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Bette Dangerous Profile picture
@Heidi_Cuda
Feb 22, 2024 • 35 tweets • 18 min read • Read on X
Scrolly
Ethane — the company that paid @SpeakerJohnson — was majority owned by three Russian nationals: Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev.
We know Konstantin Nikolaev
financed Russian spy Butina.

theguardian.com/world/2018/aug…
Konstantin Nikolaev also co-owns a large Russian ammunition producing company — supplying massive amounts of ammunition to kill Ukrainians.

—@OCCRP 2018 archivesoccrp.org/en/investigati…
In 2010, Nikolaev became co-owner of Promtechnologii, the company that controlled Orsis, a major rifle company based in Moscow… Meanwhile, Promtechnologii was expanding. In 2012, the company acquired a share in two ammunition factories in Tula and Ulyanovsk.—@occrp 2018 archives
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@OCCRP Nikolaev keeps it in the family — his wife Svetlana sits on the boards of his weapons and ammo companies. And everyone is frens with Putin.


Source: @MomsDemand 2018 archives momsdemandaction.org/new-ties-emerg…

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@OCCRP @MomsDemand So just a reminder in 2018 @SpeakerJohnson was among the politicians exposed for taking bad cash from a Russian arms and ammunition dealer under US sanctions.

And now this US Putinist is preventing aid to Ukraine—denying soldiers the ammunition it needs to fight Russian invaders
@OCCRP @MomsDemand @SpeakerJohnson Where does it say in the Bible thou shalt side with the Russian billionaire invaders who make the ammunition that kills people trying to defend their land… it doesn’t. Image
So as noted in the first tweet at the top, Nikolaev is a major stockholder of ‘American’ Ethane along with fellow Russians Andrey Kunatbaev and Mikhail Yuryev. Let’s take a closer look at their BVI offshore shell company Hewmart Products:

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As noted, Nikolaev is a family man:

“Nikolaev’s son Andrey, who is studying in US, volunteered in the 2016 campaign in support of Trump’s candidacy..Nikolaev was spotted at the Trump International Hotel in DC during Trump’s inauguration.—@politico 2018

eenews.net/articles/u-s-e…
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@politico 🤪🪆💨 Image
Meanwhile, back to Mikhail Yuryev, who died at the ripe oligarch age of 59:

“In 2018 Yuryev founded the American Ethane Company with Alexander Voloshin, FORMER KREMLIN CHIEF OF STAFF.

Later, Yuryev hosted several political talk shows on RSN and Komsomolskaya Pravda stations.” Image
“American Ethane has also been represented by Sander Resources and Barbour Griffith & Rogers.”—@politico 2018 archives

Same Barbour Griffith that’s been talking scratch from Russian mob since back in the day.
@politico ‘American’ Ethane’s OGs— Abramovich and Abramov

“In 2014, a Moscow-based company called LLC Alternative, controlled by Russian billionaires Roman Abramovich and Alexander Abramov, owned just under 50% of American Ethane, according to a NOLA lawsuit docs.”
wwltv.com/article/news/i…
@politico ‘American’ Ethane’s cutout CEO wife is Irish. Just kidding. She’s Russian.

“Houghtaling, a New Orleans lawyer and entrepreneur, became the firm’s CEO. Houghtaling’s wife is Russian.”—@guardian 2018 archives Image
Along with Trump frens lobbying for Russian Ethane, US Congress members so helpful:

“Osborne also said their work entails getting members of Congress in Louisiana and Texas to submit official inquiries through the U.S. government and the Chinese government in the hopes their contract would be honored.”—@CNBC

cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/21…Image
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@politico @guardian So meanwhile, back on the British Virgin Islands, the ‘Russian’ Ethane shareholder who’s not dead yet Andrey Kunatbaev has tentacles to Hewmart Products Inc., one of the 11 owners, according to @ICIJorg


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@politico @guardian @ICIJorg So what else do ‘Russian’ Ethane’s Russian owners do other than buy politicians to lobby for big billion dollar Chinese contracts, own Russian guns and ammo companies used to war on Ukrainians and send their kids to infiltrate Trump campaign… build fleets
marinelog.com/news/american-…
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@politico @guardian @ICIJorg “Johnson’s campaign manager, Jason Hebert, said in an email that the campaign returned the money in 2018 once it was ‘made aware of the situation.’”

