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Over the past few years, the popularity of charcuterie boards has expanded from restaurant appetizers to holiday get-togethers and everything in between. The infinitely customizable assortment of meats, cheeses, fruits, breads and spreads can add a pop of color and flavor to your table and provide many options for your family and guests. Do not be intimidated by this sometimes, difficult to pronounce word; there is no set recipe, which makes for a creative project each time! What is Charcuterie? Charcuterie is a French term for the art of preparing and assembling cured meat and meat products. Charcuterie-style meat and cheese boards have become very popular outside of France, and this concept has evolved to include many foods besides meat, along with a variety of presentation variations and ingredient themes. Charcuterie cones, skewers, jarcuterie (layered in a small mason jar) and dessert boards (although not technically charcuterie) are a few examples of this expanding trend.

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JERSEYVILLE - The Jerseyville City Council denied an application to rezone 935 South State Street at their meeting last Tuesday. This is Unit 140 of the Jerseyville Mall, the former location of Security Finance between Dollar General and Big Boy’s Donuts. The applicant, Cindy Brown Kolb, sought to re-zone the location from B-3 to B-3 with Special Use for Alcohol, with the intended use as a café and lunch restaurant with alcohol and video gaming machines. The Planning & Zoning Board did not recommend the application’s approval to the City Council because the establishment had not met city ordinances regarding the percentage of sales-to-food ratio and amount of space available at the location. Essentially, the concern from the city was that the business would appear more like a gaming business with a café attached, rather than the other way around, which led to a response from Brown Kolb herself. “It’s not the intent to just be gaming. We do intend

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by Lulu Ramadan, Mike Reicher and Taylor Blatchford, The Seattle Times

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Donna Green hit her breaking point last summer, six months into her job as the top administrator at the Northwest School of Innovative Learning.

She had grudgingly accepted when her request for classroom computers was ignored and a furniture order for what she called an “embarrassingly barren” campus was answered with plastic folding tables. She’d worried that her staff was inexperienced but had figured her decade in special education would help fill that void.

But then her corporate bosses told her to cut the hours of staff already struggling to serve high-needs children.

To Green, it meant that Northwest SOIL, Washington state’s largest publicly funded private school for children with disabilities, would fail to deliver on the promises it had made to school districts that send it more than 100 students and millions of dollars a year.

So she sat at her desk after classes let out for the day in August 2021 and typed up a resignation letter to the school’s owner, effective immediately.

“It is truly like living in the dark ages,” she wrote about the school, detailing its cost cutting at the expense of students. “I cannot ethically or morally be a part of this any longer.”

Northwest SOIL’s corporate owner, Universal Health Services, has for years skimped on staffing and basic resources while pressuring managers to enroll more students than the staff could handle, an investigation by The Seattle Times and ProPublica has found. The psychiatric hospital chain touted its first acquisition of special education schools in 2005 as a “comfortable fit” with its businesses, and Northwest SOIL staffers said they saw the profit motive drive day-to-day decisions.

Northwest School of Innovative Learning’s Tacoma campus (Ramon Dompor/The Seattle Times)

School districts pay programs such as Northwest SOIL, called nonpublic agencies, to provide specialized instruction for students whose needs can’t be met in traditional public schools. But dozens of complaints filed with the state and school districts in recent years, along with interviews with 26 former administrators, teachers and assistants, show that Northwest SOIL received public money without providing the services or education that its students needed — or that taxpayers paid for.

Northwest SOIL collects about $68,000 in annual tuition per student — more than triple the average per-pupil cost for a K-12 student in Washington — while a student with the highest needs can bring the school as much as $115,000 a year, all paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Last week, The Times and ProPublica reported that the state’s failure to regulate this corner of Washington’s special education system had allowed the school to operate for years with little to no curriculum and with staff so poorly trained that they often resorted to restraining and isolating students.

Former Staff Describe Conditions at Two Northwest SOIL Campuses

With no teaching credentials or experience, Kelly Nilsson said she was put in charge of an entire classroom at Northwest SOIL’s Tacoma campus. Jami Visaya, a special education teacher for 15 years, was shocked at the lack of curriculum and resources at the Redmond campus. Their experiences offer a look into how Northwest SOIL runs its schools for vulnerable students.

(Lauren Frohne and Ramon Dompor / The Seattle Times)

UHS, which earned nearly $1 billion in profit last year, has long faced criticism that it squeezes patient care to maximize profit at its more than 400 hospitals and residential facilities nationwide.

While the company’s residential youth treatment centers have drawn national attention recently as federal regulators investigate abuse allegations, very little media or regulatory scrutiny has been directed at UHS’ special education day schools across the country. But The Times and ProPublica found that the company settled at least two lawsuits alleging it had provided insufficient staffing at schools in California or billed public agencies for services it didn’t provide, though the company didn’t admit wrongdoing in either case.

UHS is one player in a small but growing market of special education and disability services, as investors recognize the potential for profit from insurance, public education funding and other sources. A February report by a private equity watchdog group noted a flurry of recent corporate acquisitions of autism service providers. One national broker marketing the sale of a special-needs private school group touted it as a good investment and “extremely profitable.”

“There’s a lot of money at stake here,” said Kathleen Hulgin, a University of Cincinnati associate professor who studies the funding of private special education schools. Companies know they can depend on steady revenue with a “stable, publicly funded system.”

