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Inside Jared Kushner’s purchase of the most strategically important island you’ve never heard of
As Albanians take to the streets for yet another day in what’s being called the Flamingo Revolution, the battle is about a great deal more than environmental vandalism and entitled rich people being… well… entitled rich people.
If you thought that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s plan to redevelop a picturesque Albanian island half the size of Manhattan is just about giving the one-percenters another place to park their superyachts, think again.
Because you know who else has been coveting that same island since the Cold War?
Russia. And China.
Yes, really.
It’s a geopolitical drama of epic proportions.
I’m beating myself up for not seeing the big picture myself straight away. All I saw were the revoltingly wealthy, entitled sprogs of the American royal dynasty doing what they do best: milking it like there’s no tomorrow.
But there is a bigger picture. Because there always is. And it was served up to me on a bespoke platter by online commentator, @alimcforever, who posted her mind-blowing findings about the nature of the island and the very fraught bios of the people at the helm of Jared Kushner’s private equity fund. Absolutely worth watching.
Suddenly, it made sense.
So, I put on my own investigative deep-dive suit, and jumped in. I wanted to see how it all works from the geopolitical, historical perspective I bring to the table as a historian.
Put on your scuba gear. And grab yourself a course of antibiotics.
Because it’s going to get very, very deep. And very, very dirty.
All the talk has been about flamingos and nesting turtles. Because Sazan is at the heart of an important site renowned for its natural diversity and pristine ecology… an island declassified for civilian use in December 2024. Much more on that later.
There’s a good reason that this tiny—and very picturesque—corner of Europe is bereft of development. What’s not being mentioned is that Sazan Island has been a designated military exclusion zone since the Cold War.
Yes, you read that correctly. A designated military exclusion zone.
When Ivanka “discovered” the island, and the plans to develop it came to fruition, it was, she said in a widely lampooned interview, “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”
While I down a litre of antacid to deal with that bile-inducing word salad, let’s have a look at what she was really talking about.
Let’s start with the yacht trip that started it all.
Because Jared and Ivanka weren’t on just any yacht.
It was owned by Nat Rothschild.
Nat, being a Rothschild, is a billionaire. Of course.
He’s also very well connected. Of course.
He was an adviser to and investor in a company owned by Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska’s, Rusal.
Probably just a complete coincidence. But Deripaska has been described as a “person of interest in the Mueller investigation for his relationship with Paul Manafort.”
Deripaska has vigorously disputed any suggestion he interfered in the American elections.
Deripaska is sanctioned by Australia, Canada, the EU, the UK, and the US. In 2018, the US said that Deripaska “ha[d] been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering”.
In March 2019, Deripaska sued the United States, alleging that it had overstepped its legal bounds in imposing sanctions on him and made him the “latest victim” in the FBI probe into Russia’s interference in U.S. elections. As mentioned earlier, Deripaska denies those claims.
So, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were on board a superyacht owned by a member of one of the world’s wealthiest families, who also has had a close association with a Russian billionaire with quite a reputation.
Of course, I’m not for a minute suggesting any wrongdoing here.
Because rich people know other rich people who know other rich people, right?
Who can blame them for that?
Of course, on a rich person’s superyacht, there’s plenty of room.
So, it wasn’t just Jared, Ivanka and Nat Rothschild on deck sinking mojitos and gazing at the pristine Albanian coastline.
Ivanka’s account of “discovering” Sazan Island while meandering through the Adriatic might be a bit of a porky pie. Because according to Forbes, it doesn’t look like they were there by accident.
One of the other people who was there at some point was the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama. According to The Telegraph, Nat Rothschild “facilitated” the introduction.
Seems Ivanka and Jared weren’t just there on a five-star cruise. They were there to ink a deal.
Why Albania?
Who’s Richard Grenell you ask? Well, currently, he’s Jared’s “business broker” in the region. He is also Trump’s “presidential envoy for special missions,” and served as a wildly unpopular US ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term thanks to what the German media described as attempts to interfere in domestic politics.
Years before he had a stint as Acting Director of National Intelligence in 2020 during Trump’s first term, despite having no experience working in the intelligence community. CNN found that during his time as a paid consultant, he had worked for clients in Iran, China, Somalia, and Kazakhstan.
But it was during his time as special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations from 2019 to 2021 that Grenell got to know the Adriatic coastline.
According to The Guardian, Grenell is why Affinity is in Albania.
