Vladimir Yevtushenkov attends a court hearing in Moscow in November 2014. (Credit: Radio Free Europe)
“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 Hunter Biden, and discussed “favors” they might swap, sources tell The Post.
New details of Joe and Hunter Biden’s association with Yelena Baturina and Vladimir Yevtushenkov flesh out tantalizing clues from the first 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 think it’s very fishy,” said one source who had firsthand knowledge of the business relationship between Hunter Biden and Yevtushenkov — who is sanctioned by the UK and Australia but not by the US.
“I think he should be sanctioned,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told The Post of Yevtushenkov — estimated by Forbes to be worth $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 year he met with Hunter Biden for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan on March 14, 2012 — but denied any further contact.
However, emails and calendar entries from Hunter’s former laptop show that they were set to meet again on Jan. 27, 2013, for dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano before looking at a commercial real estate development the next day near Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia.
(…) A different 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.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter reportedly used to dine with business associates such as Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina (r) and former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov (l). (Credit: Getty Images)
It’s long been uncertain whether Baturina, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.4 billion, and Luzhkov actually attended the April 16, 2015 dinner at Cafe Milano — the same Georgetown restaurant where Hunter and Yevtushenkov set a date more than two years prior.
“They could have played themselves on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said the source, who attended the dinner and was able to identify the couple in part because he met Luzhkov — who died in 2019 — on several other occasions. (Another 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 a lot 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 a big table and then there was somebody there from some food charity making a pitch for support,” they added. “I mean, it was, was — it was a little odd, the whole thing.”
In an email at the time, Hunter wrote that the meal would be “ostensibly” about his role a chairman of the World Food Program (WFP) USA.
His father, the sitting vice president, arrived at the dinner and stayed for about 40 minutes, the second source told The Post, even sitting down to eat and then posing for a photo with the Kazakhstani group.
The gathering also featured Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 while his VP dad controlled the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.(Read more: New York Post, 3/03/2023) (Archive)