I think these people are have an insatiable appetite for controlling and dominating others and enjoy the cruelty of it and the feeling of power. In their public lives it leads them to become ruthless and manipulative exploiters, and in their private lives it leads them to become ruthless and manipulative exploiters.

I’m willing to bet a lot of people weren’t customers because they wanted to fuck kids. Many, probably, but I bet that a chunk of them were probably just willing to sell their soul for a secured position in power. Something like: ”If you fuck this kid while we record it, you’ll have the full support of the Russian propaganda machine.”

In other words, I bet you there was a whole market for incriminating evidence. Even if you made the evidence for yourself, as a way to make yourself an asset of larger powers because they’d more easily know they can control you via that evidence. If you fucked a kid, you earned their trust. If you earned their trust, they’d promote you into more powerful positions. Someone sadistic enough might see this as a win-win.

They probably used people with incriminating evidence to lure more people in. Every single party may as well have been a private sting operation to further grow the network of influence.