Nastya Rybka has entered the maws of hell.
“They were discussing elections,” Nastya Rybka said. “Deripaska had a plan about elections.”
“If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” she told reporters in Thailand. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”
She was wasting her breath. She was deported from Bangkok to Moscow three days ago, where Russian law enforcement unceremoniously carted her off the plane and seated her in one of the airport’s wheelchairs.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she told them.
For unknown reasons, her desperate pleas to be deported to the U.S.— where she could tell what she knew about oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s connection to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—had fallen on deaf ears.
It felt like tyranny. It didn’t feel like my country anymore. America’s long slow fade to black continues.
CNN slug: “Jailed seductress promises US-Russia secrets”
The big question is: why did the U.S. do nothing to discover what this woman knew after an almost two-year long Special Prosecutor investigation? According to CNN, however, there was nothing to see here, thank you very much. Please move along.
How CNN reported it:
‘A spokeswoman for the American Embassy in Bangkok said she was aware of the arrests but declined to discuss the case or any asylum request. “She referred CNN to a statement released last week.”
“We are aware of media reports of this arrest. She is not a US citizen. We refer you to Thai law enforcement for questions.”
“The FBI tried to meet with her, a senior Thai official told CNN.”
Reporting about someone you’ve just dismissed as a “jailed seductress” lacks a certain je ne said quoi.
Beside, doesn’t CNN have any contacts at the FBI in Washington that they could have asked? Just curious.
Also: Given the important long-standing U.S.-Thai Chang Moi heroin partnership… could the Thai government ever refuse a U.S. request? Just asking.
Ironically, the Russian press was never under any illusion that the U.S. might be interested in what she had to say.
RussiaGate may still become yet another failed American effort to get the truth.
Nation left ‘twisting slowly slowly in the wind’
It was the latest twist in a saga that started in February 2018. That’s when Nastya Kybka was busted in Thailand, where she found herself accused of being a self-described “sex expert in Thailand.”
Talk about coals to Newcastle.
She spent almost the entire next year living in a Thai jail.
In a desperate Instagram video, she claimed to have “the missing link” connecting Russia to interference in the U.S. Presidential election, and made a last ditch effort by appealing to “the American press.”
From inside a Thai detention center, she said she could reveal “missing puzzle pieces” regarding Moscow’s election meddling. She told CNN she’d witnessed meetings between Deripaska and unnamed Americans.
“They were people who spoke English fluently—there were three of them—who she thought were Americans.”
She had photographs of one of the Americans, she said, as well as more than an hour of audio recordings.
It was obvious the FBI and the State Department, which used the passive voice to signal disinterest, weren’t interested.
“But how do you know they’ll print it?”
The U.S. State Department spokeswoman’s studied indifference reminded me of a scene in a Robert Redford movie from the ’70’s, “Three Days of the Condor,” about a ‘fictional’ American political assassination.
In the climax Redford outfoxes an old Agency warhorse played by Cliff Robertson, delivering the hot skinny about the assassination— those were simpler times—to the New York Times.
But wily old Cliff Robertson has an ace up his sleeve. He smirks at Redford. “How do you know they’ll print it?”
Redford is certain. “They’ll print it.”
Robertson smiles. “Yeah… But how do you know?”
LONG SLOW FADE.
“People used me as a tool”
Nastya Rybka may be the unluckiest girl on the planet.
Russian anti-corruption activist Aleksei Navalny published the video she’d taken on Oleg’s yacht off the coast of Norway. The Russian government made him take it down. There was also talk YouTube might experience some unspecified unpleasantness.
In the video, Nastya Rybka is on the yacht getting cozy with Deripaska, with whom she says she was having an affair. Her claim— backed by evidence, as well as Deripaska’s goofy look—is irrefutable. Irrefutable…but also inconvenient...
Because in addition to canoodling in the fresh sea air, the video shows Deripaska meeting with former deputy Russian deputy prime minister Sergey Prikhodko, and the men are heard discussing U.S. politics. The meet aboard Oleg’s yacht happened just one month after Paul Manafort,according to The Atlantic, offered Deripaska “private briefings.”
After her arrest in Pattaya, Thailand, Nastya made international headlines by requesting U.S. asylum.
“This is not only about me,” said. “It concerns a lot of people in America and other countries.”
It mattered not. Sensing a wind shift, Nastya tacked to port, and used her first court appearance to make a declaration.
“I am sorry. People used me as a tool,” said Nastya Rybka to a Russian judge. “I will never discredit Deripaska again.”
Mnuchin the Munchkin in Lollipop World
The story isn’t really about a pretty young thing named Nastya…
It’s about 52-year-old Oleg Deripaska, the fortunate last man standing after the brutal Great Patriotic Aluminum Wars, as they’re known in Russia, where today he remains President Vladimir Putin’s favorite industrialist.
