This is New York, the city that never sleeps. Life is buzzing here, and dreams come true. It has absolutely everything: the best boutiques, restaurants, entertainment. The view from the 50th floor of a skyscraper tells you: you've made it in life.
And this is London—the heart of Europe. Not a city but a postcard: beautiful architecture, magnificent parks, history. There is probably not a single billionaire in the world who doesn't own property here.
And this is Dubai—hot and insanely expensive. The richest people in the world move here in search of entertainment, luxury, and outrageous opulence.
And it seems these are the world's most desirable and most expensive cities. Centers of attraction. Cities everyone dreams of getting to. If only it weren't for the sky-high prices.
But you may be surprised: it turns out there is a city more expensive than New York, London, and Dubai. A city where $1 million will buy you only 30 square meters of luxury real estate. And if you're truly rich, living here is now considered far more prestigious. At least, that's what we're being told.
We were surprised too. Sochi? Krasnodar Krai (a region in southern Russia)? But just recently, all the media were buzzing with this news: Sochi ranked third in the cost of luxury housing, ahead of New York, London, and Dubai. Reports say that one square meter in a high-end new development in Sochi costs more than 1.4 million rubles.
It does sound like a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but judge for yourself: in this residential complex, with a 25-meter swimming pool, its own cable car to the beach, a tennis court, and a soccer field, a one-bedroom apartment is being sold for 46 million rubles.
In another, no less luxurious residential complex, the same apartment will already cost 59 million rubles. There are even buildings where they are asking 175 million rubles for a 50-square-meter apartment.
One of the most elite areas in Sochi is called Sirius. It's right next to the Olympic Park. There is a cottage community here that we like much more than trendy glass skyscrapers.
First line, right by the sea, just a few meters from the water.
And each owner has their own house. With terraces, a small garden, and a private pool. No ugly five-meter fences here—the houses stand right on the promenade, separated only by token railings.
That's where we're heading today. We can't personally stroll along the promenade just yet, but that won't stop us. We begin our walk here, near the Arfa Park-Hotel.
And if we head south, we'll see that there is a small cottage community on the hotel grounds. There are private homes here—new, stylish three-story villas.
And these are not villas for guests and tourists—these are private residences.
Each of these villas costs a staggering half a billion rubles. That is very expensive.
Even on the famous Rublyovka (an ultra-wealthy area outside Moscow), known for its insane prices, you could buy a similar house for much less.
And here it's 500 million rubles just for a summer house in Sochi. It makes you wonder who could possibly afford that.
Our curiosity is fueled by the fact that some of the owners of these villas are classified. We found this community a long time ago, back when you could still order an extract from Rosreestr (Russia's property registry) and find out who owned a house.
For example, this house:
It is registered to the family of the current governor of Lipetsk Region, a member of the Supreme Council of the United Russia party, Igor Artamonov. He is a former banker, so let's assume he can afford it.
Another villa is owned by David Faradzhev, a shareholder in Gazprom Automation. The owners are listed in the cadastral records.
But if we want to see who lives next door to these gentlemen, that's where the problems begin. The extract says that the owner of the villa next to the governor's is the Russian Federation.
That, of course, does not mean the country itself owns the house—it just means the owners are under state protection. Their safety is apparently a major concern. Spies, NATO, drones, you know the drill—and so their data are simply erased from official registries.
But we found a way to learn who is hiding here. Data from the developer that came into our possession show that this villa was bought by an old acquaintance of ours—Anna Borisovna Surovikina. The wife of General Sergei Surovikin, one of the commanders of Putin's army in Ukraine.
General Armageddon, who seven months ago was supposedly going to capture Kyiv in a couple of weeks. He is also called the Butcher of Syria: he commanded the military operation in Syria, but as you may remember from our investigation, in Syria he was more involved in skimming money. Payments for Surovikin's services in Syria were sent to his wife's company. Now it is clear what they were spent on.
Let's keep looking at the neighbors: across the fence from Surovikina there is another classified gentleman.
You're not supposed to know, but we'll tell you. This villa was paid for by Andrei Nikolayevich Patrushev, the son of Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and one of the initiators of the war against Ukraine.
Patrushev's little son, of course, is a big businessman. He used to sit on the management board of Gazprom Neft, and now does business in the Arctic.
