www.thetimes.com - Jeffrey Epstein took a leaf from Vladimir Putin's playbook
Amassing embarrassing photos and damaging information was strikingly similar to Russian kompromat operations - 2026-02-06

|------- Polish, French and British intelligence agencies are scrambling to establish whether this was, indeed, the "world's largest honeytrap operation": how much dirt Epstein amassed on whom, whether he did so for Moscow's benefit, what that material may have been used for and how much profit he extracted from his many Russian connections.

There are grubby Russian fingerprints all over the Epstein files, which contain 1,056 mentions of Putin and more than 9,000 references to Moscow: requests for flights to take escorts and models from Moscow to Paris and New York; a 2012 message to Epstein offering "2 Russian girls for you to meet, one 21, another 24. One skinny, another curvy and super cute"; a dinner companion offered to Prince Andrew with a recommendation that she was "Russian, beautiful and trustworthy". (The former prince denies any wrongdoing, as does everyone else mired in this swamp, including the Kremlin.)

... Epstein visited Russia multiple times and made arrangements to meet Putin (it is unclear if he ever did). He arranged Russian visas for others and left the bulk of his fortune, two days before his suicide, to a mysterious 36-year-old Belarusian dentist. His links to the Russian elite were many, varied and highly dubious.
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www.yahoo.com - Epstein's Russia connections, explained - 2026-02-05

dossier.center - Jeffrey Epstein's Russian Connection: Billionaire's ties with FSB Academy graduate revealed - 2026-02-14

unherd.com - Russia loves the Epstein files Nationalists delight in Western debauchery - 2026-02-04

|------- The honeypot approach is still used because it's blunt but effective. It uses kompromat sometimes in exotic, outrageous forms, but just as often in banal, almost bureaucratic ways that resemble those of the Soviet era. ...

Russia does not primarily seek to attack the West by surgically extracting targeted information, as traditional espionage would. Instead, it seeks to embarrass, humiliate, and degrade Western societies into destroying themselves by widening existing political fissures and disagreements and watching as a story-hungry media and viral social media storms do the hard work.

From Moscow's perspective, it doesn't matter so much whether the latest poisonous claims in the Epstein files are true. Even if the most sensational claims about who is (or who isn't) a Russian agent collapse under scrutiny, the story itself will please Putin immensely. It will fuel suspicion that, regardless of their political orientation, the rich and powerful in the West can commit moral aberrations with impunity, and that institutions will shield them from consequence, instead of investigating them.

...

Dr. Ian Garner is assistant professor of totalitarian studies at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw. His latest book is Z Generation: Russia's Fascist Youth
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Epstein was collecting compromat for Russian FSB and himself.
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