Deripaska’s good news of Nasta Rybka’s capitulation capped what was for him a truly amazing streak of luck: just three days earlier the U.S. Senate had upheld the Treasury Department’s decision to ease Russian sanctions… on him.
“U.S. Treasury Secretary Sanctioned Russia’s Deripaska by Accident“ Sputnik reported gleefully.
After a slip of the tongue during a Congressional hearing— caused, he claimed, by pesky lawmakers grilling him incessantly about Treasury’s reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had been forced to impose sanctions after blurting they were being imposed on Treasury’s so-called “Kremlin List.”
Treasury Department officials were forced to come up with sanctions to match the secretary’s congressional testimony.
The sanctions on Deripaska had been a mistake, a trifle, a matter of no significance… Or so went the story.
Oleg the Oligarch
Rarely off the world stage, Deripaska plays a surprising number of roles. Suing the Associated Press; bribing Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had worked on the Ukrainian presidential campaign of the candidate who poisoned the other candidate.
Remember? The one with the hideous huge bumps on his face? Manafort’s own daughter’s were sickened by it.
Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s Uber-Oligarch, is is Vladimir Putin’s go-to guy, the man who makes it happen. A leaked US Moscow Embassy cable called him “one of the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”
Judging from the number of prominent Republicans in his debt— as well as some Democrats— Deripaska is setting himself up to be a Washington power broker.
Montenegro? Who cares?
His most nefarious ‘get’ recently involved turning Montenegro into a de facto Russian colony. Most Americans couldn’t tell Montenegro from Mauritania. So why care?
Because the Russians tampered with their 2016 election, at the same time they tampered with ours.
Compounding the intrigue was the shocking and deliberate shove Donald Trump gave one of his fellow heads of state at a NATO Summit, remember?
The man Trump shouldered aside was Dusko Markovic, the premier of Montenegro, who had recently led his twee-sized Balkan nation in an historic turn to the West, and membership in NATO. Oleg Deripaska is heavily invested in Montenegro. He could not have been amused.
At first it was played for laughs. Seth Meyers, host of “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” riffed “Look at this guy! You’re a world leader at a meeting of dignitaries, acting like they just called your number at KFC! ‘Me, that’s mine, the 12-piece!’”
Later it got serious attention, when coupled with Montenegro revealing a foiled russian-linked plot to seize power, assassinate the Prime Minister, and install a leader who would keep the country out of NATO. A handful of Special Forces troops wearing uniforms stolen from Montenegro’s elite security services had been set to storm the parliament building in the capital, subdue the guards inside, and assassinate the country’s prime minister, who just happened to be the same guy that Donald Trump shoved.
In years to come, being muscled out of the way by the leader of the free world may be a gangster tell.
The Great Patriotic Aluminum Wars
Who is Oleg Deripaksa?
He made his bones in the 90’s. Some of the world’s most valuable assets were up for grabs in Russia. The country’s mineral wealth was contested on factory floors in Russia’s massive aluminum smelters. So much blood flowed during Oleg Deripaska’s “consolidation” of the aluminum industry that it could have floated his 200-ft long yacht… at low tide.
He cemented his position in Russia’s ruling elite through the creation of a powerful security service of his own. Married into Boris Yeltsin’s family. Forged a Combine with Russia’s version of the Gambino Family, a criminal organization led by Anton Malevsky called the Izmailovsky crime family.
Today’s that organization’s boss is… Semion Mogilevich —Mr Bigski— known far and wide as “the most powerful gangster on the planet.”
For a gangster, Oleg gets great press
Deripaska was not eager to publicize his ‘numerous’ charities, a profile of him in the Toronto Globe and Mail in 2011 reported. Although he did allow himself one humble brag: He told the paper he’d donated $250 million to charity during the past decade. Alas, he offered no proof.
The difference between Russia and America? In Russia, nobody asked for proof.
“Tall, with boyish features, cropped blond hair and relentless blue eyes, Deripaska looks not unlike Daniel Craig – and shares the Bond actor’s reputation for toughness,” reported London’s Guardian. “Deripaska is a cunning businessman whose mere survival in the cutthroat Russian aluminum industry is a testament to his abilities.”
The New York Times identified Deripaksa as “a former nuclear physicist” (he’s not) who had “wrested control of the Russian aluminum industry from a netherworld of organized crime figures.”
The Times offered no examples of his “wresting.” The dictionary defines ‘wresting’ as “forcibly taking something from someone else’s grasp.”
Query to the New York Times: “On this ‘wresting’ business? Were automatic weapons involved? Mortars? Rocket-propelled grenades?”
Any ‘yes’ answer would somewhat detract from the paper’s portrait of Oleg Deripaska as a “former nuclear physicist.”
Here’s my wild guess: A cadre of treasonous greedheads went balls-out spreading Russian Mob money around as fast as they could. Why?
They were looking to ‘pole-vault’ Russian interests over those of Americans making less than a hundred million dollars a year. And it appears they succeeded.