MOSCOW—In Russia, 50-year-old Oleg Deripaska is known as the winner of some brutal crime wars that left him a billionaire aluminum magnate and President Vladimir Putin’s favorite industrialist.

When it comes to the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, Deripaska, who is worth an estimated $5.1 billion, has attracted a lot of attention because of his links to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

According to a report in the Washington Post last September, Manafort owes Deripaska $19 million and, only two weeks before Trump accepted the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in July 2016, offered to brief Deripaska on the U.S. race.

Last May, Deripaska allegedly offered to cooperate with the congressional investigations of Russian meddling, in which Manafort is a leading suspect, but the committees would not grant him full immunity out of concern, at the time, that it might muddy the Department of Justice investigations.

This week, thanks to inquiries by corruption fighting opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and revelations by a call girl calling herself “Nastya Rybka, oligarch huntress,” Deripaska’s biography has added a new chapter of sleaze that might in fact form part of the trail to Trump.

On Thursday, Navalny published an exposé on YouTube describing Deripaska’s three-day long yacht voyage in 2016 in the company of his petite, pouty girlfriend-model-sex-worker Rybka and Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko, who is the Kremlin’s most influential official with regard to foreign relations, albeit with one of the lowest profiles.

Navalny suggests that the Manafort, Deripaska, Prikhodko connection is the centerpiece of Trump campaign collusion with the Kremlin. But Navalny’s tongue in cheek delivery does not strengthen his case. The Trump link is offered, as he puts it, for “dessert” after a lengthy tale of call girls and corruption.

The Navalny video, helpfully (and sometimes playfully) includes English subtitles as the would-be (but banned) presidential candidate looks into the camera with his bright blue eyes and lays out his case.

Navalny gave it the title: “Yachts, Oligarchs, Girls: A Huntress for Men Exposes A Bribe-Taker.”

Over the course of 25 minutes, he tells of a group of scantily clad women sent to “attack” his headquarters, apparently to embarrass him. Instead, he chose to be amused, and to find out more about them. Seems they are a hired hit team, of sorts. One of their recent antics: protesting nude in front of the U.S. embassy, bodies bared to freezing cold as they presented banners saying “I Love You Harvey” and “Weinstein is a Real Man.” (One wonders, naturally, if this group or one like it was ever invited to the presidential suite at the Ritz to urinate on the bed where Michelle and Barack Obama had slept—but Navalny’s investigation doesn’t go there.)

Navalny’s team focused on one of those women particularly: Nastya Rybka. As seen in his YouTube presentation, she posted an Instagram video threatening, if that is the word: “Alex, one of us will find you and f*** you and post the video of it on the internet. Because of you and those like you, people keep fighting wars now.”

The Kremlin immediately made a decision to ban Navalny’s video, claiming it contained classified secret information; and Deripaska filed a complaint in court against Nastya Rybka for leaking videos and recordings from his private yacht.

Much of the Navalny video is based on Rybka’s already published Instagram photos and a tell-all book she published last year, The Diary of How to Seduce a Billionaire , as an ostensible guide to bedding oligarchs. Her photographs of Deripaska and Prikhodko on Deripaska’s yacht sailing around Norway in the summer of 2016 were verified in detail by Navalny’s team, as shown in his video. So is the audio recording of an alleged conversation including Prikhodo and Deripaska talking in front of Rybka about relations with the United States.

In it Deripaska mocked former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, who apparently had cordial relations with Prikhodko. Deripaska described Nuland, perhaps ironically, as Prikhodo’s friend, and explained to Rybka that Nuland was responsible for Russia’s bad relations with the United States. When she was Rybka’s age, Deripaska’s voice says on the recording, “She spent a month on a Russian whaling boat and after this, she hates the country.”

Rybka, whose real name is Anastasia Vashukevich, made Navalny’s investigation easy. She had already documented her relations with Deripaska on Instagram—at one point accusing the billionaire of raping her, demanding that he marry her.

So, naturally, there have been many questions about Rybka’s motivations. It is unclear why it took the self-avowed “sex huntress” more than a year to start publishing her photographs of Deripaska sitting next to Prikhodko on the yacht, which is a clear indication, as Navalny notes, of unacceptable corruption.

