The Escort and the Oligarch: the Nastya Rybka Saga
This article is about the strange saga of Nastya Rybka, a Belorussian escort associated with Oleg Deripaska who claimed to possess information related to Paul Manafort and the 2016 American election. It is the seventh installment in the series “Paul Manafort, the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, and the 2016 Trump Campaign.”
While it is not necessary to read the earlier entries, it is recommended.
I published a series of articles covering Paul Manafort’s background as a lobbyist and political consultant, and his work in Ukraine prior to the 2016 election here.
The first article covered Manafort’s activities in post-Maidan Revolution Ukraine and his dual family/fiscal crisis.
The second article covers how Manafort was hired onto the Trump Campaign and his possible connections to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation.
The third article covered Manafort’s communications with pro-Kremlin oligarchs and Konstantin Kilimnik’s provision of polling data to Russian intelligence.
The fourth article describes the meeting between Manafort and Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Room where they discussed a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian peace plan.
The fifth article describes Manafort’s last days on the Trump Campaign.
The sixth article covers the mysterious series real estate transactions Paul Manafort engaged in at critical moments of the 2016 election.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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In February of 2018, the widely recognized (and currently incarcerated) leader of the Russian opposition to the Putin regime, Alexey Navalny, released an online video in which he described the strange story of a Belorussian escort and self-described “sex coach” named Nastya Rybka.
At a key moment during the 2016 election, Rybka was present on a yacht with Oleg Deripaska and then-Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Putin-ally and noted foreign policy expert Sergei Eduardovich Prikhodko.
Prikhodko, who died in 2021, had invited Trump to attend a conference in St. Petersburg in December of 2015 through Ivanka Trump’s Russian friend and fashion industry contact Mira Duma. Trump was unable to make the conference due to campaign commitments.
Rybka later claimed from a Thai prison to be in possession of audio recordings that established connections between Russian officials, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump and would provide evidence of Russian interference into the US Presidential election.
While the claims of an obscure Belorussian escort relating to matters of geopolitical and historic importance might otherwise be summarily dismissed, Navalny and his team, renowned for their investigations into Russian corruption, were able to establish to a certainty through a careful analysis of photographic and video evidence on her social media profiles that Rybka did know Deripaska and was in fact present with him and Deputy Prime Minister Prikhodko at the time she claimed.
Rybka, whose real name is Anastasia Vashukevich, chronicled her interactions with Deripaska in three Russian language books, one of which remains unpublished but has been seen by Russian media outlets, and through her highly active social media accounts.
Through thorough analysis, it has been determined that she had at least three extended interactions with Deripaska. The earliest of these took place during a critical moment during the American presidential election, in August of 2016.
Photos and videos from Rybka’s Instagram account confirm that, mere days after Paul Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club in New York, Rybka and several other escorts traveled alongside Deputy Prime Minister Prikhodko as guests on Deripaska’s yacht on a multi-day trip off the coast of Norway.
Prikhodko wasn’t just any Russian official, but rather possessed a distinguished career at the highest levels of the Russian foreign policy establishment. A graduate of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, he began his career in 1980 as a Soviet diplomat to Czechoslovakia, where he eventually rose to become the Soviet embassy’s First Secretary.
In 1997, after having risen through the ranks of Russia’s top foreign policy officials, Prikhodko became a direct advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He continued his rise through the ranks throughout the Presidency of Vladimir Putin and during the Medvedev interregnum.
By the time he was seen on Deripaska’s yacht, Prikhodko was considered one of Russia’s top foreign policy officials with deep links to the Kremlin.
How To Seduce A Billionaire
In the Summer of 2016, the 26-year old Rybka decided that she wanted to seduce a billionaire. Under the guidance of a self-described seduction coach Alexander Kirillov (aka Alex Leslie), she signed up with an escort service and eventually was sent to spend time on Deripaska’s yacht while on a trip up the Norwegian coast.
According to Rybka, she and Deripaska began an affair that lasted for several months. In one of the videos Rybka uploaded onto Instagram as part of a montage of the trip, Deripaska can be heard discussing Russian-American relations.
“We’ve got bad relations with America,” Deripaska can be heard saying while sitting beside a clearly identifiable Prikhodko, “because the friend of Sergey Eduardovich [Prikhodko], Nuland’s her name, is responsible for them.”
Here Deripaska refers to Victoria Nuland, at that time the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs who was widely blamed in Russia at the time for souring diplomatic relations between the two countries.
“When she was your age,” Deripaska continued, “she spent a month on a Russian whaling boat. She hates our country after this. Why is that?”
According to Rybka’s unpublished book, a copy of which was reviewed by the Russian publication The Bell, Rybka next met with Deripaska sometime in the September-October timeframe in the Fall of 2016. Rybka claims that one of Deripaska’s assistants flew her from Moscow to one of the billionaire’s country homes in Krasnodar where she spent three days with the oligarch, his guests and several other escorts.
At one point, Rybka claims that Deripaska met with an “important looking man” who arrived in an all-terrain vehicle with tinted windows. Though Deripaska and this man spoke in private, Rybka claims to have hidden her phone behind a book in the library and recorded the conversation.
Though this recording has never been released, if indeed it exists at all, the fact that Rybka definitely possessed separate photos and recordings of Deripaska lend at least some amount of credence to a claim that might otherwise be reflexively dismissed.
In her book Eurotrash: How to Seduce the Rich for the Poor, Rybka chronicles yet another meeting with Deripaska that took place on January 7th, 2017 at a ski resort in Lech, Austria. Once again, a video posted on social media establishes Rybka was in fact present with Deripaska when and where she said she was.