When can the American people return @SpeakerJohnson now that we’ve been made aware of the situation.🪆💨
@politico @guardian @ICIJorg @SpeakerJohnson Nikolaev👉🏼Butina👉🏼NRA👉🏼Johnson👈🏼Nikolaev
@politico @guardian @ICIJorg @SpeakerJohnson If you appreciate the all-nighter I just pulled tying Johnson to a Russian arms dealer, please consider supporting my work.

bettedangerous.com/subscribe
And thank you in advance for supporting independent investigative journalism.

ko-fi.com/heidicuda
I could smell Deripaska:

“Mr. Nikolaev once served on a government-sponsored council for public-private partnerships in the military-industrial sector, along with influential oligarchs like Oleg V.
Deripaska, a longtime associate of the Trump campaign's convicted former chairman, Paul J. Manafort. And his business entanglements stretch into areas that share a theme of military and security applications, which generally require trusted relations with the authorities.”—@nytimes 2018 archives
nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/…Image
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“Mr. Nikolaev has been an investor in a gun company run by his wife that developed a sniper rifle used by the Russian National Guard, which reports directly to President Vladimir V. Putin.

He is also a major investor in a satellite imagery firm that has a license from the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., to handle classified information.”—@nytimes 2018 archivesImage
“Worth slightly more than $1 billion, Mr. Nikolaev, together with two partners, owns about a third of Globaltrans, one of Russia's largest rail car operators, and the trio recently sold a major stake in a port business. He also sits on the board of American Ethane, a Houston-based energy company, and has invested in business ventures with Igor Rotenberg, the son of Arkady Rotenberg, a close childhood friend of Mr. Putin's.”—@nytimes 2018Image
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@FEC It would be weird right if ‘Russian’ Ethane “never generated income” — despite “agreements to construct ships”, a “pipeline”, and “export ethane to China” — it didn’t move “beyond development stage”. Like as if the point was to create a cash funnel to pols
fec.gov/files/legal/mu…



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@FEC It’s now February and Ukraine is suffering. Someone’s got to fuckin do this work.
@FEC So you can see why Ukraine pressured the West to sanction Nikolaev. In his munitions endeavors, he is assisting Russia in its Ukrainian genocide — as is @SpeakerJohnson who in 2018 took money from a Nikolaev-owned shell company. The money was returned, but quid pro quo continues.

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@FEC @SpeakerJohnson It should surprise absolutely no one that extremist homophobe Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council was an officer on extremist homophobe Mike Johnson’s non-profit ‘Freedom Guard’, which offered legal counsel for extremist homophobes.


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@FEC @SpeakerJohnson Such nice frens Johnson has.

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@FEC @SpeakerJohnson @splcenter So it’s weird Johnson took money from a Russian company that didn’t really do anything but give christofascists cash, and it’s equally weird he was the dean of a law school that never opened whose founder caught up in sex abuse scandals with young men. Maybe not so weird. #MICE🪆
So many nice pro-Putin frens.🥴🪆

For further reading, see Vatnik #192

vatniksoup.com/en/soups/192/


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🥴🪆Putin’s No. 1 US fren Robert Mercer put $600k into Warrior PAC 2016 and $480k went into his very own bankrupt weapon of mass democratic destruction Cambridge Analytica, while funding Christofascist gay bashing Kremlin fanboy Mike Johnson into Congress.
bayoubuzz.com/dir/index.php/…

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Here’s your Putin-Mercer refresher:
More to this story here as we follow the money to Putin’s network.