But there is no question “Rybkagate” is now all over the Russian internet. Every day Deripaska’s supposed seducer adds more details about her colorful career. Posing in swimsuits by a pool in Dubai, moving her freakishly big lips (her Instagrams show her features have grown increasingly feline over the last couple of years), Rybka boasts about having seduced at least six billionaires, and about being in a relationship with Deripaska for at least a year.

The authorities might have seen this coming. Rybka’s book last year, which Navalny quotes extensively, changed some names and locations, but not much else, it seems, about her time with Deripaska and Prikhodko. And a video she posted to promote the book on Instagram, which includes the audio about Nuland, leaves little doubt about the connections. The book “describes, to the accuracy of dates, hours AND MINUTES, everything that happened on that yacht,” as Navalny puts it.

With faux irony, he counsels readers to skip the prurient details if they can contain their curiosity. More seriously, he notes that Deripaska in the book is called Ruslan (his company is called Rusal), while Prikhodko is called “Daddy”—the man to whom everyone, including the oligarch, defers. “Who is he? Who can a billionaire be afraid of?” Rybka asks in the book, also noting that when Daddy harassed her “Ruslan” said nothing, and that Daddy was taken off the yacht before it moored, apparently to avoid being seen with “Ruslan.”

Then Navalny reads from page 257 of the Rybka book the brief bio of “Daddy”: “This is the grey eminence of the regime. [The] Richelieu of our time. … There’s hardly any information on the internet, but since [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin’s times he’s been Deputy Prime Minister and worked at the presidential administration. … He writes pre-election speeches, presidential addresses to the assembly, he’s got a lot of awards. … He’s the only one the president hasn’t dismissed yet, a long-term member of the government, he’s been among the top officials since the ‘90s. That’s why they call him Daddy. He’s been responsible for Russia’s foreign policy for the government, he has very large influence.”

“This is literally a copypasted biography of Prikhodko,” Navalny declares. “No one but him matches this description.”

The video investigation goes on to document some of the very expensive properties owned by the Deputy PM, underscoring his alleged corruption in much the same way other Navalny videos have done with other officials, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Then comes what Navalny describes as “dessert” and a “gift” to conspiracy theorists looking at Russian meddling in the American elections.

Noting the story broken by the Washington Post in September about Manafort offering to brief Deripaska on the presidential race, Navalny quotes American media reporting that Paul Manafort, “one of America’s most prominent and influential lobbyists,” had been getting paid by Deripaska since 2005 when he “started lobbying [for] the interests of Kremlin and Putin Washington.”

“Let’s make a very low-key conclusion,” says Navalny. “At the very least these two men [Deripaska and Manafort] know each other very well, and one has been getting money from the other.”

But this is the important part, as Navalny tries to connect the dots for American prosecutors and investigators:

“Why would the head of Trump’s campaign HQ conduct private briefings about the progress of the U.S. presidential campaign to some Russian oligarch? Because these briefings are actually for Putin, Kremlin, FSB, whoever, and Deripaska simply TRANSMITS (as an agent) this information to Putin. He’s very close to Putin, after all.”

But—and it’s an important “but”—as Navalny notes, “Among all the conspiracy theories of American mass media, this part was the most unconvincing. Many oligarchs are close to Putin. There were no proofs that Deripaska transmits something to him. … He doesn’t have any exclusive relations with Putin, he’s neither a government official nor a minister, to be able to make decisions on whether to support Trump at the elections or not. But now the pieces of this puzzle fell into place…”

One of Rybka’s photos of Prikhodko and Deripaska appear on the screen. “That’s who makes these decisions!” Navalny declares. “There he is, cruising with him on the yacht and, as we can hear on the video, discussing politics with him.”

Navalny claims, “These actually were some informal negotiations.”

The timing is important. Navalny’s internet sleuths have tracked the movements of Deripaska’s yacht through Norwegian waters on August 7, 2016—one of three days “Daddy” was on the boat, according to Rybka. It was a moment when the Russian leadership was said to be divided about whether and how to pursue the interference in the American election that had started to blow up in their faces with extensive coverage in the U.S. press.