Northwest SOIL collected at least $38 million in tax dollars over the five school years ending in 2021. While all of its tuition comes from public sources, it’s unclear how much profit the school made, because it doesn’t have to report its spending to the state.

In 2019, a speech language pathologist visited Northwest SOIL’s Tacoma campus and documented a school in disarray. In the auditorium, she said, there was broken furniture and other items strewn about. (Courtesy of Andrea Duffield)

Fairfax Hospital, the UHS subsidiary that owns Northwest SOIL, defended the program in a statement to the Times and ProPublica, saying, “We strongly deny any allegation that we understaff and/or pressure staff to increase admissions in order to maximize profits.” UHS said it had no comment beyond Fairfax’s statement.

Fairfax also said it “strongly refutes claims regarding the intentional billing of services not provided” and rejected the claims in Green’s letter, calling it “a gross misrepresentation of our standards and the quality of educational services.” The school said it recently brought in new education materials and computers, and it added, “To say that the school didn’t offer the students a basic curriculum or textbooks is simply untrue.”

But Green said what she saw at Northwest SOIL went against what she had envisioned when she took the job.

Northwest SOIL — with three campuses in Tacoma, Redmond and Tumwater — relied on a bare-bones staff that earned far less than they could have at local school districts, Green said in an interview, making it difficult to recruit and retain qualified educators.

“There was no education whatsoever,” said Adriene Taulbee, a recreational therapist at Northwest SOIL’s Tacoma campus from 2019 to 2021. “It’s a moneymaking scheme for Fairfax, and the kids are the ones that are paying the price for this.”

Skimping on Staff

A 2009 Northwest SOIL yearbook shows the school once hewed more closely to Green’s vision of what a specialized school could do. It features photographs of classrooms staffed with one teacher and two assistants each, with class sizes no larger than 10. Smiling children pose in front of shelves brimming with books and walls decorated with posters and art.

Though Northwest SOIL has long struggled to keep staff and used restraint and isolation on students, at times it had more resources. In its early years, the school strived for a “full holistic approach, treating these kids as part of a family,” said Tamara Zundel, who launched the school in 2000 as its first director.

But after UHS bought Fairfax Hospital and Northwest SOIL in 2010 as part of its $3 billion acquisition of a psychiatric hospital chain, there was little special education training for staff and hardly any textbooks or supplies, according to interviews with former employees.

“They had one room with like some ratty textbooks, maybe three per subject,” said Ellen Grover, who taught at the Tacoma campus from 2016 to 2018. “That was just kind of the expectation — that you work with what we have, which is nothing.”

A teacher resource room at the Tacoma campus. “The entire space was a mess and not a functional workspace,” the speech pathologist wrote in a report sent to the Shelton School District. (Courtesy of Andrea Duffield)

A Times analysis of Northwest SOIL’s staff lists from 2017 to 2022 found that the school’s three campuses — which serve students from kindergarten through high school — averaged only one certified special education teacher for every 18 students.

In contrast, Seattle Public Schools’ latest union contract requires higher staffing ratios for students with moderate to intensive needs: one special education teacher and three education assistants in every classroom with 10 elementary students or 13 secondary school students. (Maintaining these ratios was a flash point of the city’s teachers’ strike in September.)

While some Northwest SOIL campuses had staffing ratios that at times approached Seattle’s standard, the Tacoma campus was a consistent outlier. The widest gap occurred in 2017 when the campus enrolled 106 students but had just two special education teachers, a Times and ProPublica review of state records found. In those records, Northwest SOIL listed four other people as special education teachers even though they lacked such a credential.

"You’d be surprised how much simple — I’m talking very basic — training on special education was lacking,” Green said in an interview. “If you don’t have the right staff, you cannot be promising that you can take in these children.”

A Rochester School District official visited Northwest SOIL in 2018 and pointed out the lack of academics. (Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction document obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

Fairfax Hospital and Northwest SOIL said in a statement that it is not “meaningful” to compare the school to unionized public schools that serve different populations. Christopher West, who took over as CEO of the hospital in January, said that, under his tenure, the school made a push to hire more special education teachers. As of June, the school had 10 certified special education teachers serving 119 students.

A Times and ProPublica analysis also revealed that, at times, the school relied heavily on emergency substitute certifications — a category that allows people who don’t have teaching degrees to fill temporary gaps.

From 2017 to 2022, an average of one-fifth of the staffers at the Tacoma campus, the school’s largest, had emergency substitute certifications. Some staff worked under such certifications for as long as eight years. Others taught even after their certifications had expired, state records show.

These students “require highly specialized intervention, and unless you have people there and the resources, the chances are they are just being warehoused,” said Vanessa Tucker, a special education professor at Pacific Lutheran University near Tacoma.

Low pay contributed to a constant churn in staff and drew mostly underqualified candidates, former staffers said. Green said the school offered teachers with special education certification a starting salary of $45,000. Base pay for a first-year teacher in Tacoma schools is about $62,000, while special education teachers typically earn more.

At age 21, Kelly Nilsson had no education experience or credentials, but she was hired in 2017 as an educational assistant at Northwest SOIL’s Tacoma campus and assigned to a room with as many as 10 teenage boys with extreme behavioral challenges. After a few months, the class’s teacher left, and Nilsson was put in charge.