He’s been hard at work across the region. Why? Well, in an interview with the Financial Times in July 2024, Grenell said investments like another controversial real-estate deal he was involved with in Serbia are a way of bringing nations closer to the US.
Now, to the island.
As Ivanka put it, channelling her inner-Dora-the-Explorer: “We swam to the island, we went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the topand we were just captivated.”
Barefoot?
I call bullshit on that one. Because unless Ivanka has developed cloven hoofs (always a possibility), there’s no barefoot meandering on Sazan Island, because it’s home to thousands of abandoned military installations and littered with unexploded ordnance.
And this is where things start to get particularly interesting.
Every major Western power has, at some point or other, wanted to hold Sazan.
Have a look at a map of the Mediterranean and you’ll see why.
Control Sazan, and you control the Strait of Otranto; the 72-kilometre-wide entrance to the Adriatic Sea. That means access to the major ports of Trieste, Koper, Rijeka, Ravenna, and Venice, and the multi-billion-dollar trade that passes through them.
The Adriatic is the waterway that leads to the heart of Central and Eastern Europe. It is the only maritime access for Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania, and the waterway that carries cargo to Italy’s largest cargo port in Trieste.
On a clear day, you can see Sazan Island from Italy’s Puglia — the heel of its so-called boot. It’s just 85 km from Sazan to the Greek naval installations on Corfu, a NATO chokepoint.
That’s why Ivanka’s untouched paradise is anything but untouched.
When the Italians held the island from 1914-1943, they carved submarine pens, artillery positions and ammunition caves out of the rock, built a harbour on the island’s eastern side, and even built a villa for Mussolini’s personal use.
The Soviets got in on the act from the late 1940s to 1961, when they built the Pasha Liman naval base. Underground submarine pens and hangar spaces cut into the island’s cliffs are bomb-proof and safe from atomic attack.
During the reign of Albania’s totalitarian communist leader, Enver Hoxha, 3,600 one-man nuclear bunkers were built on Sazan, along with kilometres of underground tunnels connecting defensive positions. A garrison to house 3,000 soldiers was also built, along with a chemical weapons plant and nuclear-strike resistant underground bunkers.
“From there, I could control the Mediterranean to Gibraltar,”
That’s what the Cold War-era Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev (yes, he of the Cuban Missile Crisis) reportedly said of Sazan Island in 1958.
But this is nothing new. Sazan has been on the geopolitical hit list for thousands of years.
It was the site for an encounter between Philip V of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s dad), and the Romans. The Romans held Sazan as a crucial staging post to control access to the Italian mainland and, in the other direction, the Greek world.
Prior to the 20th century, the island passed between everyone from Charles I of Anjou to the Byzantine Empire, and from the Venetians to the Albanians, then to the Italians, and then to the Albanians again.
All of those conquests acknowledged the same thing.
Sazan is the keystone of the Adriatic Sea.
For western European powers, it is a defensive staging post to defend the heart of the continent.
As for those wanting to expand into continental Europe, Sazan is the first domino that needs to fall.
From Sazan, artillery can cover the narrow strait. A submarine fleet based on the island can easily move into the Mediterranean unobserved.
When Sazan Island was used as the parking garage for Soviet submarines, Western spy agencies called it “Russia’s secret Gibraltar.”
The key point?
NATO is going to be watching this very closely
Re-establishing a presence here has been a long-term objective for Russia.
Russia already has close ties to land-locked Serbia, which is not a NATO member. A Russian presence in Albania could threaten NATO by choking the Strait of Otranto, and the overland routes into central and eastern Europe.
It’s why keeping the strait open is key to NATO’s southern flank.
Control of the Strait gives the potential to monitor or restrict the shipping and naval activity in the Adriatic Sea and, beyond that, the Mediterranean.
Sazan Island is a springboard to launch an assault on Europe.
The Adriatic is also critical to Europe’s economy
94 per cent of Austria’s crude oil arrives via pipeline from Trieste, with Italy’s main port acknowledged as the main southern gateway for Central European supply chains.
Central European markets including the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia rely on container traffic through Trieste and Slovenia’s Koper. This has ramped up significantly during the war in Ukraine, with trade routes to Central and Eastern Europe shifting westward to the Adriatic.
Whoever sits on Sazan Island controls it all.
You only have to take a look at what Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz is doing to the world to understand what it would mean to choke the flow of Europe’s trade and energy supply in the Adriatic.
It’s not too big a stretch to say that Sazan Island’s geopolitical importance is greater now than ever.
Enter, China.
