Putin's war has affected almost everyone in Russia. Most people know a friend or relative who was mobilized. One in five people in the country personally knew someone who was killed in this war.
This is no joke, not a terrible dream, not propaganda fiction. This is reality. Russia has turned into a waking nightmare—tens of thousands of corpses.
Scumbag officials proudly presenting a cake, towels, or firewood in exchange for dead husbands and children.
An army people join because of poverty, hopelessness, or because television lied to them that the motherland was in danger. And then mothers, sisters, and wives run through morgues in Rostov to identify a relative by a severed leg. The bandit and criminal Prigozhin records videos against a backdrop of corpses. A 9-year-old girl in Kyiv, killed by a Russian missile on Children's Day. Apparently, she must have been living at a critical infrastructure site. After all, those are supposedly the only things being bombed, as Putin says, right?
The war—that same three-day "special military operation"—one year and three months later is now being fought inside Russia itself. The country's western border effectively no longer exists. In the Belgorod region, homes are being bombed, there is shelling, a mass evacuation, and sabotage groups are taking border guards and mobilized soldiers prisoner.
The Russian army and the Wagner PMC are shelling each other. This is Russia today. And this is what Putin has turned your life into.
By now, no one—not even the most deranged "turbo-patriot"—can deny it: Russia is losing this war. And as long as Putin remains in power, things will only get worse. More corpses, more ruined lives, more of Prigozhin's convicts walking free, more tears, more poverty, and more deaths.
But you know, there are people this horror has not touched at all. And never will. Those are Putin's elites, and especially their privileged children.
Where is Medvedev's son, for example? He's 28—so go serve, young man. Your father is on Telegram saying World War III is just around the corner. But no... Ilya Medvedev is not at the front. He's joining United Russia.
Patrushev's sons are busy making billions. The children of propagandist Solovyov are trying their hand at modeling and obtaining U.S. passports.
And the main question is: where exactly is Defense Minister Shoigu's son? Digging trenches near Maryinka? Maybe serving at a border post or defending Shebekino? Come on, you have to admit this is a basic matter of honor: you're a general, even if you've never actually served a day. You are the face of the war. You decide who goes to the front, from where, and in what numbers. You send people to their deaths. Presumably, if you take on that kind of responsibility, you should live accordingly yourself—with some conscience.
We found Shoigu's son. No, not at a military unit, not in a trench, and not even in a cozy chair at the General Staff. We found him on the Europa Plus music chart.
This is Danila Sergeyevich Shebunov. Or singer Sheba, Sheba Singer, as he calls himself. And as is not hard to guess just by looking at Sheba, he is the biological son of Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu.
Sheba is a rising show-business star. Millions are being poured into 22-year-old Danila, who once planned to become a professional footballer—now he has decided to become a pop singer.
A bit of background: Shoigu officially has two children from his marriage to his legal wife, Irina Shoigu.
Two daughters: Yulia Shoigu, who works for the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and Ksenia Shoigu, head of the Russian Triathlon Federation, who is involved with the Race of Heroes. She runs marathons.
You've probably also heard of Ksenia's husband—the blogger Alexei Stolyarov. If not, take a look at his Instagram yourself—you'll love it.
There, this former athlete—who would be very useful at the front—works out, appears in comedy sketches, and records little "news updates."
Despite the fact that Shoigu is still officially married to the mother of Yulia and Ksenia, that has not stopped him in the slightest from having other wives. And other children. In the early 2000s, he began an affair with a flight attendant from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Elena Shebunova.
Calling it just an affair would be inaccurate: this was not some mistress, but a real second parallel wife. Shebunova was immediately handed a nice fat slice of the state budget to steal from. She suddenly started making money from government contracts with the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Defense Ministry: supplying food, uniforms, and construction materials for military facilities.
Here is her house on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow), next door to the Rotenbergs. Not bad, right?
And most importantly: Elena Shebunova gave birth to three children for Shoigu. A girl, Dasha, who is now 15.
And two boys: Stepan, born in 2011, and Danila, born in 2001. That is our Sheba.
All the children attended the same elite school, President, on Rublyovka. Tuition there costs about 2 million rubles a year. The eldest, Sheba, had already become a businessman by age 19.
He now owns two large office spaces in central Moscow, which are rented out and bring Shoigu's son close to 1 million rubles in rental income.
But to hell with business—that's boring passive income. Shoigu's son is all about creativity... A few days before the war began, Danila Shebunov launched his music career by starting a TikTok with covers of famous songs. Here's what he posted on the day the war began:
In April, Sheba announced the filming of his first music video:
While conscripts his own age were being sent to the front despite promises to the contrary, Shoigu's son was recruiting extras, preparing the set, and learning the moves and choreography for his video:
Let's watch it together. You still hope that if it's not Lyube or Gazmanov, maybe it will be something like Shaman: I'm Russian, my father's blood runs in me, I'll go to the end, we'll rise up, and whatever else that was. But no.
The intro plays, and we see a magazine featuring a naked Sheba—Shoigu's son—gazing seductively into the camera.
A pretty girl picks up the magazine, and on the back cover there is another naked Shoigu son.
And finally, the star of the occasion himself appears in the frame, sitting on the girl's lap.
The girl starts writhing on him.
Then they writhe together. After that, they move through the apartment in a passionate synchronized dance, performing various acrobatic routines.
A scene on the kitchen counter, the girl undresses. More dancing around the apartment, now with both of them undressed.
Then they go outside and start dancing by the pool with a group of friends.
The dance ends, and Sheba looks straight into our eyes with great significance.
Not exactly military-patriotic, is it? In interviews, Sheba says he writes and composes exclusively in English. It's easier for him that way. And if not in English, then in Spanish—he has spoken that since childhood too.
The next—and last—video on Sheba's channel is a short clip released on November 25, the same day Putin met in Novo-Ogaryovo with the mothers of men fighting in and killed in Ukraine.
There he said that their children might have drunk themselves to death, but instead they were killed in war, so their lives were not lived in vain.
It's hard to judge by Putin's standards whether Shoigu's son is wasting his life. On that very day, he released a new video. First we see him in bed:
He checks his phone, gets up, gets dressed. Then for the rest of the video he simply makes himself a smoothie.
At the end—because of course—he once again gives the camera a meaningful look.
Both videos have shamelessly inflated view counts in the tens of thousands, while in reality Sheba has only 600 followers. What can you do—you have to pay for bots; you can't upset a general's son.
Studying Shoigu's son's social media, you can truly immerse yourself in a marvelous parallel world where there is no war, no bombed-out cities, no dead children, no mobilization—and no Shoigu either.
April 15. In Sloviansk, rescuers are clearing the rubble of a five-story apartment building hit by a Russian missile and pulling out the body of a two-year-old child.
On his Instagram, Sheba is, quote, "charging us up with a good mood"—dancing and performing his hit song.
Late June last year—in the final third of the month, Ukraine was being bombed every night: residential buildings, a kindergarten, the shopping mall in Kremenchuk. The very next day, Sheba complains about his terrible workload, not a minute of peace—sports, vocal training, cosmetologist, hairdresser, tanning salon. Apparently he's looking for our sympathy.
And do you know where Shoigu's son went in September, four days before mobilization was announced? To Turkey! On vacation with his music producer.
While Russians—often people his own age—were being snatched off the streets, dragged out of their homes, and sent to slaughter, Sheba was swimming in the sea and relaxing with a massage:
Partying and having the time of his life. Sheba's true vocal abilities are especially noticeable here.
Sheba doesn't need to go before a medical board, he doesn't need deferments or exemptions, and fleeing abroad is not really his style either. He is an elite child—his dad won't let him go to the front. Others will fight in his place.
Here he is in December at the World Cup in Qatar:
And just the other day he was teasing a hot new summer track for us:
He posts stories saying he loves Europe and plans to go there in the summer. If we were him, we wouldn't count on it.
Whatever your political views may be, whatever you think about the opposition or about Navalny. Maybe you sincerely believe all this is the work of Mossad, the CIA, and MI6. But what is this, then? Did the CIA or NATO force Shoigu's offspring to be doing this during wartime?
Which Western intelligence service came up with and planted this Sheba on Shoigu?
They send your children to their deaths without batting an eye. Hiding behind patriotism, defense of the motherland, and the compensation they will hand you for your child's corpse. They say there was no choice. We had to do it, we were forced. But why is there a way out for their own children? Putin says those who died in the war in Ukraine are heroes. But why, instead of also "becoming heroes," are their children doing this?
One is a dressed-up clown, a blogger dumb as a post, teaching us how to lose weight; the other teaches dance and shoots music videos for the charts.
When was the last time you saw Shoigu? Not Sheba—the real one. The defense minister during a war. He almost never appears in public and gives no comments. Did he perhaps make a statement after sabotage groups seized part of the Belgorod region? No. Did he hold a press conference about drones exploding against residential buildings in Moscow? Nope.
Nine months ago, Shoigu last said anything about the Russian army's total losses. Nine months! And he said that 5,937 Russian citizens had been killed in the war.
He's mocking us! What 6,000? Even the most conservative estimates put it at five times higher. To Shoigu and Putin, these are not people—they are numbers, cannon fodder; so what if Russia's male population is dying out, so what if a million have left—they don't care. "Women will give birth to more" (a notorious phrase associated with Soviet-era callousness).
To Putin, the value of a Russian life is zero. Don't deceive yourself, however much you may want to believe in heroic sacrifice and the defense of the motherland. Those dying now while taking part in the criminal war against Ukraine are dying for the dreams of the aging dictator Putin. Don't comfort yourself—or let others comfort themselves—with talk that some red line is about to be crossed and then General Armageddon will finally come and deliver a crushing blow to the "fascists." General Armageddon, Surovikin, is busy buying villas in Sochi for half a billion rubles apiece. Fascists do not exist, just like secret biolabs, weaponized mosquitoes, and saboteur locusts.
Investigations like this help reach people who may support the war or think that things are somehow not so clear-cut. If you know anything about Shoigu's corruption, where he lives, who his new wife is (he and Sheba's mother split up long ago), or how he steals from the Defense Ministry—write to us. Even if it's the smallest, most insignificant detail. We will verify everything, investigate it, prove it, and publish it.
You can contact us via Telegram, through a dedicated website, or by email: blackbox@fbk.info. We will come up with a safe way to receive the information. The main thing is: don't look the other way. Something you know may help convince at least a few people not to go to war, not to kill, and not to die for the palaces and yachts of Putin's elite. And that would already be a great deal.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny!