What is the most forbidden topic in Russia?
What is something that absolutely no media outlet is allowed to write about under any circumstances? What is forbidden to discuss on forums?
ACF investigations (by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation)? Torture in the FSB (Russia’s security service)? Terrorism? Protests?
No. Well, at least not officially.
If you look at Roskomnadzor’s blocking statistics, the most forbidden topic is the relationship between Putin crony and state banker Andrei Kostin and TV host Nailya Asker-Zade. Hundreds of takedowns. And illegal ones at that. They are scrubbing the entire Russian internet clean just to make sure, heaven forbid, no one writes: “Asker-Zade is Kostin’s mistress.”
The main wave of blocks came in 2018. Back then I read about it and thought: “What kind of idiocy is this? Why are they so fanatically and ferociously wiping out every bit of information about their affair? So what if they’re dating—why launch a whole special operation to cleanse the internet over it?”
But then we started looking more closely at what was really going on, and we realized: they truly do have something to hide. You may think, “Well, this banker Kostin is rich, obviously,” but you have no idea just how rich.
Let’s start by looking at what exactly the articles are about—the ones Roskomnadzor blocks at Kostin’s unlawful request. They deal with two things:
The fact of the relationship itself between Asker-Zade and Kostin. Despite the large number of photos of them together (including with their child), our lovebirds actively deny everything. Or rather, they do not even deny it so much as carefully conceal it. Nailya often coyly hints on Instagram about her personal life and “her prince.”
That this “prince” of hers, better known as Andrei Kostin, who has headed the state-owned VTB bank for 18 years, showers her with immense wealth. Specifically, real estate. And he does not pay for it himself, but out of the coffers of a state bank.
Specifically, this concerns two apartments in the Novaya Ostozhenka residential complex. One is 229 square meters (about 2,465 square feet), the other 155 square meters (about 1,668 square feet). Their total value is 340 million rubles.
And you can look at the records yourself and see what VTB has to do with it. The first was gifted to Nailya by the bank’s top manager Kirill Zimarin. The second had previously belonged directly to VTB.
That, in essence, is what is being forbidden. In Kostin’s view, we are not supposed to know about it.
There are also occasional mentions of some “country house on Rublyovka” (the elite suburban area outside Moscow) that Kostin allegedly gave Nailya as well. But details have been scarce. We looked into it. It’s true—here it is.
Zhukovka-3: a house of nearly 1,000 square meters (about 10,764 square feet) and more than half a hectare of land (over 5,000 square meters, or about 1.24 acres). Top-of-the-line in every respect. At least 250 million rubles.
Here is Nailya posing on the balcony of that house.
Looking at the property record, we see that Nailya bought this country house in 2015—that is, after the apartments—and the seller was an offshore company called RENAGTON INVESTMENTS LIMITED.
Let’s pause here and settle one important point once and for all. Nailya Asker-Zade could not possibly buy anything like this on her own. She works as a host on the state TV channel Rossiya 1. She is not Solovyov or Kiselyov, not some star of state propaganda. She makes a truly awful show where she interviews Putin’s cronies and other officials. These interviews are dreadful—endlessly boring and provoking nothing but embarrassment at what you are watching. The Rossiya 1 channel clearly agrees with that assessment; just look at when Nailya’s show airs—Sunday at 12:30 a.m. I don’t think anyone would dispute that this is the worst time slot on the entire schedule.
Given that the show features, without exaggeration, stars of Russian and global corruption—Rotenberg, Peskov, Chemezov, Usmanov, Kadyrov—it could have been explosive. Tough questions, bribetakers and bribegivers cornered on camera. But Nailya asks none of that. Instead, she spends an hour and a half fawning over her guests, asking Rotenberg not how an idiotic gym teacher managed to become a dollar billionaire, but how he felt when he opened the bridge in Kerch.
So as not to sound unfounded about Nailya’s journalism: same guest, two different interviewers. The view counts differ by a factor of 50.
I would not be surprised if Nailya actually pays extra to have her show aired on Rossiya 1. In any case, there can be no talk of any serious “star” salary. She simply could not have had 250 million rubles for a country house.
Back to the house on Rublyovka and the offshore company she “bought” it from.
