BuzzFeed reports:

Two men with deep ties to top figures in Russian politics are the voices caught on tape negotiating a proposed oil deal to fund Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega party, according to new analysis revealed today.

In July, BuzzFeed News uncovered an explosive audio recording of longtime Salvini aide Gianluca Savoini discussing a plan to covertly channel tens of millions of dollars of Russian oil money toward Lega’s upcoming European election campaign. The revelations have rocked Italian politics, and prosecutors in Milan are investigating the proposed deal. But the Russian men heard discussing the plan with Savoini and two other Italians at Moscow’s Metropol hotel last October have remained shrouded in mystery.

Now a joint investigation by BuzzFeed News, the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, and Russian news site the Insider has identified two of the three Russian voices heard on the recording: Andrey Yuryevich Kharchenko and Ilya Andreevich Yakunin. They have links to the high-profile far-right demagogue Aleksandr Dugin and to Vladimir Pligin, a politician deeply enmeshed in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

Dugin is the father of an ideology that Putin has embraced in recent years, which sees a resurgent Russia standing as a bulwark against the liberal west. Pligin played a major role in one of Putin’s most hostile foreign policy moves, working on drafting a law in the country’s parliament certifying the 2014 annexation of Crimea. [Continue reading…]