HOW VLAD FUNDS RUDY, DONALD, JOHN SOLOMON...:

U.S. prosecutors said in court on Tuesday that Lev Parnas, an associate of U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, received a $1 million payment from Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash.

Dmytro Firtash is usually described as a Ukrainian oligarch with admitted ties to organized crime, but he is much more than that. He has direct ties to Russia, and to President Vladimir Putin in particular, and those have only grown since he was arrested five years ago, awaiting extradition to the United States.

Now Firtash is at the nexus of Trump and Rudy Giuliani's effort to undermine the president's enemies -- and behind Firtash is a whole lot of Russian money and cover. [...]

Firtash was arrested in Austria in 2014, and has been fighting extradition to the US ever since. He swiftly posted 125 million euros ($140 million) in bail and promised not to leave the country. The bail was the highest ever paid in Austria -- and he got the funds to cover it via a loan from Russian billionaire Vasily Anisimov, who made his money in metals before switching to property development. Anisimov owns the luxury grounds on which a number of wealthy, well-connected Russian men have built their homes, including Putin's childhood friend, billionaire Arkady Rotenberg. Anisimov also heads Russia's Judo Federation -- Putin often awards his associates plum spots on Russia's sports leagues, and judo is his favorite of them all. Anisimov told Reuters, in a massive investigation into Firtash's Russia ties, that the loan "was a purely business transaction."

Why the interest from Russia? As one former US official who closely followed Firtash's case put it: "He knows where all the bodies are buried."

Firtash built himself up to become a key player in the tug-of-war between Russia and Ukraine. In a State Department cable written in 2008 and publicized in a dump by WikiLeaks, then-ambassador Bill Taylor -- who would go on to give explosive testimony in the impeachment inquiry this week -- wrote up a meeting with Firtash and said, "he acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich's approval to get into business in the first place." Mogilevich, one of Russia's most powerful organized crime figures and listed as most wanted by the FBI, lives freely in Moscow, under cover of the Kremlin.

When people talk about Russia being a "mafia state," this is sort of what they mean -- if the mob ran wild in the post-Soviet 1990s, in Putin's era it has been co-opted, and some of its tactics absorbed and deployed by the state. Subsequent court documents filed in the US called Firtash and his associate Andras Knopp -- now also living freely in Moscow -- "two upper-echelon associates of Russian organized crime."

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