“They do not pay you well enough for what you’re doing,” said Nilsson, who said her starting wage was under $13 an hour.

Kelly Nilsson was 21 when she was hired as an educational assistant at Northwest SOIL. Shown here with her baby, she said she regrets being part of a school that “might not have been doing things right, doing things that the kids deserved.” (Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times)

Nilsson, who said she led the class for eight months before resigning in 2019, described multiple kids punching and breaking windows and staff frequently calling the police when children ran away from the campus.

“The kids aren’t bad,” she said, but the school, instead of helping them cope with their behaviors, often worsened their problems.

UHS denied staff requests for furniture and education material, former employees told The Times and ProPublica. Even school meals were paltry: typically cold hospital food shipped in from Fairfax, former staffers said.

“They can only get one of everything — one burnt microwaveable pizza and a milk and a bag of carrots — when this is a growing 13-year-old boy,” said Jami Visaya, a special education teacher who quit in 2018 after 18 months at Northwest SOIL’s Redmond campus. “Why couldn't we get them healthier food?”

In its statement, the school said it strives to supply “proper nourishment and healthy meal choices.”

In a 2016 employee review, Northwest SOIL’s director lauded an administrator for increasing enrollment and reducing costs. (Washington Department of Health investigative file obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

Dave Beling, a former director at the school, lauded employees who brought in more students while spending less money. In a 2016 employee review of a top administrator, Beling set a target of getting 50 students enrolled, according to Washington State Department of Health records. He also praised the administrator for “reducing cost” while “increasing student census by double.”

Beling, who worked at the school until 2020, did not respond to interview requests.

His LinkedIn profile describes one of his accomplishments at Northwest SOIL as overseeing “operational improvements which resulted in improved profit margins.”

“Kids Seem to Be a Paycheck”

Lynette Wilson’s son spent two years at Northwest SOIL’s Tacoma campus. Most days, she said, he surfed YouTube videos instead of learning.

Resources for parents navigating nonpublic agencies in Washington

At Northwest SOIL, he regressed, losing reading and communication skills. Wilson withdrew him from the school in 2021 after he returned home with bruises on his face, chest and back. She reported it to the police, but the investigation faltered when her son, who has severe autism, couldn’t say what had happened and the school couldn’t explain the injuries.

“It was like glorified babysitting,” Wilson said. “How do you not know what’s happening to your students?”

In a statement, Fairfax Hospital declined to answer specific questions about the incident, but emphasized that police investigated and found no wrongdoing.

Lynette Wilson’s son came home from Northwest SOIL one day in 2019 with what appeared to be burns and bruises on his back, shoulders and forehead, his family and group home reported to police. (Courtesy of Lynette Wilson)

Wilson’s son should have had a one-on-one aide, which was required in the contract between Northwest SOIL and his home district, but the school shuffled around staff to fill holes, she said. Northwest SOIL typically charges districts more than $3,000 a month per student for such aides in addition to more than $5,000 a month for tuition.

Several former employees said one-on-one aides often took on the role of classroom assistants for overwhelmed teachers, instead of acting as aides to a specific child.

It was a complaint Green raised in her resignation letter. “It felt unethical, honestly, like school districts were paying that money, but the company was prepared to ignore that,” Green said in an interview.

Fairfax Hospital denied leaving children without one-on-one aides but said such aides “do help out in the classroom.”

Green’s letter was one of thousands of pages of records about Northwest SOIL obtained by The Times and ProPublica through public records requests to seven state agencies and 45 school districts.

Donna Green resigned as director of Northwest SOIL’s three campuses in August 2021 after just six months in the job. (Tacoma Public Schools records obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

Parents and school district special education officials brought similar complaints to the state, asking for investigations or seeking advice on what to do.

In 2018, a parent of a fourth grader from Rochester, just south of Olympia, called state education officials begging for attention because her son was “not getting the help he needs or deserves” at Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus, state records show. The school was short-staffed, and the boy wasn’t learning much, the parent said.

“I feel like this is not being ran as a school but as a business,” the parent told Washington’s education department. “Kids seem to be a paycheck.”

A parent called the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2018 to report that her son wasn’t getting a one-on-one aide at Northwest SOIL. (OSPI document obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

A month later, Rochester’s special education director, Laura Staley, alerted state officials that Northwest SOIL had billed the district for services it hadn’t provided.

The school told the district it needed to pay an additional $3,000 a month for a one-on-one aide for a Rochester elementary school student, describing him as the “highest need” student in the program. Four months into the agreement, Staley asked how the aide was doing. The school acknowledged that it had only recently hired one.

Fairfax Hospital didn’t specifically respond to Rochester’s allegation but said “any discrepancies related to improper billing are unacceptable and are thoroughly investigated.”

Top special education officials from the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction visited Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus in 2018 after a flurry of complaints, including the one from Rochester.

The state later notified Northwest SOIL that it was delaying renewal of the school’s annual application to accept students until its owners turned in a financial audit proving that “revenues provided by school districts are being used to provide the services” for students.

Scott Raub, the agency’s administrator for these private schools, told The Times and ProPublica the notification was merely a form letter to remind Northwest SOIL that it was required to provide an audit once every three years and did not indicate that the state intended to investigate the allegations.

