“Project” said in the announcement of its investigation “Travel Companions” that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Svetlana Polyakova, and Lyubov Kabaeva, the mother of Alina Kabaeva, regularly flew abroad together for vacations. According to the publication, they made such trips to Croatia, Turkey, and Italy on expensive business jets.
According to “Project”, the conclusions are based on a leak of the border-crossing database, which the team used to study the flights of thousands of officials and their companions over 10 years. The piece titled “Travel Companions” is due to be published in the coming days.
The investigation says that Lavrov, Polyakova, and Lyubov Kabaeva flew to Croatia twice — in 2017 and 2018 — and once to Turkey in 2021. In all three cases, “Project” claims, they used expensive business jets, one of which was regularly used by CSKA president Yevgeny Giner.
The investigation’s authors also write that on several of these flights they were accompanied by the families of businessmen Vitaly Mashitsky and Alexander Chigirinsky. The piece also says separately that Kabaeva and Polyakova flew together to Italy in 2016 and 2018, as well as to Croatia in 2019 without Lavrov.
On the trip to Croatia in 2019, they were accompanied by Leysan Kabaeva, Alina Kabaeva’s younger sister. For these flights, according to “Project”, they used a plane regularly used by Tatyana Yumasheva, the daughter of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin.
In the same announcement, “Project” writes that its sources link such closeness to the fact that Lavrov remains the only member of the Russian government who has held his post for 22 years, while also being among the leaders on United Russia’s list in the State Duma elections. Three sources — a member of the presidential administration, a top manager in state propaganda, and a person close to the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations — consider Lavrov’s resignation a logical decision, but do not know whether such a decision has been made.
Two of them have heard that the new head of the Foreign Ministry should not be a diplomat; as an example, one source named Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who represents Russia in OPEC. “Project” also writes that Lavrov is almost not publicly involved in the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, where a more visible role has been played by RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev, businessman Roman Abramovich, and presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky.
Additional details are published in the publication’s material.
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