It offers an incredible panorama of the Black Sea, and is located both out of sight and not far from Sevastopol, the capital of Crimea. Tuesday, December 30, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the NGO founded by the late Russian opposition leader, Alexeï Navalny, revealed that a luxurious building built on the coast of the territory annexed by Russia would belong to President Vladimir Putin.
This residence, formerly owned by Viktor Yanukovych, the former pro-Russian president of Ukraine between 2010 and 2014, would today be worth more than 10 billion rubles (more than 105 million euros) according to the NGO, which was able to consult architects’ documents. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, local authorities said the unfinished estate could be transferred to Russian authorities, but was ultimately placed under the supervision of the Presidential Property Management Department, according to previous reports.
If we are to believe FBK, this “secret” palace would nevertheless not belong directly to Vladimir Putin, too attached to his public image as a “man of the people”, but to a network of companies linked to Yuri Kovalchuk, often nicknamed the “personal banker of Vladimir Putin” – who also manages part of the Valdai presidential residence – and to a law firm associated with another residence of Vladimir Putin, in the Krasnodar region. The NGO’s investigation also uncovered technical documents requiring supervision by the Federal Protection Service (FPS), responsible for Vladimir Putin’s security, as well as contractors linked to other sites allegedly used by the president.
A cryogenics room
This sumptuous place would include several spas, a cinema room, lounges of several hundred square meters, as well as an indoor and outdoor swimming pool. There would also be a cryogenics chamber, a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s obsession with living a long life. If the palace is indeed the property of the Russian leader, this would make him the lucky beneficiary of at least six homes, both personally and as head of state. Such ownership would also be “politically significant, because it reinforces the fact that the Russian president will never agree to hand over the peninsula to Ukraine,” underlines Stephen Hall, Russia specialist at the University of Bath, interviewed by France 24.
The Kremlin, for its part, did not immediately comment on these allegations. It must be said that the alleged attack on the presidential residence in Valdai by drones intercepted on December 28, which Russia blames on Ukraine, is attracting all the political and media attention. Vladimir Putin even spoke of a “terrorist act” which pushed him to reconsider his attitude towards peace negotiations.
Already in 2021, Navalny’s team published a widely publicized investigation into another palace on Russia’s Black Sea coast. According to her, this building had been built for the leader, again, through a network of front companies and would have cost more than a billion dollars – information which had triggered demonstrations throughout the country.