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More from @Heidi_Cuda

Bette Dangerous Profile picture
Jan 11
GHOSTING IN, AND GHOSTING OUT: We can’t just move on from foreign influence campaigns

Democratic nations being ripped apart by foreign influence operations in lockstep with domestic traitors need to acknowledge they are at war and then fight back ffs

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/ghosting-in-…
“We’ve just used a different organization to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country. No one even knew they were there. They were just ghosted in, did the work, and ghosted out.”—Cambridge Analytica’s executive Mark Turnbull, on the use of subcontractors in a 2018 Channel 4 undercover report

2/
3/
Read 32 tweets
Bette Dangerous Profile picture
Dec 28, 2025
FAMINE AS WEAPON: Exposing Soviet Evil

In Part 2 of our Speakeasy series with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak, she offered the Bette Dangerous community a detailed history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine. Here is that report

1/
 bettedangerous.com/p/famine-as-we…
Author’s note: With the help of a Ukrainian scholar, I am rewriting the history of what we know about communism. Any romanticized notions go out the window when we view history through the eye of a refugee-historian, with access to key documents that tell a cold and hard story about lies and theft, murder and starvation. We are offering a service to reality that helps us in this grave moment when political starvation proves again convenient to dictators and war criminals who talk of peace, as fascist dictators did a century ago. The following transcript, edited lightly for brevity and clarity, is from our interview with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak on November 23, 2025, about the history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine, which took the lives of 3.9 million Ukrainians. While working on a book project on the topic in February of 2022, Boriak realized that ‘Russia was killing us again,’ and she sought refuge in Lithuania for her and her children. She is now an associate professor in the History Department at Vilnius University. This interview took place during the week of the Holodomor Remembrance and is part of our three-part Speakeasy series with her. As you will learn, the Soviets were expert at creating fake realities to fool the West, a tradition that continues today.—hsc

2/
FAMINE AS WEAPON: Exposing Soviet Evil

Words by Tetiana Boriak; edited by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, from Part 2 of our Speakeasy series with the Ukrainian historian on the history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine

Begin transcript:

Tetiana Boriak: I will try to make it pretty clear, because it’s not complicated. When you know the consequence of the events, then you can better understand the contemporary situation.
So the starting point is to understand the man-made famine, the Holodomor, is recognized as a genocide by almost 30 countries — the European Union, the European Parliament, the Assembly of the Council of Europe.

To understand, you will have to go back to the First World War, because 1914 - 1918 was the period when the empires collapsed, the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman Empire.

The First World War became a certain social network, because people from various regions of one country met accidentally on the battlefield. And they suddenly discovered that they have similar problems. And when we talk about the Ukrainians on the front of the First World War, they discovered that they have the portrait of Shevchenko, that is the national Ukrainian poet, who wrote about oppression under the Russian Empire — that they basically have the same needs. They just want land. They just want to work on this land and that Petrograd, that is St Petersburg, it’s far away and Moscow is far away. And basically, this is not their war.

So this was the main outcome for Ukraine, together with the collapse of the Russian Empire. Then we had the March 1917 resignation of the last Russian emperor, Nikolai II.

Then we have an attempt of a democratic government, of the temporary government, to create some kind of… Russia of the future, they were trying to implement some democratic changes, but the authoritarian machine seemed to be pretty powerful.

And the second reason that is probably even more important is the Russian propaganda. The Soviet Union started with the Russian propaganda. It was an unprecedented level of propaganda in world history, I would say, because the Bolsheviks, namely Lenin, was pretty smart, he was a criminal, obviously, he put millions to the ground, but he was a pretty smart guy in terms of how to communicate their messages. So the whole army of Russian agitators was created.

They had the printing houses. They printed leaflets. So basically they were saying to the Russian soldiers that this is not their war, as well. And so if the front has collapsed, the Russian sign the agreement with Germany and their allies, they kind of leave the war. But on the other hand, this allowed them to focus on occupation of the territories.