Also present, and captured on video, was Deripaska’s American lobbyist since 2009 Adam Waldman and his wife.
Less than a week later, on January 12th and 13th, Waldmen met twice with his other client at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange. The content of their meetings and whether they had anything to do with Oleg Deripaska remain unknown.
Alexey Navalny Meets Nastya Rybka
Rybka’s story and various connections with Deripaska would likely have been lost to obscurity as her books used pseudonyms and the photos and videos posted she posted on social media were not presented in any kind of cohesive narrative, were it not for a remarkably serendipitous accident.
In September of 2017, Rybka along with several other scantily clad women barged into opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s campaign office in what he interpreted as an attempt to embarrass him. Curious as to who these strange women were, Navalny and his team began researching their social media presence, which is where they discovered Nastya Rybka.
“I want to address Alexei Navalny,” Rybka stated in a video posted online. “Alex, one of us will find you and fuck you and post the video of it on the internet. Because of you and those like you, people keep fighting wars now.”
In a separate bizarre video, Rybka and several other women posed naked outside of the US Embassy ostensibly engaging in a protest in support of the disgraced Hollywood mogul and sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.
Intrigued, Navalny and his researchers continued to search through Rybka’s social media presence until they came across her photos and videos with Deripaska and Prikhodko. After getting a hold of her books, Navalny and his researchers were able to piece together the story and eventually put together a video chronicling their discoveries which they subsequently released online, gaining international notoriety.
The response in Russia to the release of the Navalny video was swift. Within days Oleg Deripaska filed a lawsuit and Roskomnadzor, the Russian state media and telecommunications watchdog agency, demanded that both YouTube and Instagram take down videos and posts related to Natya Rybka and Alexey Navalny or face investigation themselves.
Russian language publications were also ordered to take down content related to Navalny’s claims. While the video remained on YouTube, Instagram, owned by Facebook, bowed to the pressure exerted by the Russian government and removed the posts. Within days, Russian internet providers blocked access to Navalny’s website.
At the time the video was released, Nastya Rybka and her sex coach Kirillov were in Pattaya, Thailand, where they were teaching a seminary on sex and seduction. On February 25th, they were arrested by Thai authorities initially for working without a permit but the charges were later changed to soliciting sexual services.
Following her arrest, Rybka posted a shaky video onto Instagram made from a police van in which she claimed that if she were to be released from Thai prison she would be able to provide evidence of Russian interference into the 2016 American presidential election, as well as detail the connections between Russian officials, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump.
While in prison, Rybka claimed that she was in possession of 16 hours of audio recordings that could provide evidence of Russian meddling into the election. She further claimed that Oleg Deripaska discussed these matters with three fluent English speakers, whom she assumed were American.
“They were discussing elections,” Rybka told The New York Times. “Deripaska had a plan for elections.”
“If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” Rybka continued. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”
One of the individuals who Deripaska appears to have sent to help clean up the Nastya Rybka situation was Viktor Boyarkin, the same Russian military intelligence officer affiliated with the GRU who he had tasked with pursuing Paul Manafort for the money he owed him.
A video leaked onto YouTube, which was treated as authentic by the Senate Intelligence Committee, features a recording made after Rybka and her associates’ arrest in Thailand.
The conversation is between Georgy Oganov, Tatiana Monaghan and an attorney named William Sein.
During the discussion, Oganov says “what we are interested in is that these people be kept in jail.”
The group then proceeds to discuss the case.
Georgy Oganov once worked in the Russian Embassy in the United States and is a senior advisor to Deripaska known to have direct access to him.
In January of 2017, Oganov met Paul Manafort in Madrid in a meeting that evidence from text messages suggest was set up by Konstantin Kilimnik and Viktor Boyarkin, both individuals affiliated with Russian military intelligence and with strong links to Deripaska.
Tatiana Monaghan is the President of the Russian National Committee of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and is another close Deripaska associate. In March and May of 2016 she co-hosted two ICC events with Viktor Boyarkin.
According to the publication Intelligence Online, another individual to whom Deripaska turned to handle the Rybka situation was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Walter Soriano who operates a private intelligence firm called USG Security.
The article further claims that Deripaska and Soriano are primarily in contact through a former SVR officer and now director of international cooperation at Deripaska’s holding company En+, Evgeny Fokin. Soriano is reportedly close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to Nathaniel Rothschild, a financier with close relations to Deripaska.
Through a handwritten letter written by Kirillov, Rybka attempted to get into contact with the US Embassy in Thailand asking for asylum for herself and her fellow sex workers and writing that she had “very important information for the USA.”
The FBI contacted the Thai Immigration Bureau in an attempt to organize a meeting with Rybka, but were turned down by Thai authorities.
One individual who was able to gain access to Rybka was Vladimir Pronin, Russia’s newly appointed Consul to Prattaya. After improving the conditions in which she was kept, Rybka later suggested that it was Pronin who ultimately arranged for her to be deported after pleading guilty to the charges against her in Thai court.
As a citizen of Belarus, Rybka had intended to return to Minsk. However, during a stop-over in Moscow she was arrested in a dramatic and physical confrontation with plainclothes Russian officers that was captured on video and posted online. Rybka was detained on charges of coercing people into prostitution.
After she was released from custody, Rybka claimed that she sent her audio recordings to Deripaska. Though she remains at liberty in Russia, Rybka was warned by the FSB not to return to her native Belarus. She has made no further comments on the existence or nature of the audio recordings.