Global Courant 2023-04-30 06:45:22
The trip lasted ten days. The Global Bombardier 6000, registration RA-73550, one of the largest, most luxurious and most expensive private jets on the planet, took off on April 19 from the Nizhny Novgorod airport. It is the Russian city where the writer Maximo Gorky was born. Or, a less transcendental fact, where the stadium is located where the Argentine National Team lost 3-0 against Croatia in the 2018 World Cup. The aircraft circled four times and returned to earth. The reason is unknown. But on the same day, it took off for its first stop at the Sheremetyevo airport, in Moscow, the capital of the nation that, under the regime of Vladimir Putin, went to war against Ukraine, invading part of its territory, a bloody battle that continues. today. Despite this extreme situation, the Bombardier Global Express 6000 resumed a strange, mysterious journey towards a distant land where it is also cold.
El Calafate, Santa Cruz, Argentina. To reach the “place in the world” where Vice President Cristina Kirchner has her favorite residence, the jet had to avoid the airspace of the European Union. It happens that, after the invasion of Ukraine, Russian aircraft are sanctioned if they fly through the eurozone. Next stopover: Mohamed V airport, Casablanca, Morocco. Other: Guarulhos airport, São Paulo, Brazil. A few hours later, he did arrive at his final destination, at least in the first leg of a trip that, in fact, has already ended, but that perhaps has just begun in terms of an investigation that one of the Western powers may initiate in this regard. .
The Global Express Bombardier 6000, RA-73550, landed at the “Comandante Armando Trola” airport on April 22. Three days after takeoff from Russia. Long hours to suffer or enjoy the wide spaces in which a person can stand, the leather armchairs, the almost rooms divided into three rooms, and the three bathrooms with which the jet was equipped, which immediately attracted attention in the south. austral argentino
Migrations, customs. Clarín accessed the list of passengers on that flight, which had raised suspicions, intrigues, and a request for information from government deputies. The confirmation of who traveled from so far for such a short time caused a commotion in spheres of power linked to or that analyze and are aware of Putin’s spheres of power. The Global Bombardier Express 6000 brought to the country one of the most trusted men of the eternal Russian president, one of the members of the so-called “oligarchy” of that Nation, the banker and former diplomat Andrey Kostin, director of the second financial institution of your country, VTB Bank. He is a political cadre with a long career in the Kremlin, linked to the world of international relations, espionage, and denounced as corrupt by the most tenacious opponent of the Russian ruling party, Alekséi Navalny. Kostin has lived under the threat of being sanctioned by the United States since 2018, a time when his friend Putin invaded the Crimean peninsula, the first advance on Ukrainian territory that later deepened even more.
Kostin suffered the freezing of his assets ordered by the United Kingdom, where he once worked as a diplomat with a secret service that knew what an intelligence agent should never know: fame. And, since the war against Ukraine was already total, he also entered a list of Putin-allied oligarchs who can be sanctioned according to his acts by the entire European Union and also by the Government of Ukraine.
Kostin is considered one of the richest men in Russia, which shows how wealthy he can be because he is part of the billionaires who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, were awarded positions and shares of companies before totally state. Kostin is, like his boss and friend of his Putin, a man of character who would never show the shameful feeling of fear. When his government was accused of favoring the American Donald Trump with hacking and cyber schemes in the elections that brought the other billionaire to the White House, he declared that the bank he runs “never” engaged in illegal profits that could have helped build a “Trump Tower” in Russia. At the 2018 Davos Forum, recently sanctioned by the West, Kostin was stubborn in Putin’s defense: “They want to start an economic war on us to change our president.”
Why did a banker and friend of Vladimir Putin who is so important to the Kremlin, since the VTB finances a large part of his country’s government actions, travel as he did to El Calafate and later to Buenos Aires?
In El Calafate, according to this newspaper, Kostin visited the Perito Moreno glacier with two of his children, Diana Kostina and Kriril Kostin; his partner, the also controversial journalist Nailya Asker Zade; and also together with another passenger on the flight suspected of the countries that sanctioned the VTB banker, the director of the Igor Kurchatov Institute, Raisa Kuznetzova. This organism is considered the most important of those that study nuclear energy in Russia.
