According to various Russian media outlets, Kanye West arrived in Moscow this week for collaborator and designer Gosha Rubchinskiy's birthday. While this is all still a little bit unclear, new photos and videos show him apparently arriving at a Four Seasons hotel along with some other footage of his arrival. Whether Ye has other plans in Russia or not is a mystery, but we know that there's plenty of hot topics to debate and discuss with this visit. Many called him out for appointing Rubchinskiy as Yeezy's head of design last year due to the Russian designer's alleged history of soliciting explicit pictures from minors.
Furthermore, this news arrives amid a new lawsuit against Kanye West and his former chief of staff Milo Yiannopoulos. They stand accused of exploiting an app development team's labor through unfulfilled payments and excessively long shifts into the night, racial discrimination and other forms of prejudice, and showing pornographic content to them despite some of the team being minors. It's all a pretty nasty array of accusations to which neither party has responded publicly at press time. We'll see whether or not these international visits are to merely distract from legal scrutiny or indicate that Ye will want to stay elsewhere.
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Kanye West Reportedly Arrives In Russia
In addition, Kanye West also faces a sexual harassment lawsuit from a former Yeezy employee who made some very serious claims. Not only that, but there were even some alleged text message exchanges supposedly presented as evidence in the lawsuit's filing. He plans to combat this in court with a countersuit, making his own claims against the former employee. Whether it's within music, the legal system, or cultural sensitivity, there's a whole lot of controversy to go around.
Nevertheless, fans think that Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign's VULTURES 2 could still arrive one day, and that would at least dampen some of the public impact of these lawsuits. Maybe he will continue to work on the album in Moscow or he was just feeling like saying hi to his friend on his special day. Regardless, there's too much to properly digest on the Ye train right now, a sadly common fact. We'll see what comes of all this and whether there are any links between these different narratives.