Even before the U.K. issued sanctions against Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich Thursday, he was on the figurative run, trying to sell off his Chelsea Football Club and his 15-bedroom mansion near Kensington Palace, and reportedly sending his Boeing jet and two mega-yachts to places where they can’t be seized.
Unfortunately for Abramovich’s jet-set ex-wife, Dasha Zhukova, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also put her in the hot seat — even as she has long enjoyed friendships with Ivanka Trump, Karlie Kloss and other powerful people in elite circles in art, fashion, Hollywood and high society.
The Russian-born art collector, who reportedly attended Donald Trump’s inauguration at Ivanka’s invitation, has repeatedly had to answer questions about the $92 million in New York City property that Abramovich transferred to her in 2018. She’s also tried hard to distance herself from her ex-husband, who’s worth about $12 billion, enjoys close ties to Vladimir Putin and has been listed as one of Putin’s chief “enablers” by Alexei Navalny.
“As Russia has become an international pariah, it’s meant a huge shift of fortune for Zhukova,” a new Vanity Fair report said Thursday.
Just a week before the invasion, Zhukova was seen enjoying an “intimate dinner” with her good friends Kloss and Wendi Deng, the ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, at “a Greenwich Village hotspot” during New York Fashion Week, Vogue reported.
But several days after Russia’s invasion, Zhukova, 40, had to issue a statement to the New York Post for a story it published about oligarchs’ real estate holdings in Manhattan and the Upper East Side property Abramovich transferred to her. The holdings consist of a set of historic townhouses that Abramovich had begun combining into a single mega-mansion that was once derided as “a whole new level of egregious consumption.”
Zhukova, who shares two children with Abramovich, told the New York Post and other outlets that the transfer was part of their divorce settlement. She also condemned the “brutal and horrific invasion,” telling the New York Post: “As someone born in Russia, I unequivocally condemn these acts of war, and I stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people as well as with the millions of Russians who feel the same way.”
A representative for Zhukova also issued a statement to the New York Times for its report on how Abramovich’s “billions and his Kremlin connections secured him favors and elite status in the West.” The statement insisted that “Dasha has moved on with her life and is happily remarried.”
But Putin’s attack on a democratic neighbor has created uncertainty for Zhukova’s main achievement as an art-world luminary, Vanity Fair reported. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the gleaming institution Zhukova and Abramovich co-founded in 2008, announced that it would halt work on exhibitions “until the human and political tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine has ceased.”
Such statements from Zhukova and her museum may not alleviate concerns that she, like other relatives of Russia’s oligarchs, have enjoyed lavish lifestyles made possible by Putin’s associates, who used their connections to him to “pillage the Russian state” and enrich themselves and their families, as the U.S. Treasury Department has said.
The Post said Zhukova declined to comment on whether or not she agrees that family members of sanctioned oligarchs should also “be deprived of illicit wealth and its accouterments — property, yachts, art, jets and jewels — obtained and retained thanks to direct ties to dirty deals and dictators.”
Another issue with Zhukova is that Abramovich isn’t the first oligarch in her life. Her father is oil tycoon Alexander Zhukov, according to Elle and Vanity Fair. Zhukova’s parents divorced when she was young; she grew up in California with her molecular biologist mother, Yelena, and attended UC Santa Barbara.
But even with her mostly American upbringing, Zhukova still comes “from a family that’s tied up in the explosion of wealth created by the demise of the Soviet Union and a free market economy (shaped by) brute force and cronyism,” Vanity Fair said.
When Zhukova was young, she “spent her time floating around prestigious American universities and cruising on the yachts of the high society,” Elle reported. She also didn’t know much about art, but that apparently changed around the time she met Abramovich on one of those yachts, Elle added.
By 2008, she had become famous, known as “an art-world It Girl” because of her “billionaire, art-collecting boyfriend,” the New York Times reported at the time.
As Abramovich’s “muse,” Zhukova likely helped him spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy iconic art works by Edvard Munch, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and others. While she was with Abramovich, Zhukova also landed prestigious appointments to the boards of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Indeed, in a 2009 report about LACMA’s appointment of Zhukova, Time magazine speculated that her main contribution to the museum would be to help it gain “a pipeline” to Abramovich and his “zillionaire” wealth.
But the way the couple went about buying art struck one New York art world figure as “a trophy approach to collecting,” the New York Times said. Abramovich and Zhukova also ruffled feathers in New York in 2013 when he docked his $500 million, 533-foot yacht Eclipse on the Hudson River, with Zhukova giving birth to their daughter, Leah Lou, at a local hospital several months later, Forbes reported. While there were jokes about Leah being an “anchor baby,” she would have had citizenship in any case because Zhukova has a U.S. passport, Forbes said.
A few years later, Abramovich’s extravagance irked the Historic Districts Council, a New York advocacy group, because of his plans to combine three of four of his townhouses on East 75th street into what was called an “urban castle.” Its 19,000 square feet would include an elevator, a pool, a new glass-and-bronze rear facade and an “art room.”
Meanwhile, if anyone’s interested in the MASSIVE single-family home #RomanAbramovich is building on #NYC’s UES, well, here’s his 4-homes-into-1 monstrosity. Will be the largest apartment in NYC; #JeffreyEpstein just rolled over in hell
#russia #oligarch pic.twitter.com/gX5fWMELRR
— NYC Sights Sounds (@NYCSightsSounds) February 24, 2022
Abramovich’s art-world philanthropy and efforts to make VIP friends in the West may have been ways he tried to “launder his reputation in the West,” according to Thomas Graham, a Russia scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, interviewed by the New York Times. But Abramovich’s extravagance no doubt contributed to Zhukova’s celebrity.
Zhukova’s VIP friends came to include Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; and Josh Kushner, Jared’s brother, and Josh’s model wife, Karlie Kloss. Over the past decade, coverage of the Met Gala and other society events, as well as Zhukova’s yacht vacations, showed her socializing with Wendi Deng, Anna Wintour, Gwen Stefani, David Geffen, Kate Hudson, Demi Moore, Charlotte Casiraghi, Stella McCartney and even Jennifer Lopez,
Zhukova and Abramovich separated in 2017 and divorced in 2019, and she has since married another billionaire, Stavros Niarchos, heir to a Greek shipping fortune. Kloss, Hudson, Orlando Bloom, Gayle King and Princess Beatrice were among the guests at Zhukova and Niarchos’ $6.5 million wedding in St. Moritz, Switzerland in 2020, Vanity Fair reported.
But Russia’s invasion may make it hard for Zhukova to move on in the court of public opinion. Multiple news reports have reported on her New York property transfer from Abramovich. The Treasury Department also has raised concerns that sanctioned oligarchs and other Russian elites have been using family members to move assets and to conceal their wealth, NBC News reported. (The U.S. has yet to add Abramovich to its list of sanctioned oligarchs.)
The New York Post said that Abramovich transferred the New York townhouses to Zhukova, “shortly before an earlier sanctions were issued in 2018.” Zhukova, meanwhile, has insisted that there wasn’t anything nefarious about the transaction, telling the New York Daily News that she and Abramovich separated in 2016 and the townhouses were transferred “in accordance with the judgment of divorce.”
This story has been updated.