The offshore company is registered to nominees, but even from fragmentary data we can still link it to Kostin. Look: here is the record for Kostin’s own apartment on Borisoglebsky Lane. It was first registered directly in his name, then later—probably because of sanctions—transferred to the offshore company ERALMOR HOLDINGS LIMITED.
We compare the two offshore companies—Nailya’s country-house one and Kostin’s apartment one—and see that they are registered at the same address, with the same directors and nominees.
And just as Nailya Asker-Zade could not possibly have had 340 million rubles for the apartments or 250 million for the country house, she also could not have had nearly 3 BILLION rubles to buy another enormous plot on Rublyovka. The outlet Proekt wrote about this in detail this summer.
Nothing was built there in time, and after the media reports Nailya had to sell the plot. Alas.
Everything described above is not new and is fairly well known. We have simply organized it and attached official documents. Based on all this, Nailya Asker-Zade turns out to be an incredibly wealthy woman—a billionaire.
But this, friends, is only a tiny fraction. Now let’s move on to what we ourselves managed to dig up.
Since nobody watches Nailya’s show on Rossiya 1, I will have to add a bit of context. Last year, when Asker-Zade was receiving the TEFI television award for her work—yes, yes, “the country’s best interviewer,” after midnight on a Sunday—the moment she stepped onto the stage, she let slip the following phrase:
And indeed, we thought. Just look at the geography of the episodes. She films Chemezov in Kazan, Kadyrov in Grozny, Rotenberg in Crimea, Usmanov in Tashkent, and the list could go on for a very long time. Wherever the guest happens to be, Nailya is right there. Do you know the secret?
She has her own plane. A very nice plane. Worth $60 million.
Look. A super-simple exercise. We take three of her interview locations more or less at random: Grozny, the Kerch Strait, and Vladivostok (where Sechin gave an interview, which he basically never does). In airport terms, that means Grozny, Anapa, and Vladivostok. We chose the first two deliberately, because they are not especially popular destinations for private jets. That makes the task much easier. We calculated the dates when the episodes were filmed and discovered that on those days, at those three airports, there was only one aircraft: a Bombardier Global 6000 with the tail number T7-KLT.
Then we studied all of this plane’s movements over the course of a year and simply compared them with Nailya’s Instagram.
Three matches with the TV episodes, two with Instagram—and here, have 15 more. We are not stingy. And that is only what we were able to confirm 100 percent from her photos.
Now let’s figure out what kind of plane this is. From open sources we learn that it recently changed its registration number. It is now T7-KLT, but before that it was M-TSLT. That happened because the aircraft changed both its place of registration and its owner.
Now it is registered in San Marino and owned by an unknown offshore company in one of the most secretive jurisdictions—Belize.
And before that, just a year earlier, the plane was registered on the Isle of Man. The previous owner was a company called VL9762 Ltd. That too is an offshore company, but this one we were able to trace without difficulty. It belongs to VTB Bank.
Once again, in simple terms. In March 2017, VTB buys the plane and registers it to its leasing subsidiary. Nine months later, the plane is sold to some unknown offshore company that God knows where it came from and that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with VTB. And then the mistress of VTB chief Kostin starts flying on it.
How much could this cost? There are two possibilities. If Kostin personally bought the plane from VTB—which would already be corruption—then he paid $60 million, nearly 4 billion rubles, for it. And operating such a luxurious aircraft costs 500,000 rubles per flight hour.
He cannot possibly have that kind of money, not even close. Or—the second possibility—Kostin rents this plane for Nailya. But that situation is no better. We took one calendar month for which the data was most complete and found that the plane logged more than 50 hours, which would have cost Kostin 30 million rubles—for just one month.
In short, a state banker’s official income would not be enough to buy, rent, or even maintain a private aircraft like this.
Personally, I am convinced that Kostin is not renting anything at all. He simply stole this plane from the balance sheet of state-owned VTB, sold it to his own offshore company for a token sum, and now his lady love does not have to suffer in business class on the way to all these interviews. Convenient.
We have every luxury item on the checklist. Elite apartments, a lavish country house. A plane. There is nowhere further to go. Well, if we were talking about Arab sheikhs rather than a TV host and an official, there would probably be a yacht at the end too...
And there is.
