Peskov: "Oligarch" is A Neo-Nazi Term, Russia Only Has Role-Model Rossiyan Entrepreneurs Like Mikhail Friedman!
Fridman identifies as a captain of industry and demands that you respect his pronouns oy/vey!
I haven’t done any short-form blog entries in a while. I actually miss doing them. They don’t take a lot of brainpower to either write or to read, but they can be quite amusing and worth it for that reason. In the meantime, I’ve been writing literally twelve, yes, twelve long-form essays about the Bible, about Plato and Philo and all this religious junk and struggling to get all the facts lined up, make the narrative flow, keep it interesting and yet somewhat professional, but also intersperse it with savage, underhanded attacks at Christians (unrepentant liars, pompous charlatans) just so I can let off a little bit of steam from time to time. As I finish this series of essays, I’m also thinking that they will be the capstone to my second book, tentatively titled The Metaphysics Conspiracy, which I’ve been working on as well as a result of the Not-War essentially grinding to a complete halt apart from some sporadic games of king of the hill being played in Avdiivka right now. In the meantime, I’m taking a break from essaying and going back to blogging. And, this is the perfect little story to write a quick blog entry about! It is so ridiculous and blatant and fits in so perfectly with the image of Russia’s ruling class that I paint here on this blog that it barely requires any explanation at all.
In short, the Not-War is well and truly winding down and the Kremlin is trying to pretend that nothing happened, actually. As a result of this, they are arresting Russian nationalists handing out leaflets asking for support of the soldiers at the front. The formal reason, COVID lockdown laws, again:
Police disrupted a Limonov Party picket in St. Petersburg
Today, during a single picket from the National Bolsheviks party, Kirill Travkin was detained. Kirill stood with a flag and distributed leaflets about helping the front. National Bolshevik Semyon Debenok, who was nearby and did not take part in the picket, was also detained. The detainees were taken to the 78th police department of St. Petersburg.
The formal reason for Kirill’s detention was violation of covid restrictions (Article 8.6.1 of the Law on Administrative Offenses of St. Petersburg). Detaining a person at a patriotic event for allegedly spreading Covid, while many other public events are taking place in the city, is absurd. The formal reason for Semyon’s detention is not clear to us.
And, as part of this effort, they have taken down all Z-related imagery in the cities. I’ve had people tell me this for a month now living in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Finally, they are now also asking the oligarchs ah, excuse me, plucky, go-lucky entrepreneur caste, to return to Russia.
RBC:
Billionaire Friedman flew from Great Britain to Israel, and after the outbreak of war there he returned to Moscow. Peskov stresste that there is “nothing unusual” in this, and that he can cross the border like other Russians.
Billionaire Mikhail Fridman can return and leave Russia along with all other citizens, said the representative of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov, an RBC correspondent reports.
“He is a citizen of the Russian Federation and can return here, live here, leave here, like any citizen of the Russian Federation, so there is nothing unusual here,” he said.
A week ago, Friedman ( $12.6 billion according to Forbes) left the UK due to the “impossibility of living under sanctions” and came to Israel, and after the start of the war with Hamas, he flew to Moscow, RBC wrote. “The businessman is now in Moscow and now plans to visit Russia regularly,” Alfa Group said.
The Kremlin had assured the day before that there was no threat to Russians returning from Israel: “How can the homeland threaten them?” Journalists then asked Peskov about the possible return of former special presidential envoy for sustainable development Anatoly Chubais or Yandex founder Arkady Volozh. “You and I are talking about our citizens as a whole, and this is all we can say here,” he replied.
Billionaire Friedman spoke about the feeling of humiliation in the UK
Fridman was one of the first major Russian businessmen to come under British sanctions in March 2022, and in August 2023 he was added to the US sanctions list. British authorities explained the restrictions by saying that the listed Russians “received benefits from or supported the Russian government.” The assets of those on the sanctions list are frozen and they are prohibited from entering the country.
The billionaire has repeatedly complained about the terms of the sanctions. “I can’t even invite you to a restaurant. I have to eat at home and am practically under house arrest,” he shared . Friedman dismissed British officials' claims of closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin: "The distance between Putin and anyone else is like the distance between Earth and space."
In the fall of 2023, the British National Crime Agency (NCA) closed the investigation against Friedman on suspicion of circumventing sanctions. The co-owner of Alpha emphasized that in connection with the investigation he felt unprotected and humiliated, but at the same time “he did not commit a single offense and never violated the law, including tax laws, in any country in the world.”
Russian authorities call Western sanctions illegal, ineffective and demand their lifting. “We all understand: sanctions, of course, will last for a long time,” Putin noted.
I’ve written about Fridman before. He was heavily involved in the initial organized looting of Russia in the 90s and was, in fact, one of its primary architects and perpetrators. He was quite close with the Yeltsin team and with Putin for many years.