By Shane Harris
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
If you were a Russian intelligence operative trying to
penetrate the American president’s inner circle, you could hardly have done
much better than Umar Kremlev did last May. Kremlev, a boxing promoter from
outside Moscow, rented a private island in the Bahamas for Donald Trump Jr. to
host his uber-luxe wedding celebration. Four of President Trump’s children,
along with their spouses, were sequestered with Kremlev and a gaggle of other
Russians during a party that went on for three days, according to an
investigation by ProPublica
published last week.
The guest list of family and close friends included the
president’s two sons-in-law: Jared Kushner, one of his key interlocutors with
Moscow, and Michael Boulos, whose father is a senior adviser to Trump on Arab
and Middle Eastern Affairs. A VIP party like that is what spies call a
target-rich environment. “It’s an intelligence service’s dream to have so much
time with these people, when alcohol is flowing and people’s guards are down,”
Marc Polymeropoulos, who used to oversee the CIA’s clandestine operations in
Russia, told me. When foreign agents gain access to such a setting, he said,
“they are building relationships, gaining assessment data on targets, and
perhaps even setting future contact, all precisely part of the recruitment
cycle.”
Kremlev shelled out for one night on a private island, as
well as a fireworks display, which together can cost upwards of $170,000—a
pittance, given the potential payoff. The president, who didn’t attend the
wedding, defended the gift, claiming that he, too, had thrown wedding parties
for people. “With all of that being said, I understand that Don’s paid him
back,” Trump told reporters on Friday, although he didn’t say how much money
his son planned to reimburse the Russian. The top Democrat on the House Oversight
Committee, Robert Garcia of California, has started an investigation. And
yesterday, a Republican senator, John Curtis of Utah, called
on his colleagues to investigate the wedding reception and issue a subpoena
for Trump Jr.
Kremlev, who did not respond to a request for comment,
has been sanctioned by Ukraine but not by the United States. He owes his
position, and apparently his wealth, to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Current and former intelligence officials in the U.S. and Europe who have spent
their career working against Russia told me that his gift to Trump’s son should
be viewed as the continuation of a long-standing state effort to influence and
potentially compromise people in the president’s orbit.
Kremlev, born Umar Lutfulloyev, grew up in a suburb of
Moscow and has family roots in Tajikistan. After a few criminal convictions for
extortion and battery in the early 2000s, he got into the boxing business. At
age 28, Lutfulloyev changed his name to Kremlev, which essentially translates
to “the Kremlin’s man.” Around this time, he joined the Night
Wolves—ostensibly a patriotic biker gang but really more of a paramilitary
and propaganda arm for Putin. The Russian president has previously mounted a
bike and joined the gang on rides in the Crimean peninsula, an occupied
territory of Ukraine. In 2014, following Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine,
the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Night Wolves, whose members
allegedly “conducted intimidation and criminal activities” in the country.
It was in the Night Wolves that Kremlev met Alexey
Rubezhnoy, a former member of the FSB, Russia’s main security agency. Rubezhnoy
is the current head of the Presidential Security Service, in charge of physical
protection for the famously paranoid Russian president. According to Proekt,
an independent Russian media outlet that specializes in investigative
reporting, Rubezhnoy put Kremlev in position to take over the International
Boxing Association, which now serves as an instrument of Russian soft power and
a focal point for the Russian government’s rhetorical attacks on LGBTQ people
and transgender athletes. Rubenzhnoy also lobbied Putin to nationalize a chain
of car dealerships and for Kremlev to lead the company, Proekt reported.
The 43-year-old Kremlev is frequently described in the press as an oligarch, a
broadly applied term that, if it means anything these days, describes someone
who owes his fortunes to the leader of Russia.
Kremlev is just the kind of person the CIA would want to
recruit because of his proximity to Putin and Russian state leadership. Yet
there he was, ingratiating himself with Trump’s eldest son, who is also a close
ally of Vice President Vance and one of the most influential figures on the
American political right.
“Espionage is a people business, and access is its holy
grail,” John Sipher, a former CIA officer who worked in Moscow and spent his
career focused on Russia, told me. Trump Jr.’s Russian guests, he said, had
“myriad opportunities for cultivation and exploitation. A shared contact, stray
comment, or a business proposition or follow-up meeting can provide information
and access that may be leveraged in countless ways.” From the point of view of
the U.S. government, which tries to prevent compromising encounters with
politically influential Americans, “this is the stuff of counterintelligence
nightmares,” Sipher said.
***
Kremlev’s past and his current connections are well known
to the U.S. government and its partners. The Ukrainian government has
sanctioned him, citing his close relationship with Putin, Rubezhnoy, and
Russian security agencies. Kremlev is also heavily involved with Healthy
Fatherland, an organization run by his wife’s twin sister, which Ukraine has
sanctioned for its alleged role in the kidnapping and “rehabilitation” of
Ukrainian children. A Ukrainian intelligence official told me that its domestic
security agency has a thick file on Kremlev. In 2021, for reasons that remain
unexplained, U.S. Customs and Border Protection denied a waiver for Kremlev to
enter the United States.
