Iosif Prigozhin, a Russian music producer, scrolled to the bottom of the contacts app on one of his iPhones and showed me the tally of entries: 11,801.
He and his wife, the pop star known as Valeriya, “know everyone,” he told me. That includes the “generals and criminals” who once harmoniously shared a table at a concert of hers in Crimea.
“That’s Russia, my friend,” Mr. Prighozin said.
We were tucking into chicken and sea bass on the 25th floor of the skyscraper-resort in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where Mr. Prighozin and Valeriya own two apartments. There was a three-story “longevity hub” somewhere above us and a “global street food” spot through a tunnel of faux graffiti somewhere below us. Later, on the pool deck, suspended between two skyscrapers and 300 feet above vast roads and malls and building sites, Valeriya lip-synced for Instagram.
You can learn a lot about Russia by coming to Dubai, which hasn’t joined the West’s sanctions against Russia and has replaced London and Switzerland as a refuge of choice for Moscow’s wealthy. Here you will find Russian elites who never imagined that their president, Vladimir V. Putin, would invade Ukraine — and then found themselves too enmeshed in Mr. Putin’s system to abandon him.
Mr. Prigozhin — no relation to his assassinated acquaintance, the mutineer Yevgeny V. Prigozhin — is one of them, a fast-talking attention magnet whose celebrity straddles politics and pop culture in Russia. I’d been curious to talk to him for two years, ever since a recording turned up online of his purported call with a former Russian senator in which both men are heard slamming Mr. Putin.
“The nation has no future,” a voice that sounds like Mr. Prighozin’s says, with many expletives. “He’s totally screwed us over.”
At the time, analysts saw the conversation as a cri de coeur of the elite. But during my five hours with Mr. Prigozhin, I saw more clearly how members of Russian high society became inured to Europe’s greatest violence since World War II — even as the death and destruction touched their own lives.
‘How Was Lake Como?’
Mr. Prigozhin and his wife had come from Moscow for a few days at their extravagantly named high-rise resort, One&Only One Za’abeel, and a gala dinner at Sakhalin Dubai, one of many Russian hot spots that have opened in the Emirates. (Russian crab claws go for $20 an ounce.)
I was also passing through and was pleased when Mr. Prigozhin finally agreed to an interview. The socialite relishes publicity inside Russia, but hadn’t spoken at length to a Western media outlet in years.
I’m accustomed to meeting well-connected Russians in odd places — a part of the job for journalists, like me, writing about Russia from outside the country. But this was unusual: My interlocutors didn’t mind being recorded.
