A Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars towards Donald Trump Jr.'s three-day wedding in the Bahamas in May, ProPublica reported on 14 September.
Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association, rented one of the two private islands where the party was held, covered the fireworks display and put his staff to work planning the event, according to records and three people familiar with the wedding cited by ProPublica. The money moved through IB Challenger, a Dubai entity the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
Kremlev attended the celebration on 24 May as one of roughly 50 guests. Jared Kushner was another. Eight days before Kushner met Putin in Moscow and then held talks in Kyiv on 6 September as one of two U.S. envoys negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine.
Putin awarded Kremlev the Order of Friendship on 22 April, a month before the wedding. Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council placed him under sanctions on 9 December 2024. Chinese state media recorded him travelling with Putin's delegation to China in the days before he flew to the Bahamas.
The payments
The island where guests slept and the reception was held rents for around $100,000 a night. The company that staged the fireworks charges around $70,000 for a display on that scale. Trump Jr. married the socialite Bettina Anderson on a second private island, in a ceremony of 18 guests that Kremlev did not attend, his spokesperson told ProPublica.
Executives from the Trump family crypto company World Liberty Financial and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital were on the guest list. President Trump was not. Longtime friends of the groom told associates they had not been invited.
The Russian contingent drew attention from other guests, who described a group speaking Russian among themselves. Alexander Lagutin, a businessman who has held senior roles at a Russian defence contractor and a state-backed energy company, had been on the China trip with Kremlev days earlier. Elena Sobol, Kremlev's deputy at the boxing association, attended as well.
Dozens of photographs and videos of the wedding have since been published by the family and by guests. None of them show the Russians, apart from the top of Kremlev's head at the back of one group shot posted to Instagram. On his podcast afterwards, Trump Jr. said of the guest list: "if you're on that list, you weren't talking."
Kremlev's rise
Umar Lutfulloyev changed his surname to Kremlev in 2010, according to the Russian independent outlet Proekt, which reported that he was then in his late twenties with a record for extortion and battery. His press office told ProPublica he has "a completely clean legal record."
He joined the state-backed Night Wolves biker gang and rose to a leadership role, which brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, now head of Putin's presidential security service, Proekt reported. Rubezhnoi intervened personally to install Kremlev at the top of the Russian Boxing Federation in 2017, the outlet reported.
Kremlev took the presidency of the International Boxing Association in 2020, bringing with him tens of millions of dollars in sponsorship from Gazprom, the state-owned gas company. A former board member of the association told ProPublica the arrangement was political: "Umar is guided by Putin."
State favour made Kremlev wealthy. Putin's government made him a dominant player in Russian sports betting and handed one of his companies the national lottery, Proekt reported. He took ownership of Russia's largest car dealership group after the state nationalised it in 2023.
Healthy Fatherland, an organisation run by the twin sister of Kremlev's wife and in which he is heavily involved, sits on Ukraine's sanctions register over its alleged role in taking Ukrainian children from occupied territory and relocating them under the label of rehabilitation.
Olympic expulsion and the U.S. opening
The International Olympic Committee voted on 22 June 2023 to withdraw recognition of the boxing association, citing governance failures and the group's refusal to "transparently explain the sources of its financing." The decision cut the organisation out of the Olympic movement while boxing stayed on the programme for Paris and Los Angeles.
Kremlev wrote an open letter to President Trump after the second inauguration in January 2025, asking him to look into the Olympic committee's conduct ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. In September 2025 the boxing association brought Trump Jr. to Istanbul for a panel discussion alongside Kremlev, Manny Pacquiao and Rasheda Ali. Trump Jr. was not allegedly paid for the appearance.
The association staged a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami in July 2026. U.S. Marshals arrested Andrew Tate, whom the association had brought in to host, outside the arena on a United Kingdom extradition request covering rape and trafficking charges he denies.
Kremlev had told associates he feared becoming the target of a U.S. investigation after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a person close to the association's leadership told ProPublica. He moved much of the body's operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. He has never been placed on a public U.S. sanctions list.
Counterintelligence exposure
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI official who held senior counterintelligence posts, said the arrangement put Trump Jr. in a precarious position. "This should be unthinkable for the son of the president," he said.
Holden Triplett, counterintelligence director on Trump's National Security Council during the first term and a former FBI officer in Moscow, told ProPublica that Russian intelligence routinely works to build ties with U.S. officials and their relatives. "Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access," he said.
Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, arranged after an email offering damaging material on Hillary Clinton as part of Russian government support for his father, became a central thread of Robert Mueller's investigation. The Mueller report found insufficient evidence to charge him.
A spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the payments and said the two men met through a mutual friend in hunting circles. "Umar is a personal friend of Don," he said, adding that there is no business relationship between them.
Kremlev's press office said the two have a friendly relationship dating to "a couple of years ago" and that the boxing association itself incurred no wedding costs. It did not address the payments from the Dubai entity. It claimed Kremlev has never discussed political matters with his U.S. friends and acquaintances, and that he was not part of Putin's official delegation to China.
A spokesperson for Eric Trump said: "Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is."
Kushner, the White House and the Russian government did not respond to reporter's requests for comment.
The boxing association's own press release after the Istanbul panel said the two men had made clear that "this alliance will not remain symbolic" and that more joint initiatives would follow.
