Hunter Biden-linked Russian oligarchs spared in 500-name sanctions list

WASHINGTON — Two Russian billionaire pals of Hunter Biden were again spared from being hit by financial sanctions as President Biden announced his latest round of penalties on numerous Vladimir Putin-connected people Friday, the Post has learned.

Though some 500 Russian oligarchs, companies and third-country sanctions evaders were hit, real estate developer Yelena Baturina and Vladimir Yevtushenkov again skated free of winding up on the list.

The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment and has not offered explanation in the past as the pair dodged earlier rounds of sanctions.

The omissions have attracted the attention of House Republicans leading an impeachment inquiry into the president’s links to his relatives’ foreign business dealings.

Baturina, the widow of late Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, built her $1.3 billion fortune through real estate and investments and dined with Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Joe Biden at least once at DC’s Café Milano.

For reasons that remain unclear, she transferred $3.5 million in February 2014 to a firm controlled by Hunter and his associate Devon Archer.

Archer told Congress in July that he wasn’t sure of the reason for the transfer, but bank records show that more than $2.75 million of it was transferred to another corporate entity, which Archer said that he and Hunter Biden jointly owned.

Archer testified that Baturina separately invested nearly $120 million with his company Rosemont Realty, with which Hunter Biden also was briefly associated.

Baturina attended a dinner with then-Vice President Biden and Hunter’s Kazakhstani associates in spring 2014 at Café Milano, Archer told Congress.

She also allegedly attended an April 2015 dinner at the same restaurant with Joe and Hunter Biden and the then-second son’s Ukrainian and Kazakhstani patrons, an eyewitness told The Post, corroborating emails about the dinner from Hunter’s abandoned laptop.

Hunter met at least twice with Yevtushenkov, according to records from his laptop.

Yevtushenkov’s sprawling business empire, Sistema, owns Russia’s largest cellphone provider, MTS, and until 2022 also owned Russian rocket and radar-maker RTI and military drone-maker Kronstadt.

Yevtushenkov is believed to be worth about $1.7 billion and in 2022 reduced his ownership in Sistema to 49.2% — apparently in response to UK sanctions — by giving his son Feliz 10% of the company.

“I think he should be sanctioned,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told The Post last year. “I don’t understand why he has not been.”

Yevtushenkov allegedly sought to work with Hunter Biden due to a Justice Department investigation of MTS for paying nearly $1 billion in bribes to Uzbekistani officials between 2004 and 2012.

Yevtushenkov acknowledged meeting Hunter Biden at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan in March 2012 and laptop records indicate they met again in January 2013 at DC’s Cafe Milano — the same restaurant where Joe Biden allegedly attended other oligarch gatherings — before looking at a commercial real estate development the next day in northern Virginia.

“I asked [Yevtushenkov], ‘Why are you doing this?’ on the front end — before I understood that they were going to buy some real estate,” a source told The Post.

“He made it very clear to me that, you know … ‘I think it would be good to have a good relationship with this guy … maybe he can do a favor for us and we can do a favor for him… I told him that’s not the way it works in America, [but] he basically laughed at me and told me I was so naïve.”

MTS ultimately settled the Uzbekistan corruption case with the Trump Justice Department in 2019 and paid an $850 million fine.