In 1948, a group of Soviet officers and East German engineers visited the Albanian island of Sazan, five and a half square kilometers of rock wedged between a Soviet Navy base on the Albanian mainland and the heel of Italy. According to some reports that have been declassified by the CIA, the Russians and their Cold War allies dug, in the following decade, a network of bunkers and underground tunnels capable of withstanding nuclear attacks, built submarine pens to protect warships, and placed anti-aircraft guns, long-range missile batteries, and trenches on the rocks. The island of Sazan was a perfect place to block the Adriatic Sea in case of a third world war and, as the CIA also points out, thanks to the rocky walls plunging into the sea, it was impervious to attacks. Today Sazan is uninhabited, the rocks alternate with impenetrable undergrowth, it doesn’t have enough water to be self-sufficient, there are still mines in the few flat areas, and it’s the ideal habitat for poisonous snakes, so much so that the Albanian government prohibits camping. But things will change, because the company Affinity Partners, owned by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, intends to build right here, in this hostile place, a luxury resort for wealthy vacationers.<\/p>\n
Oligarchs, spies, luxury<\/strong><\/p>\n In July 2023, Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump, and Richard Grenell, former ambassador to Germany then envoy to Serbia and Kosovo and now envoy for vague “special missions,” met with the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama, as Kushner himself recounted the following year in an interview with Bloomberg, revealing plans for three development projects \u2013 in the most hospitable area of the island \u2013 whose cost is estimated at several billion dollars. According to what Mitchell Prothero wrote in the online magazine AirMail (Prothero is an investigative journalist based in Brussels, AirMail is the creation of former celebrated Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who now, in that very busy market that is American journalism, has just merged with the Puck website), Kushner is collaborating with Aman Resorts, a company specializing in small hotels, often remote and so expensive that not all wealthy people can afford them. The project for Sazan is indeed small (40 rooms are planned), but costs increase not only because construction will be complicated, but due to logistics: everything will have to be brought in, from water to food to staff, everything. Aman is owned by Russian-Swiss oligarch Vladislav Doronin, who made his fortune in the 1990s, immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union, trading in raw materials. Doronin was born in what was then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, the city from which the Kremlin chief, Vladimir Putin, comes, as does much of the Russian political, military, and economic elite. Unlike other members of this elite that has Putin as its fulcrum \u2013 the origin is not a coincidence, many of the regime’s key men are old friends of the president \u2013 Doronin left the USSR before it collapsed and by 1985 had already moved to Switzerland, to Geneva, where he began working for Marc Rich and his Glencore. He returned to Russia, to Moscow, in the early 1980s, began to build his empire, took control of Aman Resorts in 2014, and has since been working on the expansion of this luxury factory. More than for business, however, Doronin is known in the news mainly for his love affair with supermodel Naomi Campbell, to whom he also dedicated the construction of a villa near Moscow. He commissioned the project from Zaha Hadid, who designed a castle for the couple that extends over two thousand five hundred square meters: a spaceship with two towers over twenty meters each. Doronin and Campbell had talked about marriage, but the relationship ended very badly, with lawsuits, quarrels, and villas sold. In short, Doronin knows how to tackle pharaonic projects, anywhere. Despite some protests from environmentalists, in January, when Trump returned to the White House, the Albanian government gave the green light to the project. It seems that Grenell’s diplomacy was decisive, even though Aman’s former security chief, retired FBI counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal, was meanwhile sentenced to more than six years in prison for attempting to violate his own government’s sanctions and laundering money on behalf of both Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and a former Albanian intelligence agent with close ties to Rama. In short, there’s everything in this story: nuclear bunkers, snakes, oligarchs, traitors, super-luxury, but Rama has proven very skilled at maintaining relationships with disparate worlds \u2013 he was at the wedding of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, for instance \u2013 and meanwhile finding ways to serve his own national interest.