Before I jump into this week’s Rant!, I wanted to bring to your attention a new substack: How America Lost Her Way After the Cold War, a memoir written by my friend Victor Motier, a retired CIA operations officer. He is releasing his memoir in sections over the next few weeks (all for free!). But this is more than a memoir. Victor had a front-row seat to how CIA and America were transformed by the war on terror. He looks at US foreign policy, domestic policy, the end of Pax Americana, and how we got to where we are today. Oh, and did I mention he is French? It is a fascinating tale. He’ll be releasing sections twice a week. I hope you’ll check it out.
Rant! will be on hiatus next week.
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Things have gotten wild in the Baltic and North Seas, plus there’s been a development with a megayacht that most definitely does not belong to Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
Putin’s Yacht Graceful Is On The Move
Earlier this week, a strange sight appeared in the Baltic Sea. The yacht Graceful was making her way through the Danish Straits and toward the North Sea. Graceful is believed to be one of Putin’s personal yachts. And it was accompanied by a Russian destroyer and a Russian salvage ship.
The yacht is 82 meters long (269 feet) with six cabins and is worth an estimated $100 million. Not bad, for a humble civil servant like Putin who officially makes $120,000 a year. You may recall that Graceful made a not so graceful exit from Hamburg just before the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It had been in dry dock for repairs. Then very quickly, before repairs were finished, it was put in the water and made a bee-line to Kaliningrad, where it tucked itself into a military base. Indeed, many of us at the time took it as a sign that the invasion was imminent (we were right!).
Graceful has been very quiet since then. There were some rumors in 2023 that Putin was annoyed he couldn’t use his yacht in Kaliningrad and preferred to have it in Sochi, so plans were made to sail it the loooong way around, north of Russia all the way to the Pacific and down the east coast of Russia, around to Suez then up to the Black Sea. I wrote about that here.
That doesn’t seem to have come to fruition, and it looks like Graceful has passed the time in the Baltic instead. This past week was the first she pinged on AIS (the system that identifies ships) since 2022.
As I mentioned above, Graceful was accompanied by a ship called Voevoda, or Warboss. Technically a salvage ship, Voevoda has some interesting luxuries. As The Barents Observer notes, the support yacht is believed to be for VIPs, and maybe even for Putin himself. The support yacht has premium accommodations, including eight suites that each have a bedroom, bathroom, and study. There is also a conference room and a passenger lounge with buffet facilities. Caviar and blini for everyone! Just kidding, not everyone. Just Putin and his oligarchs. Other Russians can suck on a frozen potato.
Voevoda can also carry four motor boats and accommodate two helicopters. The Barents Observer adds that classifying the vessel as a salvage ship could help shield it from international sanctions. The media outlet also reports that the vessel “was designed by the Severnoye Design Bureau and built at the Yantar shipyard. Both companies have longstanding ties to the Russian military-industrial complex.”
Are they on their way to help the Admiral Grigorivich, which I wrote about recently and which is currently drifting in the Channel, low on fuel? I mean, all of Russia is currently low on fuel, which is being rationed throughout the country, but here is Putin’s yacht, whose fuel tank carries 335,000 liters (88,500 gallons) motoring blissfully away.
Where is she going? 🤷🏻♀️ In fact, both Graceful and her escorts have turned off their AIS, so we no longer know their location. At their last ping, Graceful was just north of Denmark and entering the North Sea. Voevoda had reached the North Sea and turned north along Norway’s west coast. (The destroyer never pinged at all, as far as I can tell, but you can see video of it here).
You can see photos of the yacht and its interior here. And just for posterity, here is a pic of the yacht in happier times, with the requisite fish disco.
Now, instead of underwater lights, Graceful is sporting nets draped over parts of the ship. Media reports suggest these are anti-drone nets. It seems Vlad is (rightly) afraid Ukrainian drones might find his yacht, just as they have found so many refineries throughout Russia.
I imagine such netting kind of ruins the luxury experience of a megayacht, as does the fear that your ship may get blown out of the water by Ukraine at any moment. But not all of us can vacation like Vladimir Putin.
I don’t actually think Putin is on board, though. But I am very curious why this ship is on the move. It comes at the same time that Russia is closing all railway crossings into Europe and blurring all its military sites on maps, including the shipyard that built Graceful. This latter move possibly gave away some sites people hadn’t realized were military. Oops. Likely this was done to make Ukraine’s targeting of military sites more difficult (although the sites are only blurred on Russian maps; they remain available on other commercial imagery). Some have assessed these moves, particularly the closing of railway crossings, to be indicators that Russia is about to launch mass mobilization and so don’t want their own people leaving the country.