And in Ukraine in 1917, simultaneously, with the resignation of the Russian emperor Nikolai II, the democratic government was created. And so they started to do all these changes that were necessary to set the stage to have negotiations, how to govern, how to communicate with the people, to create an army, to introduce Ukrainian languages, language of communication, etc.

So this Ukrainian revolution lasted from 1917 to 1921 — there were several democratic governments during this period. But the war with Russia began already in December of 1917, right after what is called the Great Bolshevik Socialist Revolution, on November 7, 1917. By December, the Russians launched war on Ukraine.

3/
Read 44 tweets
Bette Dangerous Profile picture
Dec 13, 2025
The Last Defence Against Trump's Total Immunity

Donald Trump’s recent threat to the International Criminal Court is a sign that he is in far more trouble than he is willing to admit, I report in @BylineTimes

1/
 bylinesupplement.com/p/the-last-def…
Donald Trump’s administration this week threatened new US sanctions on the International Criminal Court, in an attempt to strong-arm it into not investigating him and his top officials.

2/
Such a move is an admission of guilt. An innocent man would have no reason to demand that the ICC amend its founding document. Reuters first reported the threat on Thursday.

3/
Read 23 tweets
Bette Dangerous Profile picture
Oct 23, 2025
We Fight As We Breathe—A Q&A with ⁦@Mamulashvili_M⁩

A thoughtful conversation with commander of the Georgian National Legion Ukraine on Putin’s attempts to reanimate the corpse of the Soviet Union and why supporting Ukraine is the West’s best play bettedangerous.com/p/we-fight-as-…
Author’s note: On September 23, reporter Adam Sybera and I interviewed Mamuka Mamulashvili, Commander of the Georgian National Legion — Ukraine, at Bette’s Happy Hour. Mamuka has been fighting in Ukraine against the Russia invaders for more than a decade, survived multiple assassination attempts, three poisonings, and 32 years of war. At the age of 14, Mamuka took part in the Georgian-Russian war in Abkhazia. Towards the end of the conflict, he and his father were taken prisoner. Mamuka spent three months in captivity and was later released through a prisoner exchange program.
What follows is a transcript of the interview, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.—hsc

2/
We Fight As We Breathe: A Q&A with Mamuka Mamulashvili

A conversation with the commander of the Georgian National Legion Ukraine on Putin’s attempts to rebuild the corpse of the Soviet Union and why supporting Ukraine is an insurance policy for the rest of the free world

3/
Read 27 tweets
Bette Dangerous Profile picture
Oct 16, 2025
Orbán Bagman and ‘Other Loyal Servants of Organized Crime’

A brief conversation with Alex Alvarova about Hungary etc.

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/orban-bagman…
Bette’s Happy Hour on Tuesday with disinformation analysts Dietmar Pichler and Alex Alvarova was one of our finest — the exchange of information from our global community was phenomenal.

2/
I kicked off the event by talking about how I’m framing the world at the moment between those pushing illusion and those living in reality. The illusionists create phantoms — this week’s model is ‘antifa’ — a conjured phantom to defang the word ‘fascist’ so the illusionists can target political enemies.

3/
Read 15 tweets
Bette Dangerous Profile picture
Oct 1, 2025
‘A Book for Our Own Troubled Times’

A historic look at how conspiracies poison democracy, as detailed in Richard J. Evans book, “The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination”

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/a-book-for-o…
It’s okay to admit we got it wrong. We weren’t prepared for the Great Propaganda Wars.

2/
How could we be? We who were raised in democratic nations relied on a shared narrative of truth. We relied on academic and scientific expertise. We put our trust in higher learning, and those who deviated from a fact-based world — the snake oil salesmen, who exploited fear and ignorance — well, there were repercussions for these criminal exploiters. Our fact-based world had punitive laws for the exploiters.

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Read 36 tweets

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