The Epstein Files and Russiagate

Great essay by Seva Gunitsky (h/t Philip Koop) about what the Epstein scandal is really about:

It should not be surprising that Russian names are all over the files. In many ways Russia pioneered the modern transnational kleptocratic class when Soviet state assets were liquidated and intelligence officers became freelancers. The collapse created new oligarchs but also a global template.

The men who emerged from Russian bespredel built fortunes by moving money across jurisdictions, leveraging kompromat, and treating governments as service providers instead of sovereigns. In this they were enabled by willing partners in the West, who provided shell companies, anonymous LLCs, and real estate loopholes. As Casey Michel has documented in American Kleptocracy, the US was not a victim of this corruption but built the framework enabling it.

Jeffrey Epstein appeared to understand this world intuitively. He brokered connections across the worlds of Israeli intelligence, Gulf royals, European politicians, and the Russian state. One of his most frequent contacts was Sergey Belyakov, an FSB officer to whom Epstein provided expertise in tax havens and sanctions evasion; the Kremlin received help placing agents in the U.S. and access to American targets of interest.

Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, another recurring contact, went to Epstein for advice on handling Trump. “Churkin was great,” Epstein wrote in June 2018. “He understood Trump after our conversations. It is not complex.” This was sent weeks before the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit. Epstein also pushed to meet Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, telling Norway’s former prime minister and frequent intermediary Thorbjorn Jagland: “I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me.”1

As we’ve known for a while, a lot of the Russiagate stuff, despite being labeled cringe lib paranoia (e.g. Manafort working directly with Kilimnik) turned out to be completely true. I’ve had an interest in this subject for some time, arguing back in 2017 that the collusion was a byproduct of long-standing financial schemes where the protagonist was not Putin but the money itself. At a certain point it began to feel like shouting into the void.

People got so burned out on the overhyped effects of Russian Facebook trolls that they forgot the source of the problem, as usual, is not anonymous shitposters but the people in charge. . . .

The files highlight connections that span decades and resurface in unexpected places. In a 2019 email Epstein flagged a “coincidence”. The Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for more than twice what Trump paid for it four years earlier; Rybolovlev never occupied the property before demolishing it. He was the same man who sold a da Vinci painting to Saudi Arabia’s MBS for $450 million, a price Epstein claimed was absurdly inflated. Epstein noted that Rybolovlev “knows all.”

Last year, Rybolovlev appeared as part of Russia’s delegation in the Ukraine peace talks held in Riyadh, sitting across from Trump’s team.

Just to be clear: the same man involved in laundering money through a Trump real estate deal is now helping to negotiate the end of Europe’s largest war. One of the most spiritually exhausting elements of current events is that it’s impossible to discuss such things without sounding like a conspiratorial lunatic, but here we are.

Here we are.

Bespredel (беспредел) is a powerful Russian slang term meaning total lawlessness, a complete breakdown of order, or going beyond all limits (moral, legal, or social), often implying arbitrary and extreme behavior, especially within criminal or corrupt systems, becoming prominent in post-Soviet chaos. It literally means “without limits” (from bes- “without” + predel “limit”) and signifies a state where rules, ethics, and boundaries cease to exist, leading to chaos or unchecked power.

See also the distinction between the normative and prerogative states in analyses of totalitarian social breakdown.