The image Kremlev chose for himself is telling: a photograph he posted to his VKontakte account shows him seated beneath a portrait of Stalin.
We want to add to ProPublica's blockbuster story about how Donald Trump Jr.'s lavish wedding was paid for by the Russian head of the International Boxing Association, Umar Kremlev. We do not dispute any facts from this excellent article, but suggest there is more to Kremlev. Umar is not an “oligarch” but far worse. The record indicates he has close ties to the mafia and to Putin.
What is an “oligarch”?
You could argue that oligarchy just means “rule by the few,” and the oligarch is a member of that class, so then with that definition Umar might be an “oligarch”, as he is a member of the Russian elite. When people talk about Russian oligarchs, they usually aren't carefully following the Greek. Instead, they mean a very rich Russian, a captain of industry, who has his own interests and usually his own media outlets or connections to political power. The popular history of Russia goes that after Communism there was a time of the oligarchs, when unrestrained capitalists connected with the old Communist elite carved up the country and pulled the strings. Then Putin came to power and tamed the oligarchs, making them all his servants (or doing away with those who were not cooperative).
Even though they are now under Putin's control, Russian oligarchs are usually considered great men in their own right (not morally, but in a business and political sense). Most of them are savvy businessmen, men of action and/or ruthless operators who would probably still be rich and powerful, even if Putin had never risen to power… or if he disappeared tomorrow.
Umar Kremlev is not a captain of industry or a savvy businessman. He does not really rule anything. Instead, after joining Putin's personal bodyguard service, the Federal Protective Service (FSO), he has become the beneficiary of a lot of businesses.
Putinism distilled
The FSO is the rough equivalent of the Secret Service, but that's like saying Tony Soprano is the rough equivalent of a CEO of a security company. The FSO is not a professional service. Rather, it's an enforcement squad that Putin staffed with his personal St. Petersburg mobster enforcers when he became president. These are the enforcers who helped Putin extort businesses and run criminal oil export schemes in 90s St. Petersburg. Proekt Media explains how a story (perhaps apocryphal?) about Putin's first FSO head Yevgeny Murov gained Putin's trust by blocking Moscow corruption investigators' access to the St. Petersburg office where Putin then worked.
Bodyguards are incredibly powerful in dictatorships. They are the only people with regular access to the leader.
If you want to make sure that Putin does not hear nasty things about you or your business, you had better be friends with the FSO. And if some FSO guys start a business, you would be wise to avoid competing with them, unless you want to take a short trip off a top floor.
The mafia boxing connection
In Russia, as in many other countries, there is a link between mafias and boxers. And in Russia especially, boxing is a national sport that receives special attention from the Kremlin.
In the former Soviet Union, boxing schools are sometimes a source of recruits for mafia enforcers, and the FSO mafia has had a special relationship with Russian boxing associations, possibly for this reason. From 2007 to 2009, the head of the Russian Boxing Federation's board of trustees was the aforementioned Murov, who was a former KGB officer and Putin's extremely close ally and also longtime chief of the FSO (2000–2016).
The Chairman of the supreme supervisory board of the Russian Boxing Federation is Alexey Rubezhnoy, the head of the Presidential Security Service (SBP) of the FSO — the inner circle of the inner circle.
Proekt's investigation reproduces an Instagram photograph of the two men together — Rubezhnoy and Kremlev side by side, the president's chief bodyguard and the twice-convicted promoter he installed at the top of Russian boxing. You can see it in the original Proekt report, which sources it to Instagram.
Captive industries in an authoritarian kleptocracy
They simply do not exist without explicit consent from the top. In Russia, monopolies do not happen unless the Kremlin wants them to happen.
Kremlev owns the company that manages the national lottery (even though only the Russian state can act as the lottery organizer), Liga Stavok, literally “betting league” in Russian, and Rolf, the country's largest car dealer. Proekt also established that Kremlev has become the beneficiary of two other betting sites, Fonbet and Pari. Those three betting sites took in more than half of all Russian legal gambling revenue.
Then in 2020, Russia created a unified gambling regulator, and in 2021, Putin appointed Kremlev to be the operator of all unified betting operations in Russia. Kremlev also gained control of the state's gambling regulator, ERAI.
Kremlev's business acumen
Rolf, the car dealership, once belonged to a former Russian opposition politician. As Proekt put it: “Rolf was simply nationalized – they did so with the assets of foreign companies that left Russia after the outbreak of the war. Rolf, however, is not a foreign company. As far as we know, Rubezhnoi lobbied Putin to include car dealerships in the nationalization list, and then lobbied the new owner, this Kremlev.”