UHS responded by sending a companywide annual report, which included a financial audit that outlined the multibillion-dollar corporation’s revenue and spending in all its facilities across the country. The 300-page report doesn’t mention Northwest SOIL.

Still, OSPI approved the school’s renewal, as it has every year since.

State Superintendent Chris Reykdal defended OSPI’s renewal of Northwest SOIL’s annual applications, saying in an interview that the agency’s role is limited by state law. The system puts the onus of responding to problems on the dozens of school districts that contract to send students to Northwest SOIL — even though they may not be aware of problems flagged by other districts.

A Push for Profits and Referrals

Before UHS acquired its first therapeutic day schools in 2005, the company — the largest operator of psychiatric hospitals in the country — had no previous experience operating this type of specialty school.

By expanding its behavioral health footprint into education, executives noted, the company would have opportunities to refer children “up the chain” to more acute settings like residential treatment centers or inpatient care.

“We think it’s an extremely comfortable fit with our existing businesses,” Steve Filton, the company’s chief financial officer, said in an earnings call that year.

Fairfax Hospital no longer has an adolescent inpatient unit, but Northwest SOIL said that, even when that unit was open, it rarely referred students to Fairfax. “To suggest that NWSOIL is in business to serve as a referral source for other behavioral health service lines is baseless and inaccurate,” the school said in a statement.

Before long, some of the same problems now happening in Washington surfaced at the company’s schools in California. UHS ran its California campuses with a “skeletal crew” of unqualified teachers and a minimum number of aides, former employees alleged in a lawsuit that they filed against UHS in 2008. Staff lacked proper training, they said, and relied heavily on restraints to control students. UHS denied it violated any laws and agreed to a $3.5 million settlement.

Former UHS employees in California and a past student filed a separate whistleblower lawsuit in 2009 on behalf of the state, accusing UHS of fraudulently billing education agencies. The company staffed classes with unqualified aides and falsified attendance records, the lawsuit alleged. UHS settled the case for $4.25 million without admitting wrongdoing.

“They were warehousing the kids and not providing sufficient education,” Michael Sorgen, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Sacramento Bee in 2010. “They make a lot of money by charging all this money for educational services. I think it’s a nationwide scam.” (Sorgen was unavailable for comment for this story.)

Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus (Ramon Dompor/The Seattle Times)

UHS shut down at least eight of its California schools as the whistleblower case proceeded and closed at least three others within a year of the settlement.

Unlike in Washington, California has extensive requirements for operating private schools that accept public school students with disabilities. California requires its schools to provide attendance records proving that students showed up on days outlined in billing statements. California also requires a teacher with special education credentials in every classroom and a specific ratio of students per teacher, typically 14-to-1.

Washington has no such requirements. The state calls for only one special education teacher per school and collects no data on attendance or academic progress at these private schools. And the state has afforded UHS wide latitude to run its program with little intervention.

When UHS lobbied to bring a similar system to Alaska in 2016, lawmakers balked.

UHS owns a psychiatric hospital in Anchorage called North Star Behavioral Health, which provides patients with access to education. The Anchorage School District employs the teachers.

Six years ago, UHS pushed for a bill that would have allowed North Star and other psychiatric facilities to build education programs and hire their own teachers, essentially taking that control — and significant taxpayer money — away from school districts. North Star argued that the bill would result in more academic instruction and improve students’ transitions back to traditional schools.

The arrangement would have given UHS access to a deep pool of state funding reserved for students with some of the most severe disabilities — as much as $80,000 a year per student, said Patrick Reinhart, the interim executive director of the Alaska Governor’s Council on Disabilities and Special Education.

The governor’s council was “pressured heavily” by North Star, Reinhart said, though the proposal faced pushback from disability rights advocates. The council initially supported the bill, Reinhart said, but soon “realized it was primarily a money grab.” The bill died in the Legislature, never advancing out of committee.

UHS declined to comment on the Alaska legislation.

In Washington, Reykdal, the state superintendent, said state lawmakers could step in and say to OSPI, “We want you to have more aggressive oversight over private providers.” He said, “That is a legitimate policy question.”

Green, the former director, thought the state already had the oversight power it needed. When she submitted the school’s application for renewal in 2021, staffing at the three campuses was thin. Even though the state requires only one special education teacher per school, Green found it troubling that her staff had only six certified special education teachers for 120 students. She thought the application would surely be flagged.

“I turned it in thinking ‘Oh boy, I’m going to get a call, someone is going to say something,’” she said. OSPI never commented on the staffing levels.

“I just really feel like there’s a major gap here,” Green said. “These are our neediest kids. I felt like there was no one looking out for them.”

Manuel Villa of The Seattle Times and Haru Coryne of ProPublica contributed data reporting, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica contributed research.

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by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica; Will Fitzgibbon, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; and Eva Herscowitz, Hannah Feuer and Michael Korsh, Medill Investigative Lab

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

BUDVA, Montenegro — Near a teeming town square along the Adriatic coast, where ancient city walls surround the ruins of bygone empires and shops and churches rise over the sea, Russia’s newly appointed representative to this tiny Balkan nation opened his consulate office.

Boro Djukic, the first honorary consul named by Russia in Montenegro, was supposed to use his prestigious post to champion cultural ties and the interests of local Russian business owners and tourists — a benevolent bridge between the two countries.

