherwise you’re a bot account run by Antifa

      • Tryenjer@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        Why not both? And CIA too.

        If Epstein was the manager of Putin’s personal fortune, he would have been just another one. I doubt Putin puts all his eggs in one basket.

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    We’re not in the timeline to doubt anything, but Putin strikes me, a Russian living in Russia and closely following the politics at least of my own country, especially from the not-so-safe side, as someone who would not choose someone he can’t control and have in his grasp to run anything like this.

    Not to mention his paranoia, ego mania and the alleged financial skills that, again, allegedly let him win a lot of trust among the people de-facto making big decisions in Russia before he wriggled into presidency.

    I don’t doubt that Putin had dedicated financial managers at some point, it’s just hard to belive it could’ve been anyone like Epstein, i.e. someone outside Russia or even Moscow where Putin could blackmail and hurt them or at least first treaten them into obedience, even with the eventual murder somewhere outside Russia (Litvinenko poisioning).

    Not that nothing unexpected and hard-to-believe hasn’t been surfacing for a while already, though.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Did Russian money pass through Epstein? Assuredly.

      Was he THE man who managed Putin’s vast fortune through Russia and the rest of the world? Assuredly not.

      “Epstein was President Vladimir Putin’s wealth manager and provided the same service for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe,” the source claimed. PEOPLE has reached out to the Kremlin for comment.

      People magazine, you keep shooting your shots… maybe one day you’ll knock it out of the park.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        46 minutes ago

        Was he THE man who managed Putin’s vast fortune

        Would be very convenient if he was. Just completely change the narrative surrounding who the national news should be talking about for the next month

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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        11 hours ago

        nah they used trump, swiss banks, deustche bank, no need to get thier hands dirty on some easily inept"financier".

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Putin has tried to keep as many of his eggs in different baskets as possible. Having Epstein manage a bit of his money would be pretty low risk if he’s got most of it in other ventures.

      For all the many public failures Putin has had over the past few years, he’s proved himself frustratingly resilient. He’s like some kind of nuclear powered cockroach.

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      If Putin is no longer the leader of Russia, then having wealth outside of Russia is very useful. That can be because he had to flee or for his family. Obviously it has to be hidden, so the assets are not seized by other countries due to sanctions against Russia. So it has to have a financial manager, so sign necessary paperwork at least. Epstein can be easily blackmailed, making him easy to control. However he is certainly not the only one. Putin has the wealth of Russia, so stacking away some millions is pretty easy.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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        11 hours ago

        his daughters are well outside of russia, in case shit hits the fan, and they are likely holding onto some of putins fortune.

  • hector@lemmy.today
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    The establishment is trying to turn this into a russian thing, as that’s their go to move. But this was a mossad honeypot, clearly done in conjunction with the CIA, which is a great betrayal of their mission, an executable offense, of treason, or it’s facsimile, and carries a death sentence to hear the president talk about it.

    The CIA isn’t allowed to conduct operations in the country, allowing a foreign intelligence agency to accrue blackmail on politicians, and rich people, and the like, is a great betrayal, I don’t know why no one has even dug into this, who was in charge when all of this happened, who authorized this at the CIA? Why are they given a pass?

    • redsand@infosec.pub
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      21 hours ago

      This has been going on since the 80s. The Franklin scandal was also CIA and it also went no where.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      Who was in charge? This starts back with the OSS and Donald Barr, spanning like more than a half dozen administrations.

    • DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com
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      Didn’t Obama overturn a law that made it legal for propaganda to be done to Americans on American soil? Smith-Mundt act.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Not really. They lifted the ban on the domestic dissemination of materials originating from the State Department.

        Other departments and external agencies were, and still are, able to target propaganda at US citizens.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              42 minutes ago

              I mean, you can talk about legality and find all sorts of technical restrictions in code.

              But who believes any of this shit was enforced?

              The closest thing we’ve had to a government action against US propaganda was Biden’s War On TikTok. And that was for the unspeakable crime of mentioning the Gaza Genocide too many times.

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        1 day ago

        I don’t doubt it, I seem to recall vaguely something along those lines. They never followed those laws preventing domestic operations anyway.

