The comrades-in-arms of the imprisoned Russian opposition figure and corruption fighter Alexei Navalnyj have released a video investigation documenting the real estate ownership and financial abuses of Ossetian-Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who is close to President Putin.

The YouTube film called "The Conductor of Putin's War" presents Gergiev, who is celebrated around the world with his Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, who until recently led the Munich Philharmonic and conducted in Baden-Baden, Milan and Rotterdam, as Putin's shadow foreign minister .

He should use great Russian music to make us forget the crimes of the regime and polish up the president's reputation abroad.

The authors recall that in August 2014 in Rotterdam, Gergiev dedicated a concert to the victims of the downed Malaysian passenger plane.

Putin and his army shot down the plane over the Donbass a month earlier and killed 298 people, whereupon Putin's cultural ambassador publicly feigned condolences, the Navalny team is outraged.

Gergiev also ennobled Putin's brutal war in Syria with his concert in the oasis city of Palmyra in 2016.

Gergiev was therefore allowed to compensate himself through extensive real estate acquisitions, which he did not declare, although he would have been obliged to do so as a state official.

The musician owns a 165 square meter apartment on the 56th floor of New York's Lincoln Center near the Metropolitan Opera.

In Venice, he is said to own the mosaic-decorated Palazzo Barbarigo and the Café Quadri on St. Mark's Square, near Rome a luxurious villa, as well as scattered properties that he is said to have inherited from the Japanese harpist Yoko Nagae Ceschina, who died in 2015.

The allegation, backed by receipts and extracts from the land register, that Gergiev's charitable foundation, into which Russian and foreign companies, banks and oligarchs pay and is intended to promote young talent, has bought apartments in Moscow and Petersburg for the maestro weighs heavily.

Navalny had previously accused former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of abusing charitable foundations for self-enrichment.

Western concert stages are now closed to Gergiev. His performance of Tchaikovsky's greedy opera The Queen of Spades in Milan on February 23, the eve of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, was his last performance in Europe.

Russian theaters are to make guest appearances in South America, India and the Middle East.

As a sort of consolation for the loss of Europe, President Putin offered his cultural ambassador Gergiev to include the Moscow Bolshoi in his theater empire.