Most people inherit their surnames. A few acquire them by marriage. Almost nobody sits down at the age of twenty-eight and picks one out for himself — and when someone does, the choice tends to be revealing.

He was born Umar-Ali Nazarovich Lutfulloev on 1 November 1982. The sources split on where: his official biography says Serpukhov, an industrial town about sixty miles south of Moscow; other records, including sanctions databases, say the settlement of Oktyabrsky in the Shakhrinav district of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, in Central Asia. He is ethnically Tajik. In 2005 he graduated from the Moscow State Academy of Municipal Services and Construction. By his own account he worked in taxis, construction, private security and catering.

In March 2010 he went to the registry office in Serpukhov and changed his surname to Kremlev. In Russian, the root is the Kremlin — the fortress at the center of Moscow and, for the last quarter-century, the shorthand for the man inside it.

There is a tidy explanation on offer: that Kremleva was his mother’s maiden name. Proekt checked. His mother, Olga Lutfulloeva, was born Krivaya. The name was not inherited. It was selected.

Two convictions were attached to the name he left behind.

Proekt confirms both — the extortion case and the battery case — and draws the connection the reader is already making: the new surname washed away a dark past.

The practical value of that laundering became visible eight years later, and in an unexpected venue. When Kremlev submitted paperwork to the disciplinary bodies of the International Boxing Association — then still known by its French acronym AIBA — he supplied a certificate of no criminal record issued in the name Kremlev. The convictions were filed under Lutfulloev. The two databases did not speak to each other, and neither did the certificate.

In July 2019 the association’s disciplinary commission opened an investigation into Kremlev and two other officials over alleged past criminal convictions and the provision of false information. An independent inquiry led by the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, published in December 2021, also flagged undeclared history.

His press office told ProPublica that Mr. Kremlev has an absolutely clean legal history.

In the early 2010s Kremlev joined the Night Wolves — a Russian motorcycle club led by Alexander Zaldostanov, known as the Surgeon, and known internationally for its open alignment with the Kremlin and its annual patriotic rides. It is an unusual entry on a résumé. It was also, according to Proekt, where he met the man who would make him rich.

Alexei Rubezhnoy is a major general and a former operator of Alpha Group, the counter-terrorism unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service. He now heads the Presidential Security Service — the unit responsible for the personal physical protection of Vladimir Putin. There is no closer physical proximity to the Russian president available to any official in the country. Both men later put distance between themselves and the motorcycle club.

In 2016, what Proekt describes as a changing of the guard took place in Russian boxing. Control of the Boxing Federation of Russia passed to the Rubezhnoy–Kremlev pairing. The federation’s charter was amended to eliminate the vote, and Rubezhnoy installed a then-obscure Kremlev. He took the post of secretary general in February 2017.

Proekt describes the two men as inseparable, their families friendly. In 2021 Kremlev’s private security company, Sokol — “Falcon” — was renamed Rubezh, which shares a root with the general’s surname. Subtlety has never been the defining feature of this story.

There had been an earlier demonstration of usefulness. In 2015 Kremlev arranged for the American boxer Roy Jones Jr. to meet Putin in occupied Crimea. Jones subsequently received Russian citizenship. The template was already visible: find a well-known figure from the West, arrange the photograph, deliver the alignment.

Kremlev himself has never been coy about the source of his opportunities. In one interview, quoted by Proekt, he explained that thanks to one man there are today effectively unlimited possibilities — and that this man is the president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

In 2020 Russia passed a law creating a single clearing center for all interactive betting transactions. In 2021, a presidential decree named Kremlev’s company TsUPIS the sole operator of every bookmaker bet placed in the country.

According to Proekt, Putin personally telephoned Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma — the lower house of the Russian parliament — to have the law passed within a week. On the day the appointment was announced, shares in the competing payments company Qiwi fell seven percent, which is roughly what happens to a business when the state hands its market to somebody else by decree.

The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity: the company takes a percentage of every bet placed in Russia. Revenue for the first nine months of 2023 exceeded 32 billion rubles — around 363 million dollars.

In parallel, and through intermediaries, Kremlev became the beneficiary of the three largest betting companies in Russia — Fonbet, Pari and Liga Stavok. Their combined 2023 revenue was 625.6 billion rubles: 51.48 percent of the entire legal Russian betting market.

How they were obtained matters more than what they earn. Fonbet and Pari were taken from Alexander Udodov, the former brother-in-law of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. The stake in Liga Stavok came from two other businessmen. Kremlev also gained control of the Unified Gambling Regulator — the body created to supervise the very market he had just been given. Members of the executive committee of the Boxing Federation of Russia sit on its supervisory board.

The clearest demonstration of the mechanism is a company that sells cars.

December 2023. A presidential decree places Rolf, the largest car dealership group in Russia, under the temporary administration of the Federal Property Management Agency. It is the first time the instrument is used against a Russian private company. Rolf’s founder, Sergei Petrov, is a former member of the State Duma who had publicly taken opposition positions and had left the country.

31 August 2024. The sale of Rolf to structures controlled by Kremlev closes. The price, per the company’s own interim consolidated accounts reported by Interfax, is 34.798 billion rubles. Rolf’s chief executive had earlier told Meduza the figure was in the range of 30 to 40 billion — about a third of the company’s pre-war valuation. For scale: Rolf’s 2023 revenue was 323.8 billion rubles.