        Also, they use the 5 eyes network as an end run around those, they spy on americans, or do operations, and put their allies letterhead on the operation, that then shares the information back with them. Even as it’s the us doing the entire thing itself. It’s a country run by lawyers, for billionaires.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          41 minutes ago

          And now it’s all funneled through Palantir and the various other tentacles of the private sector.

          The CIA/NSA are just retail customers of privatized surveillance.

          • hector@lemmy.today
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            28 minutes ago

            And the courts have given them license to further ignore laws and protections from the government to have contractors do it for them, or use information the private sector was allowed to gather from us, and buy and use it, without warrants or judges or oversight of any kind.

            But it also gives these private companies way too much power, merging the private power and money with contacts to government, that make Thiel and his ilk way too powerful, now with all the data broker information plus every bit of data from every federal agency that doge exported to his banks secretly, don’t for a second think that’s not what this was all about.

            They caught them doing it in a couple of instances too, like at the labour department, no one is even trying to defend the country or it’s laws this time around everyone gave up in government and business. It’s only some of us citizens that are still trying to contest the republic being surrendered to the worst pieces of shit in the country.

  • OwOarchist@pawb.social
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    1 day ago

    I kind of doubt this, actually.

    I don’t think Putin is the type to trust anybody else with his wealth. Not all of it, anyway, or even most of it.

    Maybe I’d believe Epstein was a wealth manager for Putin, not the wealth manager. Just one of the many pies Putin has his fingers in.

    • frischkaesbagett@feddit.org
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      Please don’t use straw man arguments.

      Nowhere in the article it says Epstein was the only one. So you are opposing something that is never said.

      The source claimed that Epstein served as a wealth manager for Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe

      • hector@lemmy.today
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        1 day ago

        This whole article is a plant to try and associate epstein with russia away from Israel.

        • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Thank you. Exactly. If they can’t distract they redirect and/or flood the zone. Whatever works to keep the real systems hidden even as it’s all coming out anyway.

        • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com
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          Those aren’t mutually exclusive. Russia and Israel aren’t adversaries and I don’t know why Communists online act as if they are (could it be? They define all geopolitical relations based on “for or against the USA?”) Relations deteriorated in 2022, but they improved when Netanyahu got back in office.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.social
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        Nowhere in the article it says Epstein was the only one.

        You expect me to read articles?!?!? Preposterous!

        I’m just going off of the title, where it says:

        Jeffrey Epstein Was Vladimir Putin’s Wealth Manager

        Not ‘one of Putin’s wealth managers’.

        So … yeah. I blame the poorly worded title. No ragrets.

        • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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          I’m my father’s daughter. I have two sisters who are also my father’s daughters. I am also one of my father’s daughters, but that doesn’t make my first sentence incorrect.

          • deleted@lemmy.world
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            During the Cold War, there was a race between the United States and the Soviet Union, where:

            • There are only two runners
            • The American finishes 1st
            • The Soviet finishes 2nd (last)

            The newspapers report it differently:

            U.S. newspaper: “American wins race; Soviet finishes last.”

            Soviet newspaper: “Soviet athlete finishes second; American is next to last.”

            It’s a classic illustration of media framing and propaganda showing how wording can shape perception without technically lying.

          • nyctre@piefed.social
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            1 day ago

            Sure. You’re right. But there’s ways to look at it that makes it misleading anyway. For example if you read the title “Putin’s daughter was killed” what will you take from that? That he has multiple daughters or just one?

            Plus, your example works because we live in a world where many people have multiple kids. But if you lived in a world where everyone you knew only had one kid, what would you infer from that? Because as far as I know, most people have zero wealth managers and some have one. It’s the first time I’m hearing of someone having multiple.

            I’m not gonna pretend that your explanation doesn’t make sense. And the title is technically correct. But only technically. The fact that op has 34 upvotes shows that many people understood the same thing from the title and that makes it misleading, imo.

            • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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              I wouldn’t assume anything about the number of his children from that, tbh. And that’s fair, multiple children are relatively common.

              The time that something similar actually comes up for me is with doctors. I tend to assume that people are talking about their single gp when they say “my dr.,” and this is often wrong with people who have a lot of health issues (it’s not a problematic assumption, because I don’t do anything with it, I’m just picturing a GP for whatever their story is).

              I suspect the disconnect is between traditional headline values (first shortness, then understandability) and the ones that would actually make sense in the modern age (font size is adjustable at the point of receipt, and nobody reads articles, so clarity should win over length).