<\/p>\n Jared Kushner’s diplomacy<\/strong><\/p>\n The American president’s son-in-law, in Trump’s first and now second term, has always associated his name with the Middle East. During the first Administration, he was the patient architect of the Abraham Accords, the agreements that had begun to revolutionize the Middle East by bringing about the normalization of relations between Israel and some Arab countries. Kushner made his plan concrete by putting into practice, to seal the agreements, the language he speaks best and that the countries he dealt with speak best: that of business. The Abraham Accords in fact immediately proved to be a revolution in the way of doing diplomacy as well, and they held up even under the blow of October 7, when Hamas terrorists attacked the kibbutzim in southern Israel, starting the war in the Gaza Strip. With the beginning of Trump’s second term, Kushner seemed to have exited the scene; in his place, the president preferred to send to the Middle East to mediate a truce between Israel and Hamas his jack-of-all-trades, special envoy Steve Witkoff, who had managed to bring home a truce in January, just in time for Trump’s return to the White House. Witkoff was not enough for the subsequent phases and the president needed someone who knew how to involve as many Middle Eastern countries as possible. Someone with contacts, with a wide and above all solid network. Someone who knew how to concentrate the efforts of many countries around the goal of freeing the hostages and promoting a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Jared Kushner was needed, his diplomacy with the language of business was needed. Trump’s son-in-law was actually working behind the scenes for some time on a peace plan, and when he was involved and emerged from the shadows he had everything ready, including the right economic levers and a set of projects that ties him to various Middle Eastern countries. Kushner is connected to Qatar and especially to Saudi Arabia, the most valuable piece to add to the Abraham Accords to truly revolutionize the Middle East. The diplomacy of business, of resorts, of luxury is Kushner’s specialty. How he will apply it in Albania will be of interest also to Tirana’s neighbors and also to the EU.<\/p>\n The migrant protocol<\/strong><\/p>\n On November 6, 2023, the Italian government signed a protocol with Albania for the transfer of migrants rescued by Italian ships in international waters, which provides for the creation of a hotspot in Sh\u00ebngjin, a port in the north of the country, for identification procedures and a facility in Gjad\u00ebr, in the interior, for managing asylum requests and detaining irregular foreigners awaiting repatriation (which remains Italy’s responsibility) with a capacity of three thousand people. As is known, the agreement between Giorgia Meloni and Premier Rama, in line with the European (but also American) trend of externalizing the management of migrant flows to third countries, has been challenged in Italian and European courts, particularly regarding the designation of safe countries to which to repatriate migrants. The Italian government responded with two decrees, but at the moment, the balance sheet of this project is: 66 immigrants transferred from Albania to Italy by court order, about twenty detainees in Albanian centers. All this for an investment of 670 million euros, of which 170 allocated for 2024 were taken from the extraordinary Defense Fund for the construction of centers in Italy, from the Fund for urgent needs that is usually used for natural disasters, and from the Reserve Fund that has taken resources from other ministries. For Italy, in short, the Albanian protocol is a big mess, but if you look from the other side, through Rama’s eyes, it seems like an unmissable opportunity. The premier wants to do his homework well and solve his interlocutors’ problems, and even in this case, just like Kushner’s resort among the snakes, the centers that were supposed to be ready are ready, and never mind if they’re empty, the important thing for Rama is to always show himself available, particularly when it comes to receiving investments.<\/p>\n EU entry<\/strong><\/p>\n In recent days, the EU has picked up again the enlargement package, which had been effectively frozen for two decades, until Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At the moment, first on the list to enter the Union is Montenegro, which should close all negotiation chapters before the end of 2026. Next year the accession treaty will have to begin to be written and if everything goes according to plan, Montenegro’s entry could take place as early as 2028. But the most astonishing progression is that of Albania: Premier Rama has set himself the goal of closing all negotiation chapters by the end of 2027 and so far is keeping to his ambitious schedule. Two negotiation chapters are still missing: the one on agriculture and the one on cohesion. But Rama is counting on entering the EU in 2029, a year ahead of the scheduled date and with the reputation of someone who does his homework well and knows how to fulfill everyone’s wishes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1948, a group of Soviet officers and East German engineers visited the Albanian island of Sazan, five and a half square kilometers of rock wedged between a Soviet Navy base on the Albanian mainland and the heel of Italy. 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