The next house, diagonally across from Patrushev's and farther from the sea:
Here, behind the label "Russian Federation," a certain Sergei Shishin is discreetly hiding.
His biography says he is a senior vice president at VTB Bank, but in fact he is an FSB man—he headed the FSB's logistics and support service, meaning he handled all procurement for the agency and managed all its property. Worked for the FSB at some point? Then you get state protection. Putin doesn't mind spending on his own people.
But the last, fourth classified house honestly left us baffled.
At first glance, there seems to be no explanation for this state secret. The owner of a 650-square-meter villa worth half a billion rubles is... basketball player Svetlana Abrosimova.
And she not only paid for it—she clearly uses it.
For example, she ordered electronics delivered to this house. Here is the Sochi address: 2 Tsimlyanskaya Street, Villa 2.1.
We found out that the villa was not removed from Rosreestr by accident. The same thing happened to her apartment in Moscow. Pure mystery! Here Abrosimova is listed:
And then suddenly there is no Abrosimova, and the apartment is owned by the Russian Federation:
Maybe Svetlana is not just a former basketball player after all, but also a top-secret FSB or GRU officer with the rank of general? Maybe she works for the Defense Ministry, and in between running a YouTube channel, she secretly commands a battalion in Donbas?
Why is Svetlana Abrosimova, simply an athlete who retired long ago, being protected by the state like this? Why has the Russian state effectively put her on the same level as the families of Patrushev and Surovikin?
We'll need this video from an ultra-patriotic event. A charity basketball game in support of the war. Two teams are playing: Team Z and Team V.
Various officials and celebrities are playing, together with children from the LNR and DNR (the self-proclaimed Russian-backed entities in eastern Ukraine). On Team Z: Gosha Kutsenko, Deputy Prime Minister Novak, Alexander Karelin, teenagers from Donbas, and our main character—Svetlana Abrosimova.
And hosting the event is Russia's chief propagandist, former resident of Lake Como, Vladimir Solovyov, who is, let's say, quite well acquainted with Abrosimova.
He is her lover, her boyfriend. The terminology is a bit tricky, since Vladimir Rudolfovich is, after all, a married man with eight officially recognized children, but still.
Let's look at a recent leak of medical lab tests. On July 7, 2021, at Dr. Myasnikov's clinic—Myasnikov being one of Solovyov's closest friends—Abrosimova took a coronavirus test. Three hours earlier, Vladimir Solovyov had done the same there.
On November 10, 2021, they both took another coronavirus test there at the same time. The address listed for both of them was that very Abrosimova apartment in Moscow that was removed from Rosreestr. In other words, Solovyov came with Abrosimova to take a COVID test and said he lived at her place.
On February 2, 2022, Abrosimova and Solovyov were tested for coronavirus at the same place, one minute apart. This time, Solovyov listed Abrosimova's phone number as his personal number.
Let's look at another leak—Moscow parking records. Svetlana had a Mercedes, and apparently a driver.
This car was parked by a certain Alexei Martynov.
The same man also parked the Range Rover of Vladimir Solovyov's mother—Inna Solovyova.
He also parked the cars of Elga Sepp.
Elga Sepp is propagandist Solovyov's official wife.
Solovyov's own cars were also parked by this driver. So he turns out to be a family driver. Just for two families.
This could still all be some crazy coincidence—who knows, maybe Solovyov and Abrosimova are just friends, maybe they had some business together, some dealings. But an old and strangely forgotten story about how Solovyov fought for Abrosimova ten years ago adds a lot of detail to the picture.
This story was told by former head coach of the Russian women's national basketball team Boris Sokolovsky. He said that Solovyov invited him to a meeting and started threatening him: if Svetlana Abrosimova was not included in the Olympic team, things would go badly for him. "If you don't take Abrosimova onto the team, we'll launch a smear campaign against you." That is a direct quote.
Svetlana was not taken onto the national team anyway. And what happened next is easy to verify from open sources. Solovyov was clearly not joking. He devoted an entire program on the radio station Vesti FM to the decline of Russian basketball, where he called Sokolovsky helpless, accused him of destroying an entire generation of players and killing a generation's hopes.
On Twitter, he called the coach the gravedigger of Olympic hopes. He said he should be driven out. Thrown out.