Instead, the middle-aged former bureaucrat took on an aggressive role in Montenegro’s politics, backing a movement that aimed to empower allies of the Kremlin and working to undermine the fragile government of a country considered a valuable U.S. ally in a turbulent region.

Russia’s former honorary consul in Montenegro maintained a consulate in Budva, a picturesque town on the Adriatic coast. (Matthew Orr)

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While honorary consul from 2014 to 2018, Djukic helped found a hard-line, Kremlin-backed political party that sought to force the country’s withdrawal from NATO. When the party needed a headquarters, he went one step further, offering his family home in a posh neighborhood in Podgorica, Montenegro’s capital.

A sign near the front door read: “Residence of the Honorary Consul of the Russian Federation.”

Boro Djukic (Illustration by Matt Rota for ProPublica and ICIJ)

Djukic was part of a faithful network of honorary consuls embedded by the Russian government around the world that has supported President Vladimir Putin amid his most contentious military and political campaigns, including the February invasion of Ukraine that has killed or injured thousands of civilians, an investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found.

Under Putin, Russia has become an enthusiastic supporter of the largely unregulated system of international diplomacy, which for centuries has empowered private citizens in their home countries to serve as liaisons for foreign nations.

Experts say Russia is using honorary consuls as part of a strategy to move public opinion in the Kremlin’s favor and, over time, weaken pro-Western governments, particularly in European countries vulnerable to influence. In one high-profile case, intelligence officials tied two consuls in North Macedonia to an alleged Russian propaganda campaign to destabilize a stretch of southeastern Europe.

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In Montenegro, Ljubomir Filipovic, a political scientist and former deputy mayor of Budva, said Djukic helped spread chaos and dysfunction in a country that has struggled to establish an identity since it became a sovereign nation in 2006.

“He went beyond what an ordinary honorary consul would do. He went even beyond what an official diplomat would do,” said Filipovic, who tracked Djukic’s activities as consul. “The intention was to damage the social fabric of Montenegro — and he did that.”

Honorary consuls were once deployed primarily by smaller countries unable to afford career diplomats in critical foreign outposts. The arrangement is now used by most of the world’s governments as a way to further their interests in regions where embassies are far away or too costly to maintain.

Under international treaty, honorary consuls receive some of the same privileges and protections provided to career diplomats, including the ability to move consular bags across borders without inspection and maintain archives and correspondence that cannot be searched.

Consuls, however, are widely expected to be unobtrusive advocates, volunteers who focus on cultural and economic ties without proselytizing the political views of the governments they represent. “Apolitical in their words and deeds,” according to guidelines approved by an international association of consuls.

Many consuls fulfill that role honorably: promoting industry, the arts and academia on behalf of their appointing countries; assisting stranded or sick travelers; and helping with visa applications.

But a global investigation led by ProPublica and ICIJ identified at least 500 current and former honorary consuls who have been accused of crimes or become embroiled in controversy, including some who exploited their status for profit, to advance criminal activities or to dodge law enforcement. The scale of the abuse emerged in a review of thousands of pages of court documents, government reports and media accounts from dozens of countries.

Russia, which for decades did not appoint honorary consuls, has increasingly leveraged the system in service of its political agenda. Inside Russia, several of Putin’s closest associates secured their own honorary consul appointments — with the privileges that come with the title — and formed an advocacy group called The League of Honorary Consuls. Outside Russia, the government has appointed honorary consuls on six continents, quadrupling their number to more than 80 in the first decade after Putin took office.

Consuls appointed by the Russian government have denounced Western sanctions and criticized NATO. An American who served as Russia’s honorary consul in Denver traveled to Crimea several years after Russia invaded Ukraine and seized the peninsula. She visited a museum and posed for photos, while the U.S. State Department reported that torture, arbitrary arrests, ethnic violence and corruption were rampant there under Russian rule.

This year, as Russian rockets fell on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, at least two honorary consuls representing Russia spoke out again. “I’m sorry he did not do it sooner,” one consul, Constantine van Vloten in the Netherlands, declared in support of Putin.

A consul in Spain appeared on Russian state television to decry violence he attributed to the “Ukrainian terrorist state.” Before he was named consul, Pedro Mouriño Uzal traveled to Crimea as an independent observer and vouched for the “absolute normality and tranquility” of a 2014 referendum, widely condemned as illegitimate, to incorporate the region into Russia.

Uzal told ProPublica and ICIJ that criticism of the vote was unfounded and that Ukraine has “joined the ranks of terrorist organizations that attack civilian infrastructure and take lives of civilians.” Van Vloten said in a statement that he has no personal relationship with Putin and that he wished the military operation had started sooner “so that it could end sooner the civil war.”

Several of Russia’s honorary consuls quit to protest the invasion. But others have remained in place even as countries in Europe and Asia expelled Russia’s career diplomats.

Though Russia does not release lists of its honorary consuls, ProPublica and ICIJ were able to identify consuls appointed by Russia who have served in at least 45 countries.

One is a hotel and nightclub owner in Mexico whose personal security guard is accused by Mexican officials of meeting at the consul’s properties with leaders of an organized crime gang known as The Russians, according to a 2021 military intelligence report.

Another was a businessman in Equatorial Guinea whom Russia named an honorary consul in 2011 after he was imprisoned for selling cruise missiles — capable of carrying nuclear warheads — to Iran and China. He is no longer a consul and could not be reached for comment. The consul in Mexico did not respond to requests for comment.

