WASHINGTON — Two Russian billionaires who have managed to dodge US sanctions over Moscow’s year-old invasion of Ukraine went property shopping with Hunter Biden, dined with then-Vice President Joe Biden, and discussed “favors” they may swap, sources tell The Post.
Latest details of Joe and Hunter Biden’s association with Yelena Baturina and Vladimir Yevtushenkov flesh out tantalizing clues from the primary son’s abandoned laptop. The sources spoke with The Post this week after the duo was yet again spared a fresh batch of sanctions announced by the Treasury Department Friday.
“I believe it’s very fishy,” said one source who had firsthand knowledge of the business relationship between Hunter Biden and Yevtushenkov — who’s sanctioned by the UK and Australia but not by the US.
“I believe he must be sanctioned,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told The Post of Yevtushenkov — estimated by Forbes to be value $1.7 billion. “I don’t understand why he has not been.”
Yevtushenkov, whose Sistema business empire until recently included Russian rocket and radar-maker RTI and drone-maker Kronstadt, admitted last yr he met with Hunter Biden for breakfast on the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan on March 14, 2012 — but denied any further contact.
Nevertheless, emails and calendar entries from Hunter’s former laptop show that they were set to satisfy again on Jan. 27, 2013, for dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano before a industrial real estate development the subsequent day near Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia.
![According to sources, two Russian billionaires with connections to President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have managed to avoid being sanctioned.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007537905.jpg?w=1024)
“I asked [Yevtushenkov], ‘Why are you doing this?’ on the front end — before I understood that they were going to purchase some real estate,” the source told The Post. “‘Why are you even doing this? Why would you be paying the son of the vp to satisfy at a public restaurant in Latest York City?’
“He made it very clear to me that, you understand … ‘I believe it will be good to have a great relationship with this guy … perhaps he can do a favor for us and we are able to do a favor for him,’” the source continued. “It was a whole quid pro quo that he was getting into for.”
“I told him that’s not the way in which it really works in America, [but] he mainly laughed at me and told me I used to be so naïve,” the source recalled of Yevtushenkov, whose holdings also include Russia’s largest cellphone provider, MTS — which faced a long-running investigation into nearly $1 billion in bribes paid to Uzbekistani officials between 2004 and 2012. MTS, which was listed on the Latest York Stock Exchange before trading in its shares was suspended in July of last yr, ultimately settled the case with the Trump Justice Department in 2019, agreeing to pay an $850 million high-quality.
![Emails from Hunter Biden's laptop show he has met with Vladimir Yevtushenkov and toured a commercial real estate development in 2013.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007537912.jpg?w=1024)
A special source, meanwhile, told The Post he vividly recalled Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, looking “like an odd couple” at a now-infamous, intimate dinner with Hunter and his father, the then-vice president.
It’s long been uncertain whether Baturina, estimated by Forbes to be value $1.4 billion, and Luzhkov actually attended the April 16, 2015 dinner at Cafe Milano — the identical Georgetown restaurant where Hunter and Yevtushenkov set a date greater than two years prior.
“They might have played themselves on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said the source, who attended the dinner and was capable of discover the couple partially because he met Luzhkov — who died in 2019 — on several other occasions. (One other source previously told The Post that a pair matching Baturina and Luzhkov’s general appearance was there.)
Luzhkov, who was Moscow’s mayor for 18 years until 2010, “looked lots older” than Baturina — 27 years her husband’s junior — who “went overboard” on her appearance and ended up resembling Jennifer Coolidge’s comedic portrayal of an insecure heiress in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” the source recalled.
“It was an odd dinner because there was [then-Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim] Massimov, Luzhkov and his wife, and it was not an enormous table after which there was any individual there from some food charity making a pitch for support,” they added. “I mean, it was, was — it was slightly odd, the entire thing.”
In an email on the time, Hunter wrote that the meal can be “ostensibly” about his role a md of the World Food Program (WFP) USA.
His father, the sitting vp, arrived on the dinner and stayed for about 40 minutes, the second source told The Post, even sitting right down to eat after which posing for a photograph with the Kazakhstani group.
The gathering also featured Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid Hunter as much as $1 million per yr starting in 2014 while his VP dad controlled the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
![A source told The Post that Yelena Baturina and her husband ex-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov were seen having dinner with then-Vice President Biden and Hunter.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007537907.jpg?w=1024)
Pozharskyi emailed Hunter the subsequent day to thank him for “giving a chance to satisfy your father” — forming the premise of The Post’s first October 2020 bombshell from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Joe Biden called the report a false “Russian plant” on the time and social media platforms Twitter and Facebook initially censored it.
Baturina would have been familiar with Hunter Biden, having met with him and his then-business partner Devon Archer for a drink in April 2014 on the Villa d’Este — a well known haunt of Russian oligarchs overlooking Italy’s Lake Como. On the identical trip, Hunter also met the Ukrainian-Russian oligarch owner of Burisma, Mykolai Zlochevsky.
Two months earlier, on Feb. 14, 2014, Baturina had wired $3.5 million to a checking account held by Rosemont Seneca Thornton, the investment firm Hunter had co-founded.
![Baturina met with Hunter Biden's former business partner Devon Archer for a drink in April 2014 at the Villa d’Este.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006065023.jpg?w=1024)
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who co-authored a September 2020 report by GOP-led Senate committees revealing the wire, told The Post: “It is obvious that Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings with individuals from Russia and China have compromised President Biden and proceed to lift conflicts of interest concerns.”
“Our work on this matter stays ongoing, and we’ll proceed to provide the American people with transparency and evidence of the Bidens’ extensive financial connections with foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds,” Johnson added.
