Russian Activist Alleges New Link Between the Kremlin and Paul Manafort

He’s pointing to an escort’s recording of a meeting between a Kremlin official and an oligarch linked to Trump’s indicted campaign chairman.

HANNAH LEVINTOVA FEB. 8, 2018 8:22 PM

A story involving a Norwegian yacht, an escort, and her Instagram posts featuring a prominent oligarch are capturing Russia’s attention—and may represent a new and bizarre twist in the story behind Moscow’s links to the Trump campaign. In a 25-minute video published on YouTube Thursday morning, Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny accused Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko—a top foreign policy official—of having been a conduit between the Kremlin and an oligarch linked to the Trump campaign.

With a mix of news clips, Navalny presented the case that during the 2016 election Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a past business associate of Paul Manafort, the indicted former Trump campaign chairman, passed to the Kremlin inside information about the Trump campaign he obtained from Manafort. Navalny also cites social media posts from Nastya Rybka, a Russian model and escort who has claimed to have been Deripaska’s mistress and who has written a memoir about their supposed affair titled A Diary of Seducing a Billionaire.

Navalny’s video, produced in the style of a late-night news show, features a recording made by Rybka when she was with Deripaska on his yacht sailing off the coast of Norway. Her video includes photos of Deripaska sitting next to a man who looks very much like Prikhodko, and it includes audio of Deripaska saying the following to Rybka: “We’ve got bad relations with America. Why? Because the friend of Sergey Eduardovich, Nuland is her name, is responsible for them. When she was young, she spent a month on a Russian whaling boat, and after this, she hates the country.”

“Sergey Eduardovich” is a term of respect for Prikhodko, made from his first name and patronym. “Nuland” refers to Victoria Nuland, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Navalny, drawing on flight logs, yacht-docking records, photos from Rybka’s Instagram account, and excerpts from her memoir describing time on a boat with a pseudonymous billionaire lover, suggests that Prikhodko spent several days on a Norwegian fishing trip with Deripaska and Rybka in August 2016.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/escort-paul-manafort-sergey-prikhodko-nastya-rybka-oleg-deripaska/