In Montenegro, Djukic remained a consul for about four years. In 2018, the government stripped him of his title reportedly as part of a coordinated response by governments, unrelated to Djukic, to the poisoning of a former Russian military intelligence officer who had become a British spy. Russian agents were accused of carrying out the attack; Moscow denied any involvement.

Djukic, who did not respond to requests for comment, has denied acting improperly as consul. “I am not a Russian citizen, but as a person who loves Russia, I represented it in the best possible way,” he told local media after Montenegro terminated his diplomatic status.

This year, one day after the invasion of Ukraine, Djukic denounced NATO and praised Putin on social media.

Putin, he wrote between heart emojis, stopped “American domination over the whole world.”

Putin’s Circle

Honorary consuls are nominated by foreign governments but serve at the discretion of their home countries. There are thousands of consuls, though no one has a more precise estimate because dozens of governments don’t publicly release the names of their appointees.

Under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, consuls are entitled to a coveted series of benefits that can include special identity cards, passports and license plates. They cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in the official course of duty and their offices, and correspondence and consular bags are protected from searches.

For decades, what was then the Soviet Union declined to appoint consuls overseas or approve requests by foreign governments for consuls on Soviet soil. Soviet leaders saw honorary consuls as nothing more than “bourgeois spies,” scholar Geoff Berridge wrote in his widely cited book about diplomatic law and practice.

Soon after Putin became president in 2000, however, Russia fully embraced the honorary consul system. The title afforded protections and diplomatic credentials to a new class of well-connected elites.

ProPublica and ICIJ found a who’s who list of Russian power brokers and oligarchs — in mining, steel, gas, oil and banking — who have had honorary consul status.

In 2002, four of Putin’s associates founded the League of Honorary Consuls. Little is publicly known about the group, but Russian government documents show that the league spends donations on the “defense and support” of consuls.

The organization is based in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, where he was a leading liaison to foreign diplomats during his rise to national power.

A 2010 photo of sanctioned Russian businessman Yury Kovalchuk in St. Petersburg (Alexander Nikolayev/AFP/Interpress/Getty Images)

The founders secured their own honorary consul appointments: one from Brazil, another from Bangladesh, a third from Seychelles. Putin himself reportedly recommended that the government of Thailand appoint as consul the fourth organizer, Yury Kovalchuk, an oligarch the U.S. government has called “a personal banker” to Putin and other senior government officials.

In 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made clear that his government supported the honorary consul system. Meeting with the leaders of some of the smallest countries in the Pacific region at the United Nations in New York, Lavrov announced: “We are actively using the institution of honorary consuls. … I think we should expand the practice.”

ProPublica and ICIJ found that at least nine current and former consuls in Russia have been sanctioned for their reported ties to Putin or for supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine. That includes Kovalchuk, whom U.S. authorities blacklisted in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea and again in March after the latest attack on Ukraine.

Kovalchuk did not respond to requests for comment.

Under Putin, Russia also nominated a cadre of its own consuls around the world. Some were Russian expatriates, others influential local magnates of culture and industry.

Russian regulations for honorary consuls in the late 1990s said the volunteer diplomats would promote “friendly relations … the expansion of economic, trade, scientific, cultural and other ties.”

In Montenegro, Djukic went much further.

“He’s Everywhere”

Born in Podgorica in 1970, Djukic grew up eating his mother’s dumplings and borscht. His father worked for a time as a director of a tobacco factory and later moved to the Soviet Union.

In 1989, with the Soviet bloc unraveling, Djukic went to Moscow. Then 19 and knowing little Russian, he struggled to find his way.

“My first impressions were not very joyful,” he later told a Russian-language newspaper in Montenegro. “It was like being thrown into the past by a time machine. … I ended up in a half-starved Moscow with dirty, broken streets, empty counters, shops without shop windows. People were driving old cars.”

After working for an Austrian trading company, he returned in 1997 to Montenegro and found work as an adviser at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2013, Ukraine named him an honorary consul in Montenegro.

Djukic said in an interview at the time that he wanted to give back, helping Ukrainian tourists with visa problems and families with emergencies while on vacation, routine duties of honorary consuls.

“It’s time to give from yourself, to do useful things,” he said.

That consulship ended; Djukic said only that the decision was tied to leadership changes after Russia annexed Crimea in early 2014.

He was soon appointed a consul by Russia, initially maintaining a low profile even as tensions in Montenegro continued to rise.

Yachts in Budva near the former consulate office of Boro Djukic (Matthew Orr)

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The country of 620,000 had once been part of Yugoslavia and, later, part of a smaller federation with neighboring Serbia. By the time Djukic became consul in 2014, setting up his office near a town square in Budva, Montenegro was an independent nation seeking to become a member of NATO.

That position made Montenegro, with longstanding ties to Moscow and an influx of Russian tourists and investment, a high-stakes battleground between Russia and the West.

In 2016, Montenegrin authorities disrupted an Election Day coup attempt by Russian military intelligence operatives and others who had plotted to overthrow Montenegro’s government and kill its pro-Western prime minister.

