Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has, during the war in Ukraine, quietly amassed millions of rubles in property and income that far exceed her official earnings, the investigative news outlet Explainer reported Thursday, citing several publicly available and anonymous sources.
The investigation claims that Zakharova’s 2024 income totaled about 11 million rubles ($137,800), nearly double her official Foreign Ministry salary of 6 million rubles ($75,100) that year.
The difference reportedly came from payments by state media and from royalties for her songwriting.
Zakharova’s income is shielded from public scrutiny under a 2014 order signed by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that exempts her from financial disclosure requirements that apply to most senior diplomats.
According to Explainer, Zakharova bought a luxury apartment in central Moscow in December 2022 at a price around 17 times her annual government income, or more than 100 million rubles ($1.2 million).
Public documents registered the 151-square-meter property as belonging to the “Russian Federation,” the report said. In 2023, the apartment was transferred to another entity also listed as the “Russian Federation.”
Explainer said it obtained internal documents of the real estate registry Rosreestr listing Zakharova as the real buyer and her father as the apartment’s latest owner.
The outlet said it also identified her husband, Andrei Makhrov, as a senior executive at a geophysical and drilling research firm that receives multimillion-ruble government contracts from state energy and mining companies.
The report suggests Makhrov’s Moscow-based firm, Severo-Zapad, has profited from large state contracts during the wartime economic boom.
The Foreign Ministry did not reply to Explainer’s requests for comment.
The Moscow Times could not independently verify the Explainer’s claims.
Explainer describes itself as a newly formed investigative outlet focused on open-data work that has grown out of the Telegram news channel Mozhem Obyasnit.
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