After Russian President Vladimir Putin reunited with his Jewish high school teacher on an official visit to Israel in 2005, he bought the elderly widow an apartment in Tel Aviv.
And newly uncovered financial records reveal that the funds for the $208,000 apartment came from a bank account in Cyprus belonging to Russian Jewish billionaire Roman Abramovich.
The reports were published on Sunday as part of a collaboration between Israeli investigative outlet Shomrim, the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner’s widely circulated story was based on an interview that the former teacher gave to an Israeli news outlet in 2014. At the time, Putin was facing international rebuke over his invasion of Crimea, but she had nothing but praise for him.
A company controlled by Abramovich transferred $245,000 to Yuditskaya-Berliner on the same day she purchased the apartment, documents show.
The discovery of the transaction is notable because it undermines denials by both Abramovich and Putin that the two are financially linked and is likely to bolster suspicions that Abramovich’s ascent to the top of Russia’s business world indebted him to the country’s ruler.
Abramovich is currently under United Kingdom and European Union sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs, enacted in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last February to target his wealth abroad and penalize his associates.
Records of the transaction are part of a trove obtained by the nonprofit group Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared with journalists at several outlets, including Shomrim’s Uri Blau, Greg Miller with the Washington Post, and Spencer Woodman of ICIJ.
Asked to respond to questions, a spokesperson for Putin referred reporters to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia and said the organization would have been responsible for “any charitable work in Israel.”
Through his own spokesperson, Abramovich said he donated the funds for the apartment but not at Putin’s request.
The gift was made in response to “a request received from the Jewish community,” the spokesperson said. Abramovich amassed his wealth by buying state assets on the cheap after the fall of the Soviet Union and has used his fortune, estimated at as much as $13 billion, to become a major philanthropist.
He says he has donated more than half a billion dollars to Jewish causes, including to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
Yuditskaya-Berliner died in 2017 at 96. In her will, she instructed that her apartment be given to the Russian government.
