Mixing upper-crust British elegance with a touch of hip, a video on Instagram sets the scene: A blonde woman sashays out of a columned, red-brick Georgian mansion to the tune of British rapper Enny's Charge It, puts a suitcase in a silver Bentley sedan, and drives off into the twilight past a shimmering fountain.
This is the multimillion-dollar setting that Olga Savelyeva, wife of Russian upper parliament chamber member Dmitry Savelyev, who was recently detained on suspicion of hiring a would-be assassin to kill a former business partner, calls "my home."
Savelyeva's posts, including the rap-soundtracked video, show her 772,000 Instagram followers to what extent the family of a Russian politician can still enjoy the good life -- despite British sanctions for support of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine that bar the pro-Kremlin politician from visiting the home or financing their stay.
Systema, RFE/RL's Russian investigative unit, used a range of these posts from 2020 to 2024 to trace the featured residence to Wentworth Estate, a 710-hectare country-club community in the county of Surrey, about 26 miles southwest of London, that hosts an annual PGA golf championship and bills itself as "one of Europe's premier residential areas."
Among Wentworth's celebrity residents are Russian financier Pyotr Aven and the late tycoon and Kremlin insider-turned-foe Boris Berezovsky, both of whom have also been sanctioned, British rock stars Elton John and Gary Numan, and the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Whether Savelyev, 56, once ranked among Russia's richest parliamentarians, ever numbered among these glitterati is unclear.
His wife's Instagram posts from the home, Castellane, a four-story red-brick villa with white columns, do not show the politician.
Nor are they likely to.
On August 2, Russian law enforcement detained Savelyev, a former first deputy chairman of the ruling United Russia party's faction in the Federation Council in connection with the alleged murder plot, which the Federal Security Service claimed it thwarted; nobody was killed.
The upper chamber, where he has represented the Tula region since 2016, stripped Savelyev of his immunity from prosecution. His United Russia membership has been suspended, the daily Kommersant reported.
Savelyev, whose legislative term expires in September, has been in parliament since 2000. He first secured a seat in the lower chamber after losing his post as CEO of state-controlled pipeline giant Transneft.
Savelyeva has never mentioned Castellane on her Instagram page, but a Systema analysis concluded that many of the photos she has posted on social media were taken there.
In the caption of a December 10, 2023, photo that showed her seated before a recessed fireplace ahead of a trip to a Swiss medical spa, Savelyeva, 42, referred to the scene as "my home." Another post, from April 29, marked Orthodox Palm Sunday with a photo of Savelyeva and her three sons seated in a room that resembles a photo from British interior design firm Ps4House's online list of projects.
The last post from the mansion on Savelyeva's Instagram account dates from June.
A 2011 profile of Wentworth Estate and Golf Course by Country Life, an upmarket British periodical, described Castellane as "spectacular," with "all the requisite 'bells and whistles.'" Those ranged from "an indoor swimming pool and spa complex" to a "cinema room" and six "luxurious bedroom suites," including a "palatial master suite with 'his and her' bathrooms and dressing rooms."
At the time, the British real estate agency Knight Frank estimated Castellane's market price at 12.5 million pounds ($19.5 million), Country Life reported.
The financial arrangements under which members of the Savelyev family may be living in the home are not clear.
In 2023, a Wentworth Estate house across the road from Castellane sold for 11.5 million pounds (about $15.1 million), according to the British real estate database Varbes.
In his most recent official income declaration, from 2021, Savelyev said he and his wife had a joint annual income of nearly 239 million rubles ($2.7 million), according to Deklarator, an online database about Russian public figures.
Savelyev also declared a British property, no address given, but the size he reported was 2 1/2 times smaller than Castellane, which has an area of about 1,250 square meters, according to builder Bole Construction.
As of the date of this article's publication, Britain's HM Land Registry did not list any of the Savelyevs as Castellane's owner.
Since 2017, the registered owner has been Olga Kroon, whose listed address is in Meilen, Switzerland, just south of Zurich, the Swiss financial hub.
The official British business registry Companies House also identifies Kroon as the owner of Amaffi London Limited, part of an international perfumery network whose founder, Marina Amaffi, was named by the investigative media outlet Proyekt in 2020 as the girlfriend of sanctioned tycoon Eduard Khudainatov, a former CEO of state-run Russian oil firm Rosneft.
Kroon practices law in Switzerland under the name Olga Boltenko, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Monthly rents listed by one British realtor for Wentworth Estate range from 11,500 to 16,000 pounds ($14,660 to $20,390).
As a sanctioned individual, Savelyev's finances cannot be used for this purpose, under British regulations, and if the family is renting the home, it is unclear where the rent money comes from. In 2021, Olga Savelyeva had an annual declared income of nearly 61 million rubles ($827,330).
Systema attempted to contact the Savelyevs about Castellane through a jewelry factory the family owns in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod but did not receive a response.
