Yes, it’s my column in *The Times*, published last week.
If there are any such refined and sophisticated readers here who subscribe to The Times and can read in “Amerenglish,” then you can find the article here.
Normal people Everyone else can read the translation on InoSMI.
The general point is this: the Brits need to ask more questions about the origin and legitimacy of the money belonging to this whole oligarch thug crowd that has settled in London.
If, for example, Usmanov and Abramovich built their businesses in such a way that they paid hundred-million-dollar bribes to Shuvalov and kept a whole host of other officials on the payroll, then we, the citizens of Russia, should regard their money as illegally obtained and laundered through investments in Britain.
And British subjects, in my view, ought to remember how the money invested in football clubs and houses in Belgravia is actually earned.
Alongside the "Magnitsky Act," what we need is not even a broad opposition initiative, but a nationwide one addressed to the authorities of Russia, the EU, and the US. I would call it "Compulsory Patriotism."
Of course, someone like Pavel Karpov should be denied a Schengen visa.
But it is far more important to do the same to those involved in corruption (Abramovich, Usmanov) or in carrying out media censorship (Ernst, Dobrodeyev).
If Abramovich is robbing all of us, then let him vacation not in Sardinia but in the Moscow suburbs; there are beautiful places there too.
Why should Ernst go to the Venice Biennale when the magnificent buildings of luxury hotels in the North Caucasus Resorts are about to soar skyward?
Why should “journalist” Vladimir Solovyov wear out his gastric balloon jogging around the villa he bought on Italy’s Lake Como?
After all, Solovyov earns his money from paid propaganda pieces here, on home soil, so let him do his running here too.
In Maryino (a district of Moscow), I’ve got a park with an excellent view of an oil refinery. The balloon would love it.
The EU, Britain, and the US all have laws against “foreign corrupt officials”; we need to find ways to apply them actively against our own corrupt people.
P.S.
Tom Cruise in the upper-left corner of the photo has nothing to do with my article. Sadly.