The 20-year-old American Olivia Culpo, the current Miss Universe, travelled to Moscow at the beginning of 2013 to collaborate with Russian pop sensation Emin Agalarov, who is the son of a millionaire real estate tycoon with connections to President Vladimir Putin, on a music video.
One thing led to another, and on June 18 of that year, Donald Trump, who owned the Miss Universe pageant at the time, declared that he would be taking 86 of the most attractive women in the world to Moscow to perform at Emin’s father’s 7,500-seat concert venue, Crocus City Hall.
“Is Putin likely to attend the Miss Universe Pageant?” Later that day, Trump sent out a tweet. “Will he end up being my new best friend?”
Vladimir Putin gushes over president-elect Trump, claims he will support US-Russia relations https://t.co/tvwjeKXmdD pic.twitter.com/1SaVNsNnRD
— New York Post (@nypost) November 7, 2024
Questions are being raised about the real nature of Trump’s “friendship” with the man in the Kremlin after the US president made unprecedented comments yesterday in response to accusations from Ukrainian President Zelensky that he had been excluded from peace negotiations between the US and Russia.
“Oh, well, we weren’t invited,” I heard today. You should never have started it, but now you’ve been there for three years. “You could have struck a deal,” Trump continued, seemingly oblivious to the fact that in February 2022, Russia crossed the border into Ukraine with a convoy of military vehicles, including 1,000 tanks, that was 40 miles long. “Without the loss of much land,” he continued, a “half-baked negotiator” might have negotiated a deal years ago.
Since a shocking dossier created by a former MI6 officer in 2016 said that “the Russian government was working to get Mr Trump elected,” there have even been hints that Putin had kompromat, or harmful information, on the US president. Trump has frequently brushed off such claims as “fake news.”
But with the contentious choice of Tulsi Gabbard, a Putin “fan girl,” as Director of National Intelligence in recent months, the haze of conjecture has only grown. And the sight of Tucker Carlson, the conservative media commentator who visited Trump at the White House a year ago and did a soft-soap interview with the Russian president in Moscow.
However, the American president’s ties to the Russian establishment date back decades, and his attempts to conclude the war on terms that appeared to be favourable to Putin cast his choice in a shockingly different light. Trump’s real estate business was on the verge of collapse in the mid-1990s.
Due to his reputation as a poisonous businessman, no US bank would do business with him, and three of his casinos and one of his hotels had declared bankruptcy.
‘He could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything,’ Trump’s former longtime architect, the late Alan Lapidus, said in 2018. ‘It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.’
🇮🇳 Trump Considers Meeting Putin as US-Russia Ukraine War Talks Conclude in Riyadh #mostliked #india https://t.co/31I8B6bF0g
— Imminent Global News (@imminent_news) February 20, 2025
Rich people from Russia and the former Soviet republics, including several Putin-affiliated oligarchs, are alleged to have contributed the funds.
In the years that followed, Trump’s connections to these businesspeople persisted. The New York-based Bayrock Group, established by Kazakh real estate developer Tevfik Arif, who had previously worked for 17 years at the Soviet-era Ministry of Commerce and Trade in Moscow, was one of his most important partners in the early 2000s. At this period, Felix Sater, the son of a Russian mafioso who had previously been found guilty of operating a protection racket, was one of Arif’s top advisors.