Thus, Kremlev was a boxer in his youth, but he quit around the age of 19. He was convicted of extortion in 2004 and battery in 2007. After that he changed his last name and went into business as a boxing promoter. In 2016, less than a decade after his conviction for battery, he became the General Secretary of the Russian Boxing Federation. He was elected president of the International Boxing Association in 2020. And had an effective monopoly on Russia's gambling sector. And owned the country's largest car dealership. And a senior member of the Kremlin's Federal Protective Service.
It's quite a rags-to-riches story. It also suggests that he may not be a canny businessman but something else. Perhaps a front?
This contrasts with Western organized crime
In the West, criminals usually want their fronts to be squeaky-clean to avoid investigation.
In Russia, the Putin mafia runs all the investigative bodies, so a front with a criminal record can be a positive. If he ever gets out of line, he can be thrown in prison without much formality (and Umar likely knows this).
The fact that he is an ethnic minority (Tajik) might also be helpful in this regard. Ethnic solidarity will not save him if he does not do as told.
GetContact
A popular smartphone app in Russia is called “GetContact.” It automatically downloads users' address books and makes them available to other app users. Russians use it to screen for spam and to figure out who is calling you if they haven't called before.
However, as Russian opposition activists and investigative journalists have discovered, it is also useful for identifying possible Russian intelligence affiliations. The investigative journalist Christo Grozev, with a Bellingcat team, used it to hunt down the FSB officers involved in the 2020 poisoning of Alexei Navalny by looking at the leaked call logs of scientists associated with the Russian chemical weapons program. They searched the numbers in GetContact and found contacts labeled with names like “Stanislav FSB”.
According to a July 2024 article in a Russian opposition outlet, if you put one of Kremlev's mobile numbers into GetContact, you get the results “Umar (FSO)”, “FSO Umar”, and “Umar Kremlev (SBP FSO)”.
Why this subterfuge?
According to the ProPublica article, the payment for the wedding came from an entity in Dubai associated with the International Boxing Association.
Having a frontman like Kremlev makes funding Don Jr's wedding possible. Imagine if Putin, or some other senior Putin official or intelligence services operative, had paid for it. How could they actually do this? A big bank transfer from the FSB to Don Jr. would look extremely suspect to any bank, and even the Republican Congress would probably have to pretend to be shocked. Putin would have the same difficulty if the Russian treasury or Gazprom or an actual oligarch wired funds. Instead, you have a non-Russian branch of an “international” sports federation that receives “charitable donations” from Gazprom to make the transfer.
This kind of abuse of “charitable” foundations is common in Russia, and it reaches excesses that make the Clinton and Blair foundations look like the Salvation Army. This story is NOT about a Russian oligarch making a payment to Don Jr. It's about the FSO, the innermost circle of the Kremlin, making a payment to Don Jr. Paying for the party this way might avoid more than basic scrutiny – the line item on the invoice. What's the payment actually in exchange for?
Basic scrutiny suffices
Like most other mafias, the Putin regime does not want to be totally in the shadows. What's the point of stealing wealth if you can't flaunt it and use it? What's the point of giving a giant bribe to the son of the US president if nobody knows about it? You want to keep it to a small enough circle, maybe just the intelligence agencies and the Attorney General, so they know enough to stay away.
A “large group” of Russians were also at the wedding party. We will probably get some of their identities soon. It is highly doubtful that any of them are official Russian officials. More likely, they are a gaggle of mafia enforcers and “former” intel people from Russia's criminal/security underworld who graduated from being chekists to being managers and frontmen.
Some might be along for the ride and heading to the party paid for by the boss (and the boss, in this case, is probably not Umar), but some may also be there to build relationships directly with the Trump family and those in attendance.
What might this buy?
If you are a friend of the President's son, you are a friend of the President, which means you have less to fear from prosecutors, investigators or even spies. There could be joint business projects, future political cooperation, or probably most importantly, insurance for the Putin regime. After all, why would the American government try to overthrow a government which is run by such good friends of the President's family?
And, should the Russian people decide to get rid of Putin (or, more likely, some enterprising generals tired of losing a war decide to get rid of Putin), then Putin's FSO could call for the protection of their friends in Washington.
Umar Kremlev's direct link to the FSO is the story here – and it is a remarkable one, even for the Trump family.
Notice how (as far as we know) Russian oligarchs generally aren't falling over themselves to enrich the Trump family. You don't see Deripaska buying massive amounts of World Liberty Financial crypto or Alisher Usmanov pushing to build Trump Tower Tashkent, for example. Maybe this oligarch cashing in has gone undetected? But maybe Russian oligarchs are wise enough not to get too close to the Trump family because the Trump family is Putin's business? And you don't stay an oligarch for long if you chisel in on the Boss's business.
Going forward, we should keep an eye on Umar Kremlev's direct connections to the Kremlin. He is a bad actor, certainly, but not an oligarch. Don't besmirch their reputations.
This blog post is largely based on this 2024 article by Roman Romanovsky and Roman Badanin from the Russian dissident outlet Proekt Media.