The deputy prime minister, the head of Medvedev’s office, “spends his vacation on an oligarch’s yacht, accompanied by this oligarch, and … a bunch of prostitutes. Yes there were several.” The two men were talking business, some of it in front of them. Fishing and fun, per Navalny and Rybka, were just a cover.

On Saturday, Rybka published one more video: speaking in a quiet voice, the woman suggested Russian Vice PM Prikhodko, the Kremlin’s top critic Navalny, and oligarch Deripaska have group sex. “Do not fight over me and Russia, I know you will satisfy each other in sex wonderfully, let’s meet, have a great time, you will receive enough love and stop trying to smash each other’s faces,” Rybka said, smiling into the camera. “Then the [Navalny] website would not need to be banned, nor would protesters come into the streets,” Rybka added, and winked.

Scandals involving top Russian officials, their friends, families, lovers and criminal gangs, have been rocking President Putin’s world lately.

In the last three years independent investigations have shed light on the Russian president’s best friend, musician Sergei Roldugin, who has a fortune estimated to be at least $100 million kept in offshore accounts, as well as on President Putin’s alleged daughter, Katerina, and the corruption of her husband Kirill Shamalov’s.

A few hundred thousand Russians came out to protest in reaction to some of Navalny’s earlier investigations, including one exposing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s secret dacha that allegedly was worth $509.16 million .

But Navalny’s reports do not always stir such crowds. Previously, investigations by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation attracted public attention to images of the Kremlin officials’ and billionaires’ wives dressed in camouflage and riding armored vehicles for fun, as well as to Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika and his two sons’ involvement with the most violent gang in Russia’s history, but did not cause any public unrest.

For the Russian public, Rybkagate may fall into that category.

“For several days this dubious woman Rybka has been breaking news about Prikhodko and Deripaska, using social networks just as Navalny or Trump do. She has grown famous, instantly,” Olga Bychkova, deputy editor in chief of Echo of Moscow radio, told The Daily Beast. “Some experts believe that her appearance is the result of a dog fight under the carpet between Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and people close to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Prikhodko.”

An independent observer and famous satirical writer, Victor Shenderovich, says he is deeply disgusted by the Deripaska, Prikhodko and Rybka saga.

“A top Kremlin official, Prikhodko, discussed foreign affairs in the presence of a cheap hooker, demonstrating to us that he is not afraid of being punished for corruption, for sailing in Norway with prostitutes and an oligarch,” Shenderovich told The Daily Beast. “Russia’s political life has hit the bottom and the worst part of it is that people do not react to these high profile scandals—even when millions saw news about Prosecutor General Chaika and his sons being connected to a group of killers there were not millions of people in the streets. I doubt that the Rybka-Kremlin news surprises anybody.”

Still, American investigators may be interested. The U.S. intelligence agencies have been watching Deripaska for a very long time.

Deripaska used to be a permanent fixture on President Putin's trips abroad.

In 2006 the U.S. State Department refused to issue Deripaska a visa due to his alleged participation in the fight for control of aluminum manufacturing in the 1990s, described succinctly by one business publication as “a bloody period in the country’s post-communist asset grab from which a few dozen oligarchs emerged—and several potential oligarchs lost their lives.”

By 2009 Deripaska was traveling to the U.S. again, where the FBI interviewed the billionaire twice, making secret arrangements for his visits to talk about organized crime and ask about some of his massive transactions through Barclays Bank in New York.

Deripaska’s request for complete immunity in order to talk to congressional committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections was turned down last May because that might interfere with FBI inquiries. So it appears, now, neither Congress nor the FBI has heard what he has to say.

But if Rybka really did listen closely to Deripaska’s conversations on the yacht, or on the pillow, she might actually have something useful to tell the world.

Christopher Dickey also contributed to this article.</s>Russia has threatened to block access to YouTube and Instagram if the sites do not remove video and photographs that show a senior government official sailing on a yacht with a billionaire oligarch, who has links with the former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Russia’s state-controlled media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, on Saturday ordered that 14 Instagram posts and seven YouTube videos be deleted that show metals magnate Oleg Deripaska on a yacht with a Russian deputy prime minister, Sergey Prikhodko, and a woman who has described herself as an escort.

