5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Want to Understand Russia? Visit Dubai.
Iosif Prigozhin, a Russian music producer, scrolled to the bottom of the contacts app on one of his iPhones and showed me the tally of entries: 11,801.
He and his wife, the pop star known as Valeriya, 'know everyone,' he told me. That includes the 'generals and criminals' who once harmoniously shared a table at a concert of hers in Crimea.
'That's Russia, my friend,' Mr. Prighozin said.
We were tucking into chicken and sea bass on the 25th floor of the skyscraper-resort in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where Mr. Prighozin and Valeriya own two apartments. There was a three-story 'longevity hub' somewhere above us and a 'global street food' spot through a tunnel of faux graffiti somewhere below us. Later, on the pool deck, suspended between two skyscrapers and 300 feet above vast roads and malls and building sites, Valeriya lip-synced for Instagram.
You can learn a lot about Russia by coming to Dubai, which hasn't joined the West's sanctions against Russia and has replaced London and Switzerland as a refuge of choice for Moscow's wealthy. Here you will find Russian elites who never imagined that their president, Vladimir V. Putin, would invade Ukraine — and then found themselves too enmeshed in Mr. Putin's system to abandon him.
Mr. Prigozhin — no relation to his assassinated acquaintance, the mutineer Yevgeny V. Prigozhin — is one of them, a fast-talking attention magnet whose celebrity straddles politics and pop culture in Russia. I'd been curious to talk to him for two years, ever since a recording turned up online of his purported call with a former Russian senator in which both men are heard slamming Mr. Putin.
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