There’s a fantastic backstory with that one.
Albania’s Enver Hoxha fell out with Russia when Nikita Khrushchev’s revisionist policies after Stalin’s death in 1953 unpicked the cult-like authoritarian way of doing things that suited Hoxha just fine.
The other prominent Communist leader who didn’t want the status quo changing, was Mao.
By 1961, both China and Albania joined forces to make a stand against the Soviet Union and the US.
China became Albania’s biggest trading partner. It funnelled more than US$2 billion in loans and grants to cash-strapped Albania.
During that time, China sent 7,000 “advisers” to Albania. It also sent many millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment. But although Chinese officials were given access to Albania’s mainland military installations, there’s no record that they were taken to the jewel in Hoxha’s crown: Sazan Island.
When relations between the US and China began to soften in the 1970s, Hoxha broke off the relationship with China, leading to a period of isolation that saw it described as Europe’s North Korea.
Hoxha refused foreign loans, trade, or investment, maintaining a policy of self-reliance. It led to nationwide famine, and Albania’s economic collapse and the fall of the government in 1997.
“Debt-trap diplomacy”
Today, China’s so-called “debt-trap diplomacy” has seen it invest heavily in Albania’s regional neighbours, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia.
Albania, which has been aligned to US interests, has so far resisted.
But given that China’s Ambassador to Albania described Albania as a long-term “bosom friend” last year, my guess is that Beijing hasn’t given up on Albania just yet.
The takeaway from all this? The one consistent point throughout Albania’s modern history is that it held onto Sazan Island, no matter what.
The Soviets built the major fortifications on the island, and Albania kicked them out.
The Chinese threw money and military hardware at Albania and were never permitted to access Sazan.
The people at the helm have always understood how important Sazan is from a geopolitical perspective.
What, then, has changed?
Prime Minister, Edi Rama, also heads up Albania’s strategic investment committee, which overrode environmental concerns to push through Jared and Ivanka’s grand plans for Sazan Island.
That decision was made just two weeks after Trump won the 2024 election.
Rama also happens to be a founding member of Trump’s floundering Board of Peace.
When asked whether he was concerned about the potential controversy over selling a publicly-owned strategic stronghold to a private investment company, Rama said that Albania “can’t afford not to exploit a gift like Sazan,” and that he isn’t concerned about bad press “if it helps draw attention and bring investment.”
Well, he’s getting plenty of that.
Jared has a history with money from the Middle East.
Way back in 2015, before his father-in-law’s first time in office, he had hopes that a Qatari billionaire would bail him out of a monumental real estate fuck up that had him drowning in debt after the purchase of the devilishly numbered 666 Fifth Avenue building. The Qatari investor pulled out. It’s been suggested that the lingering resentment landed Qatar on the shit list during Trump’s first term in office.
It’s attracted the interest of American legislators. It’s worth quoting in detail from this report from the US Senate Committee of Finance.
“Senator Wyden launched an investigation of Kushner’s conflicts of interest in 2020 with an initial probe into whether Kushner advised Donald Trump to support a blockade against Qatar while Kushner Companies was seeking a billion-dollar bailout from Qatari, and possibly other Middle Eastern officials, for the property at 666 Fifth Avenue. His investigation expanded in 2024 to examine whether Affinity Partners, the firm Kushner launched immediately after the end of the first Trump administration, was in reality a compensation scheme designed in part to skirt federal disclosure requirements. In late 2024, unveiling evidence of Kushner engaging in political activity while on the payroll of the government of Saudi Arabia and other gulf state governments, Senator Wyden referred Kushner to the Department of Justice for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
As an aside, plenty of Affinity Partners’ cash has gone into Israeli startups, a first for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund.
But all is not well
Albanians have started calling Sazan, Ishulli i Trumpëve. “Trump Island.”
Days of protests against the project and government corruption have seen thousands of Albanians take to the streets. They’re being called the “Flamingo Revolution.”
But Rama is pushing on regardless.
The question remains whether or not the Albanian government as directed by Prime Minister Rama had the authority to transfer development rights to a foreign private equity vehicle owned by the American president’s son-in-law and bought with funds from Saudi investors.
Don’t bet against the flamingoes
I’m not in a position here to draw any firm conclusions from any of this. All I’m doing is adding to the enticing pile of breadcrumbs first cast by @alimcforever.
But you can be sure of one thing.
This is not the end of the story.
I love writing, and I love having readers.
Thanks so much for subscribing, reading, commenting and sharing.
