Growing up as an American in Russia means that I get asked a lot of questions about my upbringing: “Do Russians really drink that much vodka?” (Yes, if not more.) “Were there bears on the streets?” (None that I saw.) “Is it dangerous?” (Well, it depends.) I attended a Russian public school for most of my formative years, meaning I was immersed in the local language, society, and culture from a young age. But growing up an American in Russia also meant that I was an expat, an immigrant, a third-culture kid—the Other. Eventually, my parents moved me from Russian public school #1239 to the Anglo-American School of Moscow, an internationally facing school operated in tandem by the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

On December 29, 2016, Barack Obama announced that he would be ramping up sanctions and kicking 35 Russian diplomats out of the United States in response to reports of Russian interference and meddling in the 2016 election. Historically, any diplomatic action or expulsion has warranted an equal and opposite tit-for-tat response. That same day, a high school friend sent me a CNN Breaking News tweet reporting that an unnamed U.S. official had told CNN that Putin planned on responding by shutting down the Anglo-American School of Moscow. My old school.

Then something unusual happened: The very next day, the Kremlin came forward saying that it had no such plans. Moreover, in one final act of defiance against Obama, Putin announced that he would hold off on any and all negotiations until then–President-elect Trump took office. The mortar shell was a dud. My classmates, friends, teachers, and I, it seemed, had fallen victim to the fake-news epidemic. My entire newsfeed was awash with posts bemoaning people's distrust and frustration with the mainstream media.

Recent events, however, have revealed that December 29 was also the very same day that then-soon-to-be and now former national security adviser Michael Flynn called Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak five times to discuss the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia.

The Steele Dossier

Earlier that month on December 7, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his right-hand man, Igor Sechin, announced that they had successfully sold a 19.5 percent stake in Russia’s largest state-owned oil company, Sechin’s Rosneft, for a whopping 10.2 billion euros (or $11 billion). Sechin bragged that it was the largest privatization in global oil and gas in 2016.

One of Vladimir Putin’s closest deputies, Sechin is ostensibly an oil tsar whose salary has afforded him a tremendous amount of clout. He has a hostile relationship with the press and has sued multiple outlets for publishing stories about his lifestyle. In the past, Rosneft has held extensive business ties with ExxonMobil—the very same ExxonMobil that until recently was headed up by now Secretary of State (and recipient of Putin’s Order of Friendship) Rex Tillerson. Exxon and Rosneft had arranged for a $500 billion offshore-drilling venture as recently as 2012, but Obama’s 2014 sanctions during the Ukraine crisis clamped down on business dealings with Russia, effectively kneecapping the deal and costing Exxon $1 billion in the process. Needless to say, crude barons like Tillerson and Sechin both stand to do gangbusters, whether directly or indirectly, from the lifting of economic sanctions. (It should be noted that White House cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, also counts Rosneft among its clients.)

How to Impeach a U.S. President, Explained You have questions. We have answers.

When BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier in January, the media was naturally drawn to the salacious details (hotels! hookers! golden showers!), but beyond the juicy bits there were also stories of backroom meetings between powerful figures in Russian politics and business. In the immediate aftermath, Trump dismissed the dossier as “crap” and outright refused to answer questions from outlets that published and retransmitted the dossier’s contents. Perhaps most telling, though, was Trump’s decision to repeatedly ignore and deflect questions about whether members of his campaign had made contact with Russian officials during the election—contact that has since been confirmed by intelligence officials and reported by The New York Times. U.S. investigators have since corroborated certain details, namely that, as CNN reports, “some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier."