Who is Umar Kremlev, the Russian magnate who paid for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding festivities?

The U.S. nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica has revealed that Umar Kremlev, a 43-year-old Russian businessman with close ties to the Kremlin, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations last May, and that another contractor for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Alexander Lagutin, was also invited to the event. Only one photo taken by a guest fleetingly shows Kremlev’s presence at the event, just days after both men accompanied Vladimir Putin on a trip to China.

“Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr. maintain a friendship,” the Russian businessman’s press office said in a statement after the story broke. “They met a couple of years earlier” and “Kremlev has never discussed politics with his American friends and acquaintances,” the statement added.

Trump Jr.’s wife, Bettina Trump, posted on Instagram that it was “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift” and that the Russian businessman’s money did not finance the event. “It’s unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they come from,” she lamented.

In 2019 the businessman changed his surname from Lutfulloyev to Kremlev. By then his record already included two convictions for assault and extortion. After quitting professional boxing at 19, he began working as a promoter in the 2010s and joined the Night Wolves motorcycle gang in 2013. A year later, in 2014, that group — acting on orders from Russia’s security services — swept into the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea alongside Russian troops, who were not wearing insignia, to force its annexation by Moscow under the guise of a civilian movement.

Umar Kremlev has been secretary general of the Russian Boxing Federation since 2017, a post he obtained with the backing of Putin’s security services, and president of the International Boxing Association since 2020. After taking office he signed a multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the Kremlin’s gas monopoly, which Putin has used to extend his soft power across Europe in recent decades.

Three years later, in 2023, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended the boxing association for “failing to credibly explain its funding sources and to disclose its full structure.” With Donald Trump’s return to power in January 2025, Kremlev saw an opening to pressure the IOC ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Under his leadership the Russian Boxing Federation received a deluge of money from the betting sector, a business the oligarch has monopolized with Putin’s backing. In 2021 the Russian president signed a decree naming TSUPIS, a company owned by Kremlev, as the sole betting operator under the pretext of fighting fraud. A year earlier the businessman had taken control of three major Russian betting houses — Fonbet, Liga Stavok and Pari — with the support of banker and Putin ally Andrei Kostin, owner of VTB, an institution that funds many of the Kremlin’s shadow projects. With control of TSUPIS in Kremlov’s hands, the other betting firms had to go through his operation.

Another of Kremlev’s businesses is the Rolf car dealership chain, handed to him by the Kremlin after it was confiscated from former deputy Sergei Petrov. Petrov had allegedly made the “mistake” of voting against some Kremlin laws, including those that increased the powers of the security agencies and that banned organizations in receipt of U.S. funds.

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