The Olympics came and went, but the fascination with basketball—or rather, with Abrosimova—did not go away. A much more interesting goal loomed ahead: the post of head of the Russian Basketball Federation. Abrosimova publicly declared that she had left her sports career for this position and would fight for it.
Solovyov immediately fired up his PR machine, so aggressively that he ended up facing a defamation lawsuit from Abrosimova's main rival.
Abrosimova lost the election for head of the federation, and an irritated Solovyov kept raging on Twitter for a long time: claiming that everything was rotten, that all basketball fans had been humiliated. And even a year and a half later, on his radio show, he kept insisting that he had been right about everything.
For the most skeptical and detail-oriented viewers of our channel, we have something else too: flight records. In his pre-war life, Vladimir Rudolfovich was quite fond of hopping over to the United States for a break.
In one of the test records, Solovyov exposed his international passport number, which lets us see when he entered and left the United States.
From January 2 to January 6, 2016, he was in New York.
He did not fly alone—Svetlana Abrosimova was traveling on those same days as well.
Solovyov traveled to America especially often in 2017—he was flying there practically every free day he had. He was there for three days over the New Year holidays, five days during the May holidays, flew in for one day in June and July, and for three days in August.
Neither before nor after that did Vladimir Solovyov fly to America so often.
The purpose of his visits—what a surprise—was connected to Svetlana Abrosimova. The thing is, she had flown to America for an extended stay back in late December 2016.
Svetlana was busy with something very important—giving birth—and she returned to Russia with newborns: Margarita and Maria Abrosimova.
Both girls have the patronymic Vladimirovna.
By birth, they have U.S. citizenship. Exactly the same as Solovyov's other daughter born in the United States—Yekaterina.
And not just them. Solovyov's mistress herself, who is effectively under Russian state protection, also has a U.S. passport. Here is its number, which we found in her flight records:
We spoke to several people from Solovyov's circle, and they confirmed everything: he really has had a secret family for a long time, two children, and he often appears at that very same ultra-elite house in Sochi. There are not many public photos of Solovyov with Abrosimova, but to this day he comments on her basketball games, invites her onto his broadcasts, and reposts her social media posts.
An important note: we absolutely do not care about Vladimir Solovyov's private life. He can have a third family, a fourth, a twenty-fifth, and another hundred children for all we care. That is none of our business—let them live with their families however they want.
But here is what we do care about, and what is absolutely infuriating: why the hell is the Russian state busy classifying the records of some clownish propagandist and, separately, all the records of his mistress. A crook who is constantly in the ears of millions of Russians, brainwashing them with outright lies and making billions from it.
At first, we were told that the state was protecting the safety of security officials and military personnel so that no Ukrainian saboteurs could find them through Rosreestr. But in reality, what we see are half-a-billion-ruble homes belonging to Patrushev's son, Surovikin's wife, and, for God's sake, Solovyov's mistress, all placed under what is effectively state protection. So first they stole their fortunes, unleashed a pointless war, and now, under cover of that very war, they are simply hiding their property from all of us so that, God forbid, we don't find out about it and tell everyone.
There has to be some limit to hypocrisy. There is no more rabid enemy of the West in Russia than Solovyov. Every day on his channel, on social media, on the Rossiya TV channel, on his personal Solovyov Live broadcasts, he practically bursts with hatred for America, Europe, and NATO. He positively glows when talking about how Russia will wipe them all off the face of the earth.
First, they found his three villas and apartment on Lake Como. And now it has also emerged that Solovyov—the great patriot and defender of traditional values—deliberately took his American mistress to the United States so she could give birth there and their children would get U.S. citizenship. It turns out that the West, led by the United States, is continuing not only Hitler's cause, as he says, but also Vladimir Solovyov's bloodline.
Their entire struggle against the West, which they use as a pretext for war, is a colossal fraud. There is no one in Russia more tied to the West than Vladimir Solovyov, with his life on Lake Como and his American children. Solovyov knows that Putin will end sooner or later, and he will have to build himself a new life. And so Solovyov, like a typical Putin hanger-on, has prepared a fallback airfield for himself and his family in that very same West. As for Russians, they can deal with the consequences of his many years of work on their own.
Help spread our investigation. Together, let's make sure it reaches the people Solovyov deceives every day. Let's help them see what Russian propaganda really is.
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Freedom for Alexei Navalny!