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.
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