The watchdog listed the posts on its register of banned sites after Deripaska won an injunction from a court in his hometown Ust-Labinsk, which ruled they violated his privacy. Roskomnadzor said it had informed the sites that they must delete the images within three days.

The images are at the heart of the public battle between Deripaska and the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, who first drew attention to the posts in an investigative video piece he released last week. In the report, he accused the oligarch of bribing Prikhodko by hosting him on the yacht in August 2016.

Alexey Navalny/YouTube

Navalny has built an anti-Kremlin political movement around similar investigations into alleged official corruption and was recently barred by a court from running against Russian President Vladimir Putin in elections this year. In the 25-minute video, there are accusations of Deripaska flying Prikhodko to the yacht in Norway on his private plane and of allegedly paying for the services of six more escort girls aboard the boat.

Navalny’s video also attracted attention because of a speculative link he makes in it with the 2016 U.S. election. He alleges, without offering proof, that on the yacht Deripaska may have been passing information to Prikhodko that he acquired from Manafort.

Manafort is a former business partner of Deripaska and in 2016 he offered to give the billionaire private briefings on the election shortly after joining Trump’s campaign, according to the Washington Post. Manafort, who has been indicted on money laundering charges in the course of the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election, has denied any briefing ever took place.

Deripaska in a statement last week called Navalny's investigation "part of a planned campaign to damage my reputation" and warned media against disseminating "these mendacious accusations." Representatives for Deripaska have said the video illegally makes use of private images and makes false assertions.

Prikhodko responded to Navalny's video last week with a statement to the Russian news outlet, RBC, that “such stuff should be answered man-to-man, but we will leave in within the bounds of the legal field."

Oleg Nikishin/Epsilon/Getty Images

Roskomnadzor also ordered Navalny to delete the video and text versions of the investigation from his website.

On Tuesday, Oksana Baulina, a member of Navalny’s political organization said it had received messages from YouTube to take down the video, posting a screenshot of it on Twitter. Navalny has so far refused to do so and has filed suit against Roskomnadzor, arguing its block on the images is illegal. Over 4 million people have watched the video on YouTube, so far.

The video and photos highlighted by Navalny were first posted in 2016 by the woman onboard the yacht with Deripaska. The 21-year-old Belarussian goes by the name Nastya Rybka and has promoted herself as an expert in seduction in video blogs and a book.

In some of the videos on Rybka's Instagram, Deripaska can be seen with her and Priokhodko relaxing aboard the yacht. At one point, Deripaska and Prikhodko joke about the poor relations between Russia and the United States.

Rybka has also written a book in which she describes the encounter, using pseudonyms, and where she claims there were other women aboard the boat. The book presents itself as a manual for women on how to seduce an oligarch.

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Rybka had previously attracted some public attention when she staged a nude demonstration with other women outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow in support of the disgraced movie producer, Harvey Weinstein. She has described herself in social media posts as a follower of a self-proclaimed sex-guru named Alex Lesli.

Navalny has said he found Rybka’s posts about Deripaska while looking into her Instagram feed after she and other women staged a protest while wearing few clothes at his organization’s office.

The lawsuit filed by Deripaska that prompted the watchdog's order to YouTube and Instagram accuses Rybka of illegally making use of private images and asked the court to forbid their dissemination. "The media has seized on Navalny's information attack and began to illegally republish private photographs," a representative for Deripaska told the business newspaper, Vedomosti.

Navalny has accused Deripaska and the government of exploiting the court in his hometown to try to bury his investigation.

“It turns out that that the oligarch Deripaska doesn’t just have a puppet court, he has a whole puppet town," Navalny said in a video posted on Monday. "It wasn’t me who sailed on the yacht. But the only and instant response of the state system is directed against me. That is, against those that uncovered the facts of the corruption."</s>Russia wants videos on YouTube and Instagram showing a senior government official cavorting on a yacht with an oligarch once close to Russian President Vladimir Putin taken down, leaving both companies scrambling to respond.