“It is incredibly concerning that Biden-linked Russian nationals are avoiding sanctions. If this happened under a Republican White House, the mainstream media can be up in arms,” added Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) added. “This latest report is further proof of the deep level of corruption occurring with Hunter Biden and Biden Inc.”
![House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer called the lack of sanctions on the Biden-connected oligarchs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007207567.jpg?w=1024)
“It’s alarming that Hunter Biden’s Russian oligarch pals are missing from the Treasury Department’s public sanctions list of Russian elites and oligarchs,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), whose panel is leading investigations into the Biden family’s overseas influence-peddling.
Yevtushenkov, contacted by The Post through Sistema’s press department, declined to comment — including about whether he bought property in cooperation with Hunter Biden. The Post’s first source said he had heard second-hand that three properties can have been purchased within the US as a part of the partnership.
Baturina, contacted through her BE OPEN think tank, didn’t immediately reply to questions, nor did an attorney for Hunter Biden or spokespeople for the White House.
A Post reporter asked President Biden Wednesday on the White House lawn for a proof of the non-sanctioning of his son’s Russian oligarch associates, but Biden didn’t reply and it’s unclear if he heard the query as he walked to his Marine One helicopter.
Biden allies previously sought to downplay his association with Baturina and the $3.5 million. An anonymous source told the Washington Post last yr that Archer was speculated to dissolve the company entity that received the funds, but secretly kept it in existence for his own use.
Nevertheless, emails from Hunter’s laptop show he was actively engaged in courting Baturina. A couple of month after the transfer, Archer wrote to Hunter to say he was “[w]ith Yelena” and an April 26, 2014, email from Hunter to Archer said “we should always ask Yelena to fund a short-term development team to scope projects” after an attempted real estate deal in Manhattan fell through.
The Biden campaign in 2020 vaguely denied that the April 2015 Cafe Milano meetup even occurred, saying, “[W]e have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the Latest York Post, ever took place.” After Biden won the presidency, WFP USA’s former president Rick Leach told the Washington Post that Joe Biden did attend –but only briefly to satisfy with Greek Orthodox leader Alex Karloutsos.
Joe Biden’s interaction with his son’s post-Soviet associates on the meal is a pillar of Republican arguments that Biden misused his official roles to financially profit his family.
![Archer proposed to Hunter Biden they](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000002133598.jpg?w=1024)
In addition they point to Hunter joining his dad aboard Air Force Two for trips to China and Mexico while the younger Biden sought business, in addition to a White House arrangement developed in 2021 for Hunter to secretly sell his novice artworks to undisclosed buyers.
Hunter Biden said in communications retrieved from a former laptop that he paid as much as “half” of his income to his father and a 2017 email described 10% of a financial windfall being held for the “big guy” as a part of a business deal being negotiated in China.
Two former Hunter Biden associates have identified Joe Biden because the “big guy”.
Meanwhile, Biden’s administration touted last week that it had enacted “greater than 2,500 sanctions” meant to cripple Russia’s economy and halt the war in Ukraine.
![Two Hunter Biden business partners have claimed Joe Biden is the](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000002133155.jpg?w=770)
“The greater story is that the US has sanctioned only a few oligarchs,” Swedish economist and sanctions expert Anders Åslund told The Post. “It is sort of difficult to follow now since each of [the] seven different Western communities have sanctioned on average 1,200 Russians.”
Åslund, a fellow on the Atlantic Council, said he felt certain powerful Russians were more deserving of US sanctions, reminiscent of billionaire Roman Abramovich, the previous owner of English Premier League soccer club Chelsea.
“I agree that Yevtushenkov must be sanctioned, but he’s within the fourth row of oligarchs,” he said.
Yevtushenkov had a dustup with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration about nine years ago when the Kremlin effectively seized Sistema’s large oil subsidiary. One in every of The Post’s sources described him as being more closely linked to Putin ally and former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev than with Putin himself.
McFaul, the previous US ambassador to Russia, declined to comment specifically on Baturina, but did say: “Every billionaire in Russia must be sanctioned unless they do something to obviously distance themselves from Putin and the war.”
Daniel Fried, the Obama administration’s coordinator for sanctions policy following the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, said that he believes the Biden administration was being “prudent” in reviewing the possible collateral effects of sanctioning billionaires with international holdings.
Yevtushenkov, who has denied reports that he’s Baturina’s brother-in-law, “will not be someone we had squarely in our sights” in the course of the Obama administration, Fried added.
“I’m not going to let you know he’s a great guy, but he wasn’t a primary goal” because “he wasn’t particularly close with Putin,” the ex-official went on. “Remember, the Trump administration continued the sanctions in 2017 they usually didn’t go after him either.”
Fried, who also was US ambassador to Poland in the course of the Clinton administration, said his sense was that sanctions will proceed to expand against Russia’s elite and that he doubts Joe Biden and even high-level deputies with deep ties to his family, reminiscent of Secretary of State Antony Blinken or national security adviser Jake Sullivan, are making decisions on individual names.
“In the event you’re a sanctions person and also you’re doing all of your due diligence, you must make rattling sure that there aren’t going to be unintended consequences,” Fried said. “I sniffed around slightly bit and my sense is individuals are doing due diligence [and] not hesitating — they’re not shying away, they’re doing the right due diligence.”
Yevtushenkov, who Hunter also reportedly met in Moscow in February 2012, has taken steps to avoid attention amid the Ukraine war. One source who spoke to The Post recalled him ruling like an all-powerful czar over Sistema’s board, while one other called him a good person and Russian “patriot.”
In April 2022, Yevtushenkov reduced his ownership stake in Sistema to 49.2% in apparent response to UK sanctions, giving his son Feliz 10% of his own stake in the corporate.
Sistema said last yr, months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that it had quietly reduced its share in military contractors RTI and Kronstadt below 50% in July 2021 before completely divesting by May 2022.