I recently shrank my violin to a Planck-length singularity and misplaced it somewhere in the quantum realm after briefly stopping by to graffiti Marjorie Taylor Greene’s brain, so I can’t respond to this story as I ordinarily might. But damn, these are some rarefied Russian tears you’re about to taste.
Elizaveta Peskova, a 24-year-old Russian socialite and daughter of Vladimir Putin’s chief propagandist, Dmitry Peskov, has been caught up in the sanctions dragnet the West has cast over Russia in response to its war of aggression against Ukraine, and she’s having an epic series of sads over her plight.
In a recent interview with Insider, Peskova, who told the media outlet that she’s a self-made woman who was blindsided by the sanctions against her, further stated, “For me, it's totally unfair and unfounded. I was really surprised because it's weird introducing sanctions [on] someone who is 24 years old and has nothing to do with the situation.”
Sure. But what feels even more unfair is being bombed while you’re sheltering with your children in a nonmilitary facility in your own country, which was brutally invaded without provocation. That’s really fucking unfair. And while Peskova may not be directly involved, her father sure is. On the day of Russia’s invasion, Peskov, in his role as Putin’s lead spokesperson, said, “Ideally, Ukraine should be liberated, cleaned from neo-Nazis, from people sharing pro-Nazi sentiment and ideas.”
Of course, if you’ve profited for years from your connections to an increasingly autocratic and kleptocratic regime, it only seems fair that you should take the hit when that regime starts to falter. But it appears that Donald Trump is far from the only oafish authoritarian to have raised clueless, entitled children.
So as Russia continues to bomb itself back into the Stone Age, the people who got rich off Putin’s perfidy are feeling attacked—and, naturally, they’re thinking mostly of themselves.
According to the US, Elizaveta has profited off her family's connections to power. The official announcement of the sanctions against her notes that she has "tens of thousands of followers on social media, where she displays her luxurious lifestyle."
It is unclear how much money she or her father actually have. In 2019, however, The Guardian reported that Peksov's wife had amassed real estate holdings worth more than $10 million. Tatiana Navka, an ice dancer who took home a gold medal at the 2006 Olympics before marrying Peksov in 2015, has also been sanctioned.
Oh, noes! I don’t have access to my ill-gotten lucre! Daddy said this would never happen! No fair!
Of course, Peskova isn’t likely to be hurt nearly as much as your average 18-year-old Russian conscript, but she seems prepared to squeal even louder than they do.
It won't impact her financially, she said — though like other Russians, she has felt the impact of broader sanctions and the country's isolation from the global financial system — but it does mean there will be no more trips to places like New York City, where she remembers visiting Times Square with her father when she was nine. “I'm upset because I would like to travel, and I love different cultures,” she said.
She loves different cultures—and her benefactors love pounding different cultures into rubble with artillery barrages. So I guess it evens out. That said, I’m not going to shed too many tears over her sudden inability to score loge seats for Hamilton. Now, to be fair, on the day Russia invaded, Peskova posted “no to war” on Instagram, but she’s since deleted that post. And she’s also been cagey about the message she intended to send.
“When I say it, I mean that I am for peace, not only in Ukraine but all around the world,” she told Insider. But she refused to go further, noting that she would “not talk about the situation going on—I can only speak about the sanctions and I can only say what I feel and what I think about the sanctions.”
Maria Snegovaya, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, noted that Peskova may actually identify somewhat with the West as a result of her extensive travels to the world’s liberal democracies, but openly siding with democracy would have been untenable for her—unless she wanted the gravy train to completely derail.
"I think that's why the original responses may be antiwar. But then, because they remain the children of Putin's elites, they remain loyal and compliant with Putin's policies," Snegovaya said. “She quickly deleted [her ‘antiwar’ response], probably because her father told her, ‘Hey, what the hell are you doing?’”
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