Russia’s FSB detains Ilya Traber, a St. Petersburg port tycoon with long-standing Putin ties, for his suspected role in organizing a contract killing

Officers from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) have searched multiple addresses in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region tied to businessman Ilya Traber.

The St. Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka reports that security forces searched Traber’s mansion in the Leningrad region, his office on Starorusskaya Street, and several businesses. Traber and his longtime business partner Vladimir Danilenko are suspected of involvement in organizing the murder of St. Petersburg entrepreneur and municipal deputy Alexander Petrov, according to sources cited by Fontanka and the Russian business news outlet RBC. “The case had been stalled for several years, but investigators recently received new information,” one of RBC’s sources said. That source added that Traber is expected to be brought to Moscow, to the Investigative Committee’s Main Investigative Directorate.

Alexander Petrov was killed in 2020, shot leaving a bathhouse on his property in the Vyborg district. His killers were never found. Petrov’s son is former Formula 1 driver Vitaly Petrov, who told Fontanka he has no information about the investigation and is not commenting.

Ilya Traber is a prominent St. Petersburg businessman who built his career during the years Vladimir Putin worked in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. Much of what is known about Traber comes from investigative journalism, including a documentary series called Piterskiye — in one episode, then TV Rain editor-in-chief Roman Badanin spoke with Traber’s son Dmitry. The series was released in 2017 by TV Rain.

Traber started out in the 1980s with an antiques business and, as TV Rain journalists reported, “made a dizzying career in the shadow economy,” building a network of shops dealing in antiquities. He was known at the time by the nickname “the Antique Dealer.”

In the 1990s, Traber gained control of the St. Petersburg seaport, one of the most important transportation hubs in northwestern Russia. Details of his business activities emerged in part through investigations opened in Monaco and Spain and through tax authority records that the magazine L’Express obtained and published in 2002. That report described Traber as a friend of Vladimir Putin with ties to the Tambov criminal group, which controls operations at the Port of St. Petersburg.

In 2008, Spain opened an investigation into a “Russian mafia” case involving alleged members of the Tambov-Malyshev organized crime group, who were accused of money laundering through shell companies. In 2016, Spain’s anti-corruption prosecutor’s office sought international arrest warrants for a number of individuals, including Traber. In 2018, however, a Spanish court acquitted all defendants in the “Russian mafia” case, finding no evidence of ties to the Tambov-Malyshev group or of money laundering.

TV Rain’s investigation claimed that in northwestern Russia “there is no port where Traber’s people don’t have interests.” Among Traber’s partners, the journalists named Nikolai Shamalov, whose son Kirill was married to Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova.

Traber is also connected to the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal (PNT), the largest petroleum products transshipment terminal in the Baltic region, founded in 1996. Traber’s structures controlled the PNT alongside the structures of Gennady Petrov, the leader of the Malyshev organized crime group. Another shareholder was a company belonging to businessman Dmitry Skigin, who died in 2003. His heirs later sued the new co-owners of the PNT, and in April 2025 a court seized 55% of the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal’s shares for the state.

Traber is considered a businessman close to Vladimir Putin. TV Rain called him “the only living crime boss whose acquaintance Putin acknowledged.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta that Skigin and Traber “at one time worked on a project to build an oil terminal,” in connection with which they repeatedly “officially approached the leadership of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office,” where Putin worked at the time.

After TV Rain’s documentary series aired, Traber filed a defamation complaint. A criminal case was opened, though the identities of those named in it were not disclosed. Roman Badanin became a witness in the case. In June 2021, investigators searched his home and those of two colleagues, Mikhail Rubin and Maria Zholobova. The journalists themselves linked the searches to an investigation they had published that same day about the then-head of the Interior Ministry, Vladimir Kolokoltsev.