Instead of the Scheherazade yacht arrested in Italy, Vladimir Putin began using another one — the 72-meter Victoria. The Dossier Center reports this.
The formal owner of the vessel is the Paer company, which Dossier and Layout associate with the oligarch and close friend of the president Gennady Timchenko.
Investigators note that the crew of the yacht consists of people who worked on other ships associated with the president. In addition, as the Dossier Center found out, Victoria is usually located in the waters of the city of Sochi and often visits Cape Idokopas, where the presidential palace from Alexei Navalny’s investigation is located.
Journalists also found photos with Victoria in the background in the account of Alina Kabaeva’s friend Natalya Belugina on VKontakte. Thus, the Dossier Center came to the conclusion that Kabaeva herself, the alleged mistress of the president, can use the ship.
According to investigators, the ship costs at least $50 million and has two separate large bedrooms on board. Construction of the yacht began in 2005 at the Russian military plant Sevmash, which produces submarines. In 2016, when the company closed the production of civil vessels, Victoria was sent to Turkey — to the shipyard of the AES Yachts company. There the yacht was launched.
As the Dossier Center found out, Victoria is the only yacht associated with Putin that leaves Russian territorial waters after February 2022. According to investigators, on October 21, she left Sochi “for the winter” in Tuzla, a remote area of Istanbul located on the shores of the Sea of Marmara. The vessel has been in the Desan hangar since October 26, when its onboard transmitters were turned off.
As investigators note, there are NATO ships at the shipyard next to Victoria, and the Desan company itself has a license to work with military technologies.