A man is escorted by Montenegrin police to court in Podgorica in October 2016, when authorities disrupted an Election Day attempt to overthrow Montenegro’s government. (Savo Prelevic/AFP via Getty Images)

Montenegro joined NATO the following year, a move celebrated by political leaders and diplomats as a guarantee against foreign meddling.

“It will never happen again that someone else decides instead of us and our state behind our back, as was the case in the past,” Montenegro’s then-Prime Minister Dusko Markovic said at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

The founding document for True Montenegro was signed by Djukic in 2017 (Obtained by ProPublica and ICIJ)

In the Senate a few weeks later, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., praised Montenegro’s leaders and warned of Putin’s “long-term campaign … to erode any and all resistance to his dark and dangerous view of the world.”

“Every American should be disturbed,” McCain said.

Four months later in October 2017, Djukic took a bold public step.

As honorary consul, he helped organize a trip to Moscow for Marko Milacic, one of Montenegro’s most well-known anti-NATO populist leaders. Milacic had already been convicted for organizing what local media described as an unauthorized protest. Reporting to prison to serve a 20-day sentence, Milacic had paused outside to burn a blue-and-white NATO flag.

In Moscow, according to a subsequent social media post by Milacic, the politician met with Sergei Zheleznyak, a top Putin ally who was under U.S. sanctions for his involvement in the annexation of Crimea.

Two months after the trip, according to records obtained by ProPublica and ICIJ and reporting by local media, Djukic signed the founding documents for True Montenegro, a Kremlin-backed, right-wing political party led by Milacic. Djukic would later acknowledge that the party set up its headquarters at his family home in a Podgorica neighborhood of expansive houses and foreign embassies.

Djukic offered his family home to True Montenegro, the Kremlin-backed political party he helped establish. (Matthew Orr)

In 2018, shortly after the Montenegrin government removed Djukic as consul, he stood alongside Milacic at a press conference, endorsed True Montenegro and defended his own involvement in politics.

“If I had several million euros or dollars, I would legally offer them to Mr. Milacic,” Djukic told reporters. “Why? Because I like his idea.”

Djukic also commented on Facebook that he had been “persecuted” by NATO. And in an interview with a Russian media outlet, he defended the men behind the attempted coup in 2016, calling one of the plotters a “comrade, friend” and saying there was no conspiracy.

“If there was something like that, I would know for sure,” Djukic told the interviewer. “This is in the same category as everything else that has been done against Russia in recent years. There was no coup d’état. The maximum that could be … someone in a drunken conversation said, ‘Come on, let’s kill someone.’”

Milan Jovanovic, an analyst for a democracy group in Montenegro that tracks disinformation, said Djukic was an influential force. “He went from national Montenegrin to … the closest possible cooperation with Russia,” Jovanovic said.

In a two-bedroom apartment crowded with books about philosophy and religion, Filipovic, the political scientist and former Budva deputy mayor, watched the former consul’s appearance at the True Montenegro press conference. Filipovic took to social media, posting commentary, media reports and photos that Djukic had put on Facebook.

“He went beyond what an ordinary honorary consul would do,” Ljubomir Filipovic, former deputy mayor of Budva, said of Djukic. (Matthew Orr)

One photo showed the former consul in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Russian,” his arm around Alexander Zaldostanov, leader of the pro-Kremlin motorcycle gang known as the Night Wolves. The U.S. Treasury Department had previously sanctioned Zaldostanov, whose nickname is “The Surgeon,” accusing him of leading an organization that recruited fighters and committed crimes during the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. He could not be reached for comment.

In another photo, Djukic brandished a machine gun in front of a wall of rifles, rockets and other military paraphernalia.

Djukic in a photo he posted on social media in 2018 (via Facebook)

“He’s everywhere,” Filipovic said in a recent interview in a Budva coffee shop overlooking the Adriatic Sea. “It’s sharp power that masquerades as soft power. It’s not the power of attraction. It’s the power of coercion.”

Russia’s Reach in Denver

Nearly 6,000 miles away in Colorado, the last remaining honorary consul for Russia in the United States lost her post in March as Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

After Russian forces invaded Ukraine this year, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis sought to decertify honorary consul Deborah Palmieri. (via Colorado governor’s office)

“Colorado is … severing diplomatic ties with Russia,” Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, wrote in a letter to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., seeking the decertification of honorary consul Deborah Palmieri. “Should at some point the regime change in Russia to one that honors global order … Colorado will reconsider.”

The State Department subsequently withdrew recognition of Palmieri’s consular status, the governor’s office said. The State Department did not respond to questions about Palmieri or the governor’s request.

Russia has nominated a series of American citizens as honorary consuls on U.S. soil. They included the founder of a Russian art museum in Minnesota, the president of a Russian trading firm in Puerto Rico and the former president of St. Petersburg College in Florida, who in 2007 penned a newspaper column titled “Putin and Me.”

“Their definition of ‘democracy’ is different than ours,” Carl Kuttler Jr. wrote, calling Putin “perceptive,” “detail oriented” and a “muscular man” with “an amazing intellect.”

In an interview, Kuttler, who is no longer an honorary consul, said his work included trade, education and helping Americans with adoptions and that he “never was asked to participate in anything but the most ethical of ventures.”

In 2016, the State Department revoked the status of all but one of the Russian-appointed consuls in the United States after reports that Russian intelligence officers were harassing U.S. diplomats in Moscow. Only Palmieri stayed on.

