Jean-Pierre won’t say why Hunter Biden-linked Russian oligarchs aren’t sanctioned

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top spokesperson refused to comment Monday on why two Russian billionaires associated with first son Hunter Biden have escaped US sanctions over the year-old war in Ukraine.

The Post asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for an explanation after reporting fresh details last week on the association between the Biden family and oligarchs Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Yelena Baturina.

“Could [you] share the reason why President Biden hasn’t sanctioned the Russian billionaires Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Yelena Baturina?” The Post asked Jean-Pierre at her regular briefing.

“How is he handling the conflict of interest there given his son was a business associate of these two people? And can you confirm that, as sitting vice president, he dined with Baturina in Georgetown?”

“I’m just not speaking to anything that’s related to his son from here,” Jean-Pierre said, adding: “If you want to ask a question about Hunter Biden specifically, I would refer you to his family. And as it relates to any sanctions, I’m not speaking to individual persons from Russia.”

Yevtushenkov and Baturina partnered with Hunter Biden while searching for US property investments while Joe Biden was vice president, according to communications from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and witnesses who spoke with The Post.

Yevtushenkov allegedly expressed interest in courting the powerful political family for reciprocal “favors” and Baturina allegedly dined in 2015 with then-Vice President Joe Biden and a group including other Hunter Biden associates from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

“I think it’s very fishy,” a source with firsthand knowledge of the relationship between Hunter Biden and Yevtushenkov told The Post — noting that the oligarch, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.7 billion, is sanctioned by the UK and Australia but not by the US.

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

Yevtushenkov, whose Sistema business empire until recently included Russian rocket and radar-maker RTI and drone-maker Kronstadt, admitted last year he met with Hunter Biden for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan on March 14, 2012 — but denied any further contact.

However, emails and calendar entries from Hunter’s former laptop show that they were set to meet again on Jan. 27, 2013 for dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano before looking at a commercial real estate development the next day near Dulles International Airport 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. “‘Why are you even doing this? Why would you be paying the son of the vice president to meet at a public restaurant in New York City?’

“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,’” the source continued. “It was a complete quid pro quo that he was going in for.”

“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,” the source recalled of Yevtushenkov, whose holdings also include Russia’s largest cellphone provider, MTS, which faced a long-running US investigation into nearly $1 billion in bribes paid to officials in Uzbekistan between 2004 and 2012.

MTS, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange before trading in its shares was suspended in July 2022, ultimately settled the case with the Trump Justice Department in 2019 and agreed to pay an $850 million fine.

A different source told The Post last week that he vividly recalled Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, looking “like an odd couple” at an intimate April 16, 2015, dinner with Hunter and his father, the then-vice president, more than a year after she allegedly wired $3.5 million to a corporate entity associated with the then-second son.

It previously was uncertain whether Baturina, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.4 billion, and Luzhkov actually attended the dinner at Cafe Milano — the same Georgetown restaurant where Hunter and Yevtushenkov set a date more than two years prior.

“They could have played themselves on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said the source, who attended the dinner and was able to identify the couple in part because he met Luzhkov — who died in 2019 — on several other occasions. (Another source previously told The Post that a pair matching Baturina and Luzhkov’s general appearance was there.)

Luzhkov, who was Moscow’s mayor for 18 years until 2010, “looked a lot older” than Baturina — 27 years her husband’s junior — who “went overboard” on her look and ended up resembling actress Jennifer Coolidge’s comedic portrayal of an insecure heiress in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” the source recalled.

“It was an odd dinner because there was [then-Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim] Massimov, Luzhkov and his wife, and it was not a big table and then there was somebody there from some food charity making a pitch for support,” they added. “I mean, it was, was — it was a little odd, the whole thing.”

In an email at the time, Hunter wrote that the meal would be “ostensibly” about his role a chairman of the World Food Program (WFP) USA.

His father, the sitting vice president, arrived at the dinner and stayed for about 40 minutes, during which time he sat down to eat and posed for a photo with the Kazakhstani group, the second source recalled.

The gathering also featured Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 while his VP dad controlled the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Pozharskyi emailed Hunter the next day to thank him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father” — forming the basis of The Post’s first October 2020 bombshell from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Republican members of Congress say President Biden has conflicts of interest in deciding on sanctions, which his administration has touted as a top mechanism to end the Ukraine war by crippling Russia’s economy.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told The Post last week: “It is clear that Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings with individuals from Russia and China have compromised President Biden and continue to raise conflicts of interest concerns.”

“It is extremely concerning that Biden-linked Russian nationals are avoiding sanctions. If this happened under a Republican White House, the mainstream media would be up in arms,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), whose panel is leading investigations into the Biden family’s overseas influence-peddling, said, “It’s alarming that Hunter Biden’s Russian oligarch pals are missing from the Treasury Department’s public sanctions list of Russian elites and oligarchs.”

Yevtushenko declined to comment though Sistema spokespeople. Baturina did not respond to a request for comment.