In today’s Vatnik Soup I’ll introduce the current Deputy Minister of Defense in Russia, Timur Ivanov. Actually, I’ll talk more about his wife and a socialite, Svetlana Zakharova, whose 8000 leaked e-mails were carefully inspected by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Ivanov is an engineer for the war. He’s responsible for building military barracks, cadet corps, submarine bases and military airfields, as well as hospitals and kindergartens.

He is also responsible for many rebuilding efforts in Mariupol.

Svetlana have mostly been living off his husband(s), and all of her personal business ventures have gone bankrupt. She’s mostly known for appearing on tabloid covers and being a TV presenter. She loves glamour and lavish life, including 5-star hotels, yachts and shopping.

On March 17, 2022, rescue workers were searching for survivors from the ruins of the Mariupol theater. At the same time, Svetlana was buying expensive jewellery in Joel Arthur Rosenthal’s jewellery store in Paris. The prices at this establishment start from 100,000s of euros.4/12

Later she travels to London to meet her son, but moves quickly to Paris. There she buys 8000 EUR worth of Prada outfits. Her daughter lives there, too, and they spend family time together for a month in Europe. At the same time, Russia is bombing civilian targets in Kyiv.

Every year the whole family spends the whole August in the Côte d’Azur in a 120,000 EUR / month villa. 90,000 EUR was spent for a yacht rental. For some villas, they paid 2000 EUR a month extra to see the Russian TV channels — just to see Solovyov lie on Russia-1!

Timur Ivanov has been a strong opponent of NATO, yet the family has no problem in vacationing in NATO countries like France.

They do all this through front organizations and offshore companies, some of them registered to Luxemburg.

In 2013-2018 they spent at least 1, 3 million EUR
on their holidays in Europe. These included 5-star hotels, and luxurious villas and yachts. Nice boost for the local economy!

They’re also good friends with the press secretary of Russia, Dmitry Peskov. Peskov visited one of their parties and even put on a bear suit to entertain the
guests. As it turns out, Peskov’s daughter, Yelizaveta also loves the West — she’s living in France.

Svetlana’s spendings seem endless, and she also likes to eat well: while Russian soldiers are eating food-like products in the trenches, Mrs Zakharova eats red & black caviar, croissants and fresh berries for breakfast.

They’re circumventing the sanctions in a creative way: they’re cars are registered to their drivers, their yachts are ordered for their nannies, and so on. Jewellery and clothes are paid via offshore companies. They also order construction from their own companies.

In Oct, 2022, Timur Ivanov (but not Svetlana) was put on sanctions list by the EU. What did they do? They filed for a “divorce”, just so that she can continue her glamorous life in Europe. On 3 Dec, 2022, she was again shopping in Paris.

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