Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's son, Danila Sergeevich Shebunov, is a budding entrepreneur attempting to build a career in show business at age 19, according to a report by Alexei Navalny's team of investigators at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF). A few days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Shebunov started a TikTok account with covers of famous songs.
The young man performs under the stage name Sheba (or Sheba Singer).
Shebunov posted the following on the day the war began:
The singer has recorded and released several videos with “shamelessly inflated thousands of views” (Sheba’s subscriber count amounted to little under 700 users at the time of publication).
The ACF also pointed out that Shoigu's son went on vacation to Turkey with his music producer four days before Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a nationwide mobilization into the country’s armed forces:
In 2019, an investigation by The Insider revealed how Danila Shebunova's mother (stewardess Elena Shebunova) suddenly became a billionaire after starting an affair with Sergei Shoigu and winning contracts with Russia’s Emergency and Defense Ministries, which allowed her to buy a luxurious mansion in Rublevka [a prestigious residential area in the western suburbs of Moscow – The Insider] next door to the Rotenberg palace.
In an expletive-laden May interview with pro-Kremlin political technologist Konstantin Dolgov, Wagner Group co-founder Yevgeny Prigozhin openly criticized the Russian Defense Minister and his family, calling his son-in-law a “d*ckwad.”
“F*ck, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? Why don't you grab your teenagers by the balls, or, I don't know, by the pigtails, and put them in their place so they can calm down? Look what's going on. What's going on with Shoigu [the Russian Defense Minister]? Shoigu's son-in-law is shaking his buttocks on camera, and his daughter is opening Kronstadt forts. Did you earn money for these forts?! Is it your money you spend on these forts? Spend it on f*cking ammunition. And when the Defense Minister flaunts his daughter and flaunts some d*ckwad who's also a blogger and who says he doesn't even like the special operation... It was not us who came up with this special operation, but we followed orders and said, “If we're going to fight our neighbors, we should go all the way.”