Wines linked to Putin and Patriarch Kirill enter U.S. tasting contest in San Francisco, brought in personal luggage by Kovalchuk aide

Sanctions risks

Although the wineries near Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik are not themselves on sanctions lists, numerous investigations have documented their personal links to Putin. Outlets including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Meduza, and Important Stories have shown that employees of more than 80 companies linked to Putin use email addresses on the LLCInvest.ru domain. These include managers of Lazurnaya Yagoda LLC (which owns Krinitsa’s vineyards), managers of the winery’s nominal owner (the nonprofit Development of Agrarian Initiatives), as well as employees of the Igora ski resort and of Putin’s residence in Russia’s Novgorod Region.

As Proekt previously reported, since 2020 Ekaterina Golovacheva — a cousin of former Olympic gymnast and lawmaker Alina Kabaeva, who reportedly bore Putin two sons — has worked at Divnomorye JSC and Axis Investments JSC, companies tied to Usadba Divnomorskoye. Until 2018, Golovacheva sat on the board of Kabaeva’s charitable foundation and worked as her aide when Kabaeva was a State Duma deputy.

Mayorov’s own statements indicate that Tasting Alliance, the U.S.-based organizer of the competition, was aware of the legal risks but provided correspondence intended to facilitate the import of the wines into the United States. Both Mayorov and Tasting Alliance may have violated multiple sanctions:

• Executive Order 14068, issued March 11, 2022, bans the import of Russian alcoholic beverages into the United States.
  
  
• Executive Order 13685, issued Dec. 19, 2014, prohibits the import into the United States of any goods from Crimea.
  
  
• Mriya Resort & SPA, the legal entity linked to the Winepark winery, was added to the U.S. sanctions list on Nov. 8, 2018, under Executive Order 13685.
  
  

At the time of publication, the competition organizers had not responded to inquiries from The Insider.

Mayorov, Kovalchuk, and the winemakers’ association

Pavel Andreyevich Mayorov was born in 1984 in Krasnodar. He later studied in the United States as an exchange student. In 2006, he graduated from the law faculty of Kuban State Agrarian University, worked as a senior lawyer at a law firm and later as managing partner of his own consulting group. In 2018 he became head of a regional development institute, the Krasnodar Region Development Corporation.

Media reports suggest personal connections may have helped his rise. Registered at the same address as Mayorov — on Rozhdestvenskaya Embankment in Krasnodar — was Alexander Mishustin, who from 2012 to 2016 served as deputy head of the administration of the Moldovskoye rural district in Sochi. Mishustin is also listed on Mayorov’s auto insurance policy.

According to media reports, in 2020 Mayorov created what he called the National Agency for the Marketing of Russian Wine, according to media reports. However, no legal entity under that name exists. The trademark “NAM of Russian Wine” is owned by Vinologiya LLC (ООО «Винология»), whose sole beneficiary is Mayorov. Vinologiya’s director, Vitaly Ganeev, is listed as a founder of three pro-government youth organizations in Krasnodar: Region 93, the Russian Youth Union, and the Kuban Youth Union.

The agency is patronized by Mikhail Kovalchuk, the brother of financier Yuri Kovalchuk, often referred to as “Putin’s personal banker.” The Kurchatov Institute National Research Center, which Mikhail Kovalchuk heads, is listed as a founder of the agency on its website.