After the sale. The state ownership is lifted by decree.

According to Proekt, Meduza and Agentstvo, the nationalization was lobbied for by Alexei Rubezhnoy — the head of the president’s personal security service, and the same man who had installed Kremlev at the boxing federation seven years earlier.

17 August 2026. A Moscow court sentences Sergei Petrov in absentia to nine years in prison over the alleged transfer of four billion rubles abroad.

Among the executives who joined Kremlev’s companies after this sequence completed was Alexander Lagutin, formerly of the construction holding owned by a retired officer of Russian military intelligence. He served as an adviser at Rolf. In May 2026 he was on a beach in the Bahamas.

Kremlev entered international boxing administration in 2018, elected to the executive committee of the association at a congress held in Moscow. In December 2020 he won its presidency with 57.33 percent of the vote — 86 ballots against 45 for the Dutch candidate Boris van der Vorst and 19 for the acting president, in the fourth round.

It is worth pausing on the man he replaced. Gafur Rakhimov of Uzbekistan had stepped aside in March 2019 over his links to organized crime; the United States Treasury had described him as one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals and tied him to heroin trafficking. The organization’s response to that problem was to elect a man with two concealed convictions. Institutions rarely improve by accident.

Under Kremlev’s leadership the association, rebranded as the IBA, changed character completely. Its sole sponsor became Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy corporation — a contract Kremlev himself valued at 50 million dollars over two years. Operations were moved out of Lausanne, Switzerland, first toward Russia and then to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Ukraine was suspended from competition. Russian and Belarusian boxers were admitted under their own flag and anthem against the recommendations of the International Olympic Committee.

In 2022, rather than hold a presidential election, the membership voted 106 to 36 not to hold one — after the only challenger had been disqualified. The result was a president elected without an opponent, by an organization that had voted against having elections.

On 22 June 2023, an extraordinary session of the International Olympic Committee voted to withdraw recognition of the IBA: 69 in favor, one against, ten abstentions. The committee’s report cited governance failures, financial opacity, and the association’s complete refusal to explain its funding transparently alongside its total financial dependence on a single state-owned company. Boxing’s Olympic future passed to a new body, World Boxing.

A former member of the association’s board told ProPublica what the arrangement had actually been for: Umar is guided by Putin, the sport was being used for soft political power, it is geopolitics — and the fact that it happens to be boxing is incidental.

On 22 April 2026, Vladimir Putin personally presented Kremlev with the Order of Friendship at a Kremlin reception for the Russian national boxing team. He had received the Medal of the Order for Merit to the Fatherland, second class, in 2020.

In May 2026, according to Chinese state media, he was in China during Putin’s visit. His press office denies he was part of the official delegation. Ukraine’s sanctions dossier and Proekt both record that he was a member of the official Russian delegation during a presidential visit to China in 2023.

Days after that trip, he flew to the Bahamas.

Ukraine’s sanctions were imposed by decision of the National Security and Defense Council on 5 December 2024, enacted by presidential decree, for a term of ten years. The dossier maintained by Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence describes him as a Russian businessman and sports official close to Putin and a close friend of the head of Putin’s security service. It lists his leadership of the Russian boxing federation with the support of the Federal Security Service; the relocation of the association’s operations to Russia; the suspension of Ukraine; the installation of the sanctioned state gas company as sole sponsor; the 2020 state decoration; and the acquisition, between 2020 and 2023 and with the assistance of state structures, of substantial control over the Russian betting market.

Separately sanctioned by Ukraine is the Russian public movement Zdorovoye Otechestvo — “Healthy Fatherland” — which according to ProPublica is run by the twin sister of Kremlev’s wife. The stated grounds are participation in the organized mechanism of mass deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian citizens, including children, from occupied territories into Russia.

He does not appear on any public United States sanctions list. According to a person close to the association’s leadership, he was very afraid of being placed on one.

Extortion conviction in a provincial town. A new surname. A motorcycle club, and in it a general who would come to stand closest to the president of Russia. Then, in sequence: a sports federation, a betting monopoly, an Olympic body stripped of recognition, a nationalized car dealership, a medal from Putin’s own hand, and a fireworks barge off a Caribbean island.

Twenty-two years separate the first item from the last. Nothing in between is illegal by the standards of the jurisdiction where it happened, because the jurisdiction where it happened writes the standards to fit.

What remains unanswered is the question ProPublica ended on, and it is not a question about money. A man whose entire position depends on remaining useful to the Russian state spent a great deal of that state’s derivative wealth cultivating the son of an American president — and nobody outside a small circle in Moscow knows what he expected in return.

He is not the first to try. Part III is about the others: a diplomat who threw famous parties for nine years, ten people who lived under the names of dead Americans, and why the newest method turns out to be the oldest one with the disguise removed.

Editorial note: the criminal convictions described here are reported from Russian court records as published by Proekt and corroborated in Russian media; the organized-crime affiliation attributed to the early 2000s rests on sources rather than documents and is presented as such. Mr. Kremlev’s press office states that his legal history is clean and that the boxing association bore no wedding expenses; it has declined to address the payments made by the Dubai entity. No court in any jurisdiction has found him guilty of any offense connected to the events in Part I of this series.