            • D_C@sh.itjust.works
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              I would take it that Putin has many wealth managers.
              Mainly because if he only had one then he’s a fucking idiot. And Putin is many horrible things, but he’s no idiot.

              I mean if you had enough cash that you needed wealth management would you trust one person to oversee all of it? I know I wouldn’t, money can make even the most trustworthy of people question things.

    • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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      Pu shares his wealth with a whole bunch of people, who also were given high positions in the government or business by him. Except he knew all those people since the nineties at the latest, and they’re long-time friends of his, not some jackass from the US.

    • Rothe@piefed.social
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      You seem the most gullible in the fact that you think he couldn’t have been both.

      • hector@lemmy.today
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        1 day ago

        Israel first. Any russian involvement was after the fact, and done with the blessing of Israel, probably done after Russia started to back the far right across the west, which started at least years before 2016, I remember them giving the National Front of France a loan of 20 or so million, idk if 2014.

        But these articles and this talk is all to protect Israel and disassociate from them. Any russian involvement was in effect at the behest of Israel, for their interests, he was an israeli agent through and through.

      • gressen@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        The first and last sentence in the screenshot is satire, everything in between is not.

        Comedy can serve the truth as well.

    • Mika@piefed.ca
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      I would be surprised if this activities ever stopped with Epstein’s death. He surely was an important figure but he didn’t do it alone, and he isn’t irreplaceable.

      The question “who created Epstein” should also be answered. A school teacher generally can’t just start human trafficking out of nowhere.

    • 474D@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Could have been a message to a certain someone to keep them in line.

  • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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    Pu doesn’t need Epstein to ‘hide his money offshore’. There are more than enough knowledgeable people in Russia who’ll teach any aspiring businessman to create LLCs that own each other in a circle, while the actual decision-maker is nowhere to be seen. Pu likes his confidants to be close to him, he wouldn’t hire some schmuck from the other side of the world for this, especially seeing as he himself was involved in money-hiding since his days in the KGB.

    An actual wealth holder for Pu is cellist Sergei Roldugin, his friend since Roldugin’s military service in 1977. Roldugin holds positions in multiple state-funded culture-related initiatives that Putin personally oversaw. He’s also a businessman, or rather a business owner, somehow having shares in private companies worth dozens of millions of bucks each. He’s been shown to own offshore companies that traded shares in state-owned companies and got loans without collateral and with small interest. Lithuanian government confirmed Roldugin’s offshore operations — as Lithuanian banks were involved in the transactions — and considers them to be money laundering. Roldugin is named in the Pandora Papers and other journalist investigations, is indirectly a suspect in state investigations in Panama and Switzerland, and is sanctioned since 2022 by the US, EU, and some other countries.

    Roldugin is also involved with the Rossiya bank, which is considered the personal ‘wallet’ for Putin’s friends, and which bank is separately sanctioned by the US since 2014 and the EU since 2022.

    The founder and owner of the largest share in the Rossiya bank is Yury Kovalchuk, who’s sanctioned by the US since 2014 for being Putin’s personal banker. Well, again, Putin knew him since early nineties, and they founded the Ozero cooperative together with Putin’s other friends, who all hold top positions in the government or business.

    • iguessimlemming@lemmy.ml
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      24 hours ago

      They’re just all the same class of assholes. I was explained by one dude years ago that they all went to the same “business” schools and are all very much on the same line. They were educated and socialized together, so of course they have their little clubs of horror eveywhere.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Are you saying that Epstein studied law in Leningrad State University, or do you mean training in the 401st KGB School or the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute (aka Academy of Foreign Intelligence)?

        • iguessimlemming@lemmy.ml
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          9 hours ago

          No not Putin, or Epstein, but the whole cohort of biznesmeni/bandity behind the scenes who took over in the 90s, sponsored by the US and the rest of the “Washington consensus” scheme. Joining the lizards. Same class of creeps worldwide, is what I’m saying. Giving them and their secret services (CIA, Mossad, KGB/FSB) any kind of special status/perversion/allure per country lines, I think, is an unproductive distraction, and it ends up feeding xenophobia, Russophobia, and in Israel’s case, *gasp" antisemitism. Sorry it’s a bit of a thought in process but yeah.