Alexey Navalny, a prominent opposition figure, posted a video Thursday on YouTube describing his investigation into Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with ties to Putin and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Navalny found 2016 videos of Deripaska on his yacht with Sergey Prikhodko, Russia’s deputy prime minister, and said Deripaska could have been bribing Prikhodko and offering information about the 2016 U.S. election he had received from Manafort. (Manafort did offer to send Deripaska updates on the campaign via email in 2016, The Washington Post reported.)

Both men denied wrongdoing. Prikhodko said the issue would have to be settled “man to man,” and Deripaska accused Navalny of trying to ruin his reputation.

Actress, escort and model Anastasia Vashukevich ― who goes by the name Nastya Rybka ― took the videos and posted them online. She claimed in a book she wrote that she was hired as an escort on Deripaska’s boat, but her allegations weren’t taken seriously until Navalny’s expose last week, according to The New York Times.

Deripaska filed suit following Navalny’s investigation, accusing Vashukevich of illegally using private images. The government’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, then gave YouTube and Instagram three days to take the videos down or be investigated. It also demanded that YouTube remove the Navalny clip.

Navalny’s video was still on YouTube as of Wednesday, and had been viewed almost 5 million times. He tweeted that both sites were up and running in Russia, but could be shut down Wednesday night.

Neither YouTube nor Instagram immediately responded to requests for comment. YouTube told the Times it hadn’t yet figured out how to respond to Russia’s threat. Navalny, in an interview with the The Times of London published Wednesday, called for both companies to resist the demands of the Russian government.

Navalny has built a reputation on poking into well-known Russian figures and their questionable behavior. Russia banned Navalny from running in next month’s presidential election.

Deripaska’s ties with Manafort date back to 2005, when they reportedly signed a $10 million contract. But things went sour, and Deripaska sued Manafort and his associate Rick Gates earlier this year for $25 million in damages over the failed business dealings.</s>Instagram and YouTube may be blocked in Russia unless videos that allegedly show the Deputy Prime Minister meeting an oligarch linked to Donald Trump's presidential campaign and discussing the US on a luxury yacht are removed.

Billionaire Oleg Deripaska and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko were reportedly filmed by an escort on Deripaska's private yacht in 2016, which the Russian opposition, led by Alexei Navalny, claim is evidence of corruption.

In the video, the two men can be heard referring to 'bad relations with America' and 'Nuland', the Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration.

A Russian court has now ruled that the videos must be removed from the social media platforms, because they invade Deripaska's privacy.

Deripaska won an order from the Ust-Labinsk district court in his native Krasnodar region which ordered 14 Instagram posts and seven YouTube videos that 'breach his right to privacy must be removed, according to BloombergQuint.

Navalny said that the order also threatens to block his website after he reproduced the material and accused the pair of corruption and, according to a letter posted online by his team on Monday, Google warned him to remove the material from his YouTube channel or face being blocked.

Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor, gave YouTube and Instagram until the end of Tuesday to delete the material or face censure.

As of Wednesday evening, it appeared that the offending Instagram and YouTube posts from Anastasiya Vashukevich, a woman working as an escort under the name Nastya Rybka, had been removed.

However the pictures and footage can still be seen on the YouTube channel of Mr Navalny and have been broadcast by several news outlets.

Miss Rybka, who has written a book about working as an escort, claims to have had an affair with Deripaska and says she was hired to spend time on the oligarch's yacht.

Miss Rybka, originally from Belarus but now based in Dubai, posted several videos in August 2016 showing Deripaska on his yacht talking with Deputy Prime minister Prikhodko.

The videos were only picked up by Mr Navalny on February 8 as part of an investigation.

In one snippet, Deripaska explains to Miss Rybka why relations between Russia and the United States are so bad.

'We've got bad relations with America. Why? Because the friend of Sergey Eduardovich [Prikhodko], 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.

On Tuesday, Miss Rybka had put it to a vote among her Instagram followers, who, she claims, convinced her not to take down the videos and pictures.

