The United States Office of the Treasury on Wednesday canceled sanctions on Karina Rotenberg, a long-time member of the European jet set and wife to businessman Boris Rotenberg, a billionaire oligarch and close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control removed Mrs. Rotenberg from its sanctioned persons list without an explanation, and did not respond to media requests for comment on the decision.
On Thursday Washington announced the Department of Treasury would impose double-digit import duty tariffs on over 180 countries – but Russia wasn’t targeted.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the US news platform Axios the reason for Russia’s exclusion was that economic sanctions already imposed on the country following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine already “preclude any meaningful trade.”
Official US trade data contradict, dramatically, the White House claim of no bias on Russia’s behalf.
According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, US imports from Russia were worth about three billion dollars in 2024, while exports were $526.1 million, making for a trade deficit of about $2.5 billion in favor of Russia.
In a gala Thursday Rose Garden presentation US President Donald Trump, using colorful information boards printed specially for the occasion, pointed to multiple countries (many with smaller trade deficits with the US than Russia) and declared they were trading unfairly with America and so must now face punishing tariffs.
Among countries with roughly the same-sized $2.5 billion trade deficit with the US as Russia, and hit by Trump tariffs while Russia was not, were Norway (15% tariff, $2 billion trade deficit), Iraq (39%, $5.8 billion), Philippines (17%, $4.9 billion), Guyana (38%, $4 billion), Pakistan (29%, $3 billion) and Venezuela (15%, 1.7 billion.)
Karina Yurievenva Rotenberg, wife of Russian oligarch Boris Rotenburg, appears likewise to have benefited from a friendly stance towards Russia by the Trump administration.
A Russian national moving to the US in 1996, the future Mrs. Rotenberg married in 2009. According to US property records, she was born in St. Petersburg (sic: at the time it was Leningrad) on Nov. 24, 1978. Her maiden name was Gapchuk.
According to research by the Organized Crime and Corruption Research Project, before marrying Rotenberg, Karina Gapchuk had settled in the Atlanta area.
A report by the Russian anti-corruption site Kompromat1 said that Karina Gapchuk graduated from the University of Atlanta with an MBA and was employed there. A Vkontatke bio page, seemingly giving her the surname Fox, states she is a graduate of American InterContinental University, a group offering online college degrees and small campuses in three US cities, including Atlanta.
In 2003, per Kompromat1, Gapchuk applied to US immigration to change her US immigration status from political refugee to US citizen. The application remained under review for three years. The Russian oligarch-tracker group Ruspres, in 2020, reported this was because the FBI suspected she might be linked with a Russian group operating illegally in the US, potentially Russian overseas intelligence.
In 2007 Karina Gapchuk sued then-US FBI Director Robert Mueller, an appointee of US President George W. Bush for, she claimed, undue delays by the FBI in processing her request to become a US citizen. She withdrew the lawsuit and the application months later.
Later that year Gapchuk reportedly met her future husband Boris Rotenberg while travelling in Monaco. The couple moved to Russia, married, and in 2010 Karina nee Gapchuk Rotenberg, still a Russian citizen, moved to Sarasota County, Florida and started a real estate business.
It is not clear by what means Mrs. Rotenberg became a US citizen. Most reports say that by 2013 she was a US citizen. Per the Kompromat1 report, once married, Karina Rotenberg became a co-owner of three Atlanta area properties worth together about $3.5 million – a mansion, a high-rise condo and a mid-range single-family apartment. Boris Rotenberg listed the mansion as a residence.
The OCCCRP and other sources call Boris Rotenberg a “notorious” Russian oligarch. He is a former judo instructor, President of the Russian Judo Federation and long-time personal Putin friend. Starting in Putin’s home city Petersburg, where he trained judo with the future Russian authoritarian leader, Rotenberg made a fortune in the 1990s and early 2000s in Russia’s construction, banking and energy industries.
In 2014, the US government, at the time headed by President Barack Obama, placed Boris Rotenberg on a sanctioned persons list following Russia’s first invasion of Russia.
In 2022, the US government, now headed by President Joe Biden, placed sanctions on Karina Rotenberg, citing alleged assistance in sanctions evasion she gave her husband via shell companies, offshore accounts and jointly-owned properties. Their two sons were blacklisted at the same time.
The US decision marked an escalation in American pressure on Russia’s elite because Mrs. Rotenberg and her sons held US passports. The US sanctions most affected real estate property she owned jointly with her husband, the OCCRP investigation said.
Although also sanctioned by the European Union, Mrs. Rotenberg, following Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, appeared able to continue a lavish lifestyle. Russian media images show her doing Pilates in a French Rivera resort, posing on the steps of a Mediterranean mansion, and inspecting stables and blooded Arabian horses in her capacity as head of the Moscow Equestrian Federation.
In interviews, Rotenberg stated that aside from US real estate, she and her husband own properties in Provence and Moscow. A Forbes world’s-richest-men list published on Wednesday estimated Boris Rotenberg’s net worth at $1.3 billion.
Perhaps ironically, the FBI official that allegedly dragged his feet on Karina Gapchuk’s US citizenship application in 2007, Robert Mueller, ten years later a Special Counsel for the US Department of Justice, handed over to Congress a controversial report on Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election.
In that report, Mueller said he and his investigating team had found clear evidence of Russian state efforts to place agents in the US and manipulate voting results, but, was unable to find a direct link between those agents and the candidate elected that year, Donald J. Trump.
Trump, since then and through the present, has repeatedly stated those findings, now widely known as the Mueller Report, prove there is no link between him and the Russian government.