Before she was appointed consul in 2007, Palmieri publicly supported Putin, writing in a publication for the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce that he was achieving democracy “at his own pace.”

As consul, she worked out of a downtown Denver rowhouse, with photos of the Kremlin and Red Square in the dining room, and promoted the Deb Palmieri Russia Institute, a provider of training to businesses seeking to enter the Russian market. Her website, which is no longer active, noted that she has worked with hundreds of U.S. and Russian companies, including Aeroflot, Russia’s state airline.

After Russia sent troops into Crimea in 2014, Colorado lawyer Olena Ruth, who was born in Kyiv, organized a rally in support of Ukraine and marched with scores of others to the consulate.

“She was just ignoring the Ukrainian question,” Ruth said in a recent interview. “Nobody wanted to have her presence here.”

Three years later, Palmieri was among a group of Americans who toured annexed Crimea, visiting a local university and a museum and posing for photos. On her website, Palmieri described the trip as a “fact-finding visit.”

“She was a participant in the trip?” said Rusty Butler, a retired college administrator and former honorary consul for Russia in Utah, when told about the 2017 visit by reporters. “I can’t wrap my head around seeing myself in that role.”

Palmieri in an undated photo (Obtained by ProPublica and ICIJ)

Palmieri, whose website included an undated picture of herself greeting Putin, has kept a low profile since she lost the consul post and did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.

A retired Colorado federal bankruptcy judge, Sid Brooks, who once helped train Russian judges about independent judiciaries, said he knew Palmieri from events at the consulate. Brooks said he stepped back from his own work in Russia in recent years because of Putin’s policies.

“I don’t know what triggered the [removal] of Deb Palmieri as honorary consul, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just fine,” Brooks said. “I always thought it was a little bit curious that [as consul] she seemed to continue her efforts to promote exchanges.”

“Intelligence Bases”

In North Macedonia, another fragile Balkan democracy, honorary consul Sergej Samsonenko became one of the most visible promoters of the Kremlin.

A Russian-born entrepreneur who made millions as the founder of an international sports betting company, Samsonenko built a four-star hotel in the capital that he called Hotel Russia and helped fund a landmark Russian Orthodox church that, according to local media, an archbishop described as a “part of the Russian soul on Macedonian soil.”

In 2016, Samsonenko was named honorary consul for Russia. He set up his consulate in Bitola, an ancient trading hub near the Greek border that had served as a cultural and political junction under the Ottoman Empire, earning the nickname “City of Consuls.”

In 2017, a North Macedonian intelligence report found that the consulate offices in Bitola and in the lakeside city of Ohrid represented “intelligence bases” used by Russia as part of an alleged propaganda campaign aimed at creating conflict in the Balkans and isolating countries like North Macedonia from the West.

“Performing intelligence activities from diplomatic consular missions is a widely used method of the Russian Federation … from which they are collecting, processing, analyzing and distributing information,” noted the report, first obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The report also described Samsonenko’s financing of the Russian church, saying “religious influence [of the Russian Federation] is an important segment of the Russian strategy.”

North Macedonia joined NATO in 2020. This past summer, the government withdrew its approval of Samsonenko’s honorary consul position.

Samsonenko declined to comment to ProPublica and ICIJ beyond dismissing reports about him as “lies and slander.” He has previously denied using his diplomatic status to support Russian intelligence operations.

“I am not a political person, I am an honorary consul of Russia and I should support the politics of my home country,” Samsonenko told the Macedonidan magazine Fokus in 2019.

He added, “Of everything written about me … one of the many lies [is] that there is a spy center in Bitola, in my consulate.”

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson previously called Samsonenko’s dismissal “yet another politically charged gesture.”

Lingering Divisions

In early fall, four years after Djukic lost his honorary consul post in Montenegro, red and white election posters promoting the True Montenegro political party that he co-founded lined a busy mountain pass connecting the capital to Budva.

Filipovic, the former deputy mayor, said he fears that pro-Russian interests will drive his country of birth back to the Kremlin. In September, authorities expelled six Russian diplomats in Montenegro who were suspected of espionage.

Filipovic said he blames Djukic and others for helping to fuel the unrest that has roiled the country.

“The honorary consul position gave him stature. It gave him a position in society,” Filipovic said. “He was an agent of Russian influence.”

Djukic has regularly posted on social media, sharing photos and comments about his love for Putin, Russian religious orthodoxy and his former position as honorary consul.

In July, he reposted a pro-Russia video that circulated on social media. “Beautiful women. … No cancel culture. … Economy that can withstand thousands of sanctions,” the narrator proclaimed. “Time to move to Russia.”

Djukic’s social media post (via Facebook)

A few days later, Djukic also posted a red and white image of the Kremlin and “First Honorary Consul of the Russian Federation in Montenegro” written above it in Russian.

In his post, he included three words: “JOY. JOY. JOY.”

Reporting was contributed by Delphine Reuter and Jelena Cosic, of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; Saska Cvetkovska, of the Investigative Reporting Lab; Dejan Milovic, of MANS; Dmitry Velikovskiy, of iStories; Leo Sisti, of L’Espresso; and Emily Anderson Stern, Jordan Anderson, Michelle Liu, Grace Wu, Linus Hoeller, Dhivya Sridar, Quinn Clark and Henry Roach, of the Medill Investigative Lab.

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