Those who walked with them on the Patagonian ice added up to around twelve people from a homogeneous group, sources familiar with that tourist visit told Clarín, the only one known to have been a plane trip that lasted, as was said, ten days.
Ten days for a glacier hike?
Kostin amassed a fortune of such magnitude that he could be the protagonist of such an adventurous eccentricity. Traveling in the Bombardier Global 6000 is not the same as traveling in the first class of an airliner. But ten days are ten days.
What was nuclear energy researcher Kutnezova doing on the flight?
Why did the jet make a direct stopover in El Calafate and not in Buenos Aires, the city it flew to after its passengers, and crew, spent only one night on the ground after the long flight from Moscow?
The intrigues increase since new information about this plot is known.
The Bombardier Global Express 6000 left El Calafate airport on April 23. It arrived at Ezeiza and, immediately, only its crew went directly to Asunción del Paraguay to stock up on fuel.
The companies that could have loaded gasoline on the Russian jet in Argentina would not have even been consulted to see if they fulfilled that function or not. Its headquarters, located in Europe or the United States, would be sanctioned on the spot because one of its passengers was Kostin, since the plane is also supposed to be owned by the Russian company AirCompany Rus Jet.
In Paraguay only one of the pilots landed. He asked to use a bathroom. The jet has three. Human reasons, boredom, or another matter, now difficult to reconstruct.
The mystery plane left Argentina on April 25. He made a three-day stopover in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Perhaps there the passengers returned to tourism. This time, sand and sea. It is unknown. The jet left on the 28th for San Pablo. That same day, after a 9:16 flight, he made a stopover, again, in Casablanca. The aircraft, and its politicized crew denounced for corruption in the main media on the planet, this time took 8:31 to arrive in Moscow. In Buenos Aires it was a spring noon.
Where did Kostin sleep in El Calafate? Five star hotel. Not from the Kirchners, said qualified sources in this regard.
And what did Kostin do in the Federal Capital?
The Russian embassy should have been informed about his visit to the country, clarified sources who know how the Russian oligarchs move around the world and how is the link with their diplomatic headquarters.
The National Government did nothing regarding Kostin and the jet that brought him to the south of the world because it is not governed by the sanctions that all of Europe, and some NATO member countries, such as Japan, or New Zealand, do take into account to stop or study what Putin’s millionaire financiers are doing. No Latin American country sanctions those sanctioned elsewhere because of their link to Russia’s irrational war against Ukraine.
Kostin, as mentioned, traveled with his unofficial partner, Russian regime propagandist journalist Nailya Asker Zade. It is not a minor fact. On the contrary.
Putin’s opponent, Alekséi Navalny, a denouncer of government corruption in his country, accused Kostin of having used money from the bank he runs, the VTB, mostly state-owned, to give Asker Zade an apartment and a mansion in Moscow from 6 million dollars. To which he added other very expensive gifts: one is a 62-meter-long yacht. The others, maybe it’s coincidence, maybe not, already in Navalny’s textual sayings: “Flights in a Bombardier 6000 jet”, which Kostin would have obtained, in reality, buying it through the bank accounts he runs.
That ship has a market price of 60 million dollars.
Navalny was poisoned a little less than a year after making that complaint, and others against Putin. Unknown people managed to make him drink tea with a potion that could have caused his death.
What was the mission of the Russian plane that passed almost low over Argentina?
Tourism? What was an expert in nuclear energy doing on the trip?
Opponents of Putin from various nations often warn that flights similar to Kostin’s are used by the Russian government to finance allied countries with cash, or to transfer espionage experts or machines that are used to hack state software.
Those accusations are from Putin’s opponents and could never, ever be proven. No way.
Two opposition deputies, Hernán Lombardi and Ricardo López Murphy, sent a letter to the National Government to clear up several questions about the Russian flight that, it is now known, brought to the country an oligarch close to Putin sanctioned throughout Europe, the United States United States and other powers not only from the West, but from Asia, for example.
Lombardi told Clarín that he hoped that “everything has to come to light. The Government hides information from us and acts with dangerous complicity. They must respond and report.”
The Russian opponent who denounced Kostin, Navalny, lives in prison today after being accused of crimes that he swears he did not commit. From his cell, his voice continues to rise against the Putin regime, against Kostin, whom, locked up and all, he continues to bother.