Before Kremlev took over the boxing association, it was
run by Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek businessman whom the Treasury Department
publicly identified as an organized crime figure in 2012 because of his alleged
membership in Brother’s Circle, a Russian criminal network involved in
international heroin trafficking. Treasury sanctioned him again five years
later for providing material support to another notorious group, Thieves in
Law, which originated in Stalinist prison camps in the Soviet Union and is akin
to the Italian Cosa Nostra. Rakhimov’s career is a manifestation of the blurry
lines in Russia between organized crime, international sports, and the state
security apparatus.
The U.S. designations, as well as concerns about the
International Boxing Association’s ties to the Russian banking system, prompted
the International Olympic Committee to block the association from organizing
the sport at the 2020 Tokyo Games. In 2023, USA Boxing withdrew from the IBA,
which Kremlev now ran, citing his governmental ties as well as the
association’s financial dependency on sanctioned companies. Gazprom, a Russian
state-owned energy corporation, had been its largest sponsor.
What Trump Jr. knew about Kremlev’s history is still
unknown. When reporters pressed his father, the president suggested that his
son “didn’t do a background check.” Within the West Wing, another tough
headline elicited some groans and eye rolls, as well as quiet acknowledgment
that the ProPublica report would, yet again, spark questions about the
relationship between Russia and the Trumps.
For an administration that is generally neither moved nor
shamed by questions about ethics, the wedding party triggered a response,
albeit a mild one. “I mean, just how dumb can you be?” one outside Trump
adviser asked my colleague Jonathan Lemire, on the condition of anonymity so as
to not alienate the president's family. One Republican who has been
disappointed with the president’s consistent deference to Putin at the expense
of Ukraine grimly noted that the wedding had been a savvy play by Moscow to further
engender goodwill with the first family. They took this as proof, if any more
was needed, that Trump would likely never
back Kyiv in the war.
Maybe Trump Jr. didn’t know much about Kremlev. But
Russians have long seen Trump Jr. as a conduit to his father, and they have
tried to exploit him for political and business purposes.
Back in 2006, Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka went to
Moscow to cultivate potential business contacts. During that trip, a
real-estate developer reportedly arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair
during a tour of the Kremlin. By his own account, Trump Jr. traveled to Russia
half a dozen times over the next year and a half. “Russians make up a pretty
disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” he said at a
real-estate conference in New York in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in
from Russia,” which he also called a “scary” place to do business.
In 2013, Trump Jr. was the main negotiator on behalf of
his father’s company with Russian figures who wanted to construct a
Trump-branded tower in Moscow. The deal didn’t materialize, but it laid a
foundation for future contacts between the presidential campaign and the
Russians that emerged three years later. During the 2016 presidential election,
Trump Jr. took a meeting in Trump Tower in New York with Natalia Veselnitskaya,
a Russian lawyer who offered incriminating material about Hillary Clinton. When
Trump Jr. learned that the Russian might give him dirt on his dad’s opponent,
he memorably told an associate, “I love it.” But Veselnitskaya didn’t deliver,
and the meeting, in retrospect, looks more like an effort to bring the future
president around to pro-Kremlin foreign policy.
When exactly Trump Jr. and Kremlev first met is unclear.
The Russian claims it was a couple of years ago. What’s known for sure is that
they appeared together on a panel last September at an IBA event in Istanbul.
Trump Jr. criticized transgender women and recalled his childhood love of
boxing. An appearance onstage by the president’s son and a Russian who’d been
sanctioned by Ukraine would not have escaped Moscow’s attention. It was the
beginning of an apparent friendship that led to Kremlev subsidizing Trump Jr.’s
wedding fete less than a year later.
***
Kremlev wasn’t the only Russian heavyweight at the party.
He was joined by Alexander Lagutin, whom ProPublica described as a
businessperson who served in top roles at a Russian defense contractor and a
state-backed energy company. Also at the wedding party was Elena Sobol, whom ProPublica
called Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA. Sobol didn’t respond to a request for
comment, and Lagutin couldn’t be reached.
The attendance of what ProPublica described as a
“large contingent” of Russians at a wedding party of only about 50 people was
conspicuous. “‘What are they doing here?’ one person recalled thinking,”
according to the news organization. After the story was published, Trump Jr.
and his wife, Bettina, acknowledged Kremlev’s largesse, describing it in a
social-media post as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend.”
“It’s unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as
something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they
come from,” they wrote. “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive.”
Maybe not. But former intelligence officers told me they
believe that it’s no mystery why Kremlev was willing to foot the bill for his
friends’ big day. “Money motivates—and that generosity can be a means of buying
access, cultivating obligation, stealing secrets, and securing influence,”
Steven Cash, a former CIA officer who was also the director of the
Counterintelligence Program at the Department of Homeland Security, told me.
“When the president’s family accepts lavish benefits from someone close to
Putin, private financial interests become a national-security concern.”
Kremlev knew what he wanted when he paid for the party.
The worrying question now is what Trump Jr. might give him in return.
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