'The threat of blocking YouTube and Instagram in Russia because of my moves in seducing the oligarch concerns everyone,' Miss Rybka wrote.

'It would have been simpler to have met them all and made peace, but Lyosha, Sergey and Oleg are angry and want to fight, like real alpha males.'

She adds that 40 per cent of her followers had voted to remove the videos and images and 60 per cent had not.

'I will follow the majority's opinion, this is now a public affair. At the decision of the majority, I leave everything as is, and we look what will happen next.'

However as of Wednesday, she appears to have deleted the offending images and videos.

Last week, several media outlets were also ordered to redact reports that initially picked up on Mr Navalny's report. They all complied as of Wednesday, according to Interfax, the Russian news agency.

Navalny claims that the videos allegedly showing Miss Rybka, Deripaska and Prikhodo, are evidence of government corruption and has refused to take down the videos.

Navalny quoted public records suggesting that Prikhodko spent several days on the yacht and was flown there by Deripaska's private jet.

A spokesman for Deripaska rejected Navalny's report, saying: 'These scandalous and mendacious assumptions are driven by sensationalism and we totally refute these outrageous false allegations in the strongest possible way.'

As it is not possible for internet providers to block specific pages on Instagram and YouTube, the entire sites may be blacklisted in Russia, a spokesperson for the Russian Association for Electronic Communications told the BBC.

Neither YouTube nor Instagram returned a request for comment.

Deripaska is a controversial figure who has been linked to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort.

In 2008, he was at the centre of a British political scandal, when it emerged that then-Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, Lord Peter Mandelson and banking heir Nat Rothschild had all spent an evening on his yacht Queen K in Corfu in August.</s>A dispute between one of Russia’s richest businessmen and an opposition leader could mean no access to YouTube and Instagram for the country’s citizens.

The Russian government has threatened to block access to Instagram and YouTube in the country, after videos surfaced on both platforms showing a senior government official spending time on a yacht with an oligarch in apparently corrupt secret meetings.

The wealthy oligarch in question, Oleg Deripaska, was seen in the videos sailing his yacht around Norway, with Russian deputy prime minister Sergei Prikhodko also on board the vessel.

According to The New York Times, opposition leader and activist against government corruption Alexei Navalny published an investigation into Deripaska, a billionaire who made his money in the aluminium and mining industries.

He alleged that Deripaska was feeding Prikhodo information regarding the 2016 US presidential election. It is said that Deripaska was previously close to former Trump campaign lead, Paul Manafort.

The videos in question are from the social media accounts of blogger Anastasia Vashukevich, who posted the videos of Deripaska and Prikhodko on the yacht. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation posted a video last Thursday (8 February) presenting the footage that allegedly showed both men meeting.

Navalny also uploaded a photo of the apparent secret meeting to his own Instagram account.

Soon after, Deripaska hit Navalny with a court order for the removal of 14 Instagram posts and seven YouTube videos. Navalny has refused to take down the content from either platform.

Russia’s governmental internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, issued both platforms a notice, giving them three business days to remove the content. If a decision is not reached by the end of today (14 February), Russian internet service providers (ISPs) must take action themselves.

As ISPs in Russia cannot censor specific posts, this could result in a total blockage of YouTube and Instagram in the country.

Russia’s most well-known opposition figure, Navalny has been forbidden from standing against Putin in an upcoming March election. He alleges a corruption conviction against him was fabricated to keep him out of the running.

Navalny said: “It wasn’t me who took bribes from an oligarch in the form of aeroplane flights and expensive cruises, but the singular, lightning-fast attack of the government is directed against me and my foundation, who exposed the corruption.

“This is a war of our dissemination against their blockage. And it’s one we have to win.”</s>Russia has threatened to block access to YouTube and Instagram if the websites do not remove videos and photos of a Kremlin-linked oligarch’s meeting with a senior government minister on a luxury yacht.



The meeting between Oleg Deripaska, an aluminium and mining tycoon, and Sergei Prikhodko, a Russian deputy prime minister, was the subject of a recent investigation by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition figurehead.

Navalny’s investigation was based on footage and photographs posted to Instagram in 2016 