And yet, someone is sailing a luxury yacht away from Mother Russia, as mass mobilization looms and normal Russians can’t get a liter of fuel. My guess is Graceful is moving because they fear it will indeed get promoted to submarine by Ukrainian drones if left in port in Kaliningrad. Remember a few weeks ago when I Ranted about how vulnerable Russian ships can be?
For Ukraine and its sea drones, this is a great opportunity to do something truly fun. As for me, I’ll be sailing in the North Sea this weekend and will keep my eye out for Russian warships and luxury yachts. I might not have sea drones of my own, but I will greet those ships with a one-finger salute.
Another Win for Alisher Usmanov
Also this week, it was revealed a German court has found that the German government failed to prove that the mega yacht Dilbar is owned by Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. There are some interesting twists and turns in the tale of how we got here.
Dilbar used to be a regular site in the port of Barcelona. See if you can spot it.
Dilbar is 156 meters long (512 feet!) and is the largest Russian yacht by volume, much like Usmanov is the largest Russian oligarch by volume. The yacht is worth an estimated $800 million. The oligarch is worth an estimated $15 billion.
When sanctions hit in March 2022, Dilbar was in Hamburg, Germany, in the Lürssen shipyard undergoing maintenance. The German government refused to let the ship leave. Lürssen, though, still had to run a shipyard and Dilbar takes up a shitload of space, which led to the yacht being tugged down river to a different maintenance site, where it has sat since then.
Usmanov denies he is the ultimate beneficial owner of the yacht, which technically is owned by a trust. In April 2022, the EU sanctioned Usmanov’s sister Gulbahor Ismailova, for her association with the trust. In September of that year, German officials raided the yacht and many of Usmanov’s real estate assets. They found millions of dollars worth of art, including a Chagall and Faberge eggs (Usmanov says they are replicas), and tons of documents that seemed to make a good case for money laundering. But in May 2023, a German court ruled the search warrants used to do those raids were unlawful. It was a major win for Usmanov. Indeed, at the time, Usmanov’s lawyers said the decision had renewed Usmanov’s faith in Germany’s constitutional state (I cannot roll my eyes far enough back in my head for that comment).
Here comes another twist. We now know that on August 30, 2024, Hungary’s then-foreign minister Péter Szijjártó received a call from Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who said, “I am calling on the request of Alisher and he just asked me to remind you that you were doing something about his sister.” As Panyi Szabolcs and his colleagues reported, Szijjártó was tasked by Lavrov to get Usmanov’s sister off the EU sanctions list. The same sister related to the trust that owns Dilbar.
She was soon removed from the sanctions list, thanks to Hungary and Slovakia threatening to block other sanctions unless she was removed. Probably just a coincidence, considering Hungary’s foreign minister at the time had been tasked to do just that. Once Usmanov’s sister was off the sanctions list, Lürssen, which was paying for the maintenance of Dilbar, sued the German government to allow Lürssen to collect money from the trust that owns Dilbar. The trust that is absolutely not run by Usmanov (wink wink!). Costs were estimated at $2 million a month. This past week it was revealed the court ruled that the German government had not provided sufficient evidence to link the trust to Usmanov.
This follows a separate legal case in which a Hamburg court barred the media from calling Usmanov the owner of Dilbar, with fines up to 250,000 euros for violations.
So, to be clear, Usmanov is NOT the owner of Dilbar, which is owned by a trust very close to Usmanov but definitely not controlled by him or his sister who was removed from the sanctions list thanks to a Russian asset tasked by the Kremlin. For the record, I have spoken with people who helped service the yacht. Everyone knows it is Usmanov’s yacht, but no one is allowed to say it. Yet another example of Russia using our court system against us and coopting (i.e. recruiting) our politicians to act on Russia’s behalf.
I expect we will soon see Dilbar setting sail for Turkey, where so many other Russian yachts have been hanging out. Dubai, the other hot spot for Russian yachts, has its own set of problems these days with the opening/closing/bombing of the Strait of Hormuz, as I wrote about here.
It is frustrating as hell, but it looks like this might be another yacht (and oligarch) that gets away.
A roundup of things you should be reading
Russia ‘mounted drone surveillance of European nuclear sites over 18 months’ (The Guardian)
Just Security has launched WHAT JUST HAPPENED? as well as a litigation tracker to help readers keep up with the chaos
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
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