While compiling a log of Nailya’s movements around the world, we could not help noticing something. Nailya vacations at sea very often. Very often. The photos are sparse; mostly they show nothing but water and outfits.
But it is impossible not to notice. She is dying to show off that she is vacationing... on a yacht. And every time—on different dates, in different parts of the planet—the microscopic details of the yacht that make it into the frame are the same.
So there is a yacht. Her own, personal yacht. But our heroine deliberately takes photos in such a way that it is impossible to identify the yacht visually from the pictures. So we came up with another method.
Every aircraft, private or not, broadcasts a radio signal with its position. Ships do the same—including yachts—and their coordinates at any given moment can be found quite easily. There are several websites for this, with free access or expanded subscription access: Flightradar, Planefinder, Marinetraffic, Vesselfinder, and so on.
In addition, we have our lady’s Instagram, with hundreds of photos and stories about her vacations. So altogether we have three sets of completely public, open-source information: Instagram, the movements of her plane around the world, and radar data for all the yachts in existence.
So in theory, we can overlay them and figure out which yachts put to sea from the city where Nailya’s plane had flown. It sounds simple, but in practice, for example, in the area around Nice—where both she and the jet were from July 30 to August 4—5,234 vessels put to sea.
And Nailya’s yacht was definitely among them. Five thousand is too many; we are not going to find the right yacht among 5,000. But why not look at other cities where the plane was? We checked which of those 5,000 yachts also put to sea in Olbia, Italy, from August 14 to 17, and our sample shrank to 256.
Add Genoa from August 30 to 31, and the number of yachts drops to just 34.
And then, just for sport, we check Cyprus, where the plane was from June 30 to July 5. And the number of yachts that were in all four places on the right dates comes down to... exactly one.
Meet SEA&US: the 62-meter superyacht of Rossiya 1 host Nailya Asker-Zade.
Above are photos from Google. You have to admit, they do not tell you much. Is Nailya really taking pictures on this exact yacht? Absolutely. When we identified the yacht, it was in the port of Barcelona for maintenance. We went there specifically and made sure.
Now let’s compare the details and prove it.
First: the bow of the yacht.
Second: the railing and some round detail in the deck.
And third: the staircase. Here you do not even need to compare individual elements—it is obvious as it is. Nailya is on the SEA&US yacht.
The yacht model is called the Amels 199. Its price is $62 million, or 4 billion rubles. It is registered to an offshore company, completely anonymously.
Kostin goes to great lengths to conceal his salary at VTB; it is usually estimated at between $2 million and $15 million a year. But for our purposes, that does not matter at all. Whether he earns $2 million, $15 million, or even $30 million at a state bank, it makes no difference. He still could not afford either to buy or maintain a yacht like this.
Here is what I want to say in conclusion.
This story is the disgusting essence of Putin’s regime in its purest form. A state official, a state banker, in a country where people cannot get free medicine for months, keeps yet another mistress in a style that outdoes actual royalty. Real estate, a plane, a yacht—only a few hundred people in the entire world can truly afford things like that. And Nailya.
And on that plane she flies around to all of Putin’s cronies to conduct flattering interviews with them, while her “prince” has spent 18(!!!!) years incompetently running a loss-making state bank. The Finance Ministry, Rosimushchestvo (the federal state property agency), the Deposit Insurance Agency—the state in its various forms has given VTB more than 1 trillion rubles in support over the past 10 years. Every one of us—from the elderly to infants—has paid 7,300 rubles to prop up the endlessly unprofitable VTB bank. Which, as you now know, went in part to this as well.
A triumph of double standards. In news broadcasts, Nailya talks about the difficult economic situation, and then she gets on a plane and flies to a yacht whose cost exceeds the budget of some Russian region. And she knows perfectly well where these yachts, planes, palaces, and diamonds came from. Her “prince” looted a state bank and now spends the spoils on her. And none of this bothers her in the slightest. Although why say none of it? One thing does bother her—that Russians might accidentally read about it in the tabloid press or on some forum.
Putin’s rule is shamelessness and degradation. Each of us should make at least some small contribution to fighting it. Ours is this investigation. Go ahead and block it—good luck.
Now it is your turn, dear readers of this blog. Help us spread this investigation. Post it on social media, send it to friends, discuss it with your taxi driver.