The layers of PEUs around Ukraine include Trump II's special envoy Jared Kushner of Affinity Partners as well as KKR and Apollo, the two firms Kushner is recruiting to rebuild the country.
Affinity, Apollo & KKR, oh my....
Trump innovated the bold assassination of whoever he targets as part of war or his lesser military skirmishes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may be doing likewise. Ukrainian officials speculate a Russian attack on a train targeted KKR Partner, Chairman of KKR's Global Institute and Chairman of KKR Middle East David Petraeus and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Principal Advisor for Bia Advisory.
A recent paper explored "The Sponsor Premium." It:
"examined whether a private equity sponsor's reputation for fair dealing with lenders impacts the yields its portfolio companies must pay for loan capital. Using comprehensive leveraged loan data from 2016-2025, we find that sponsor fixed effects explain approximately twenty percent of the variation in loan yields that other observables cannot. Moreover, we find that, under three measures of reputation, portfolio companies owned by the most aggressive sponsors pay considerably higher yields than those owned by more genial sponsors."
The difficult to deal with list includes Apollo, Platinum Equity, ClearLake, KKR and TPG Capital. Carlyle was smack in the middle of the distribution.
If you are a difficult to deal with financier/sponsor and your affiliates make war products, are you now a war target?
Leaders killing leaders would be quite the war innovation as it would not require legions of fresh citizen meat.
As of now politicians Red & Blue love PEU and their new TechGod brethren. Increasingly, more are one. Might this change as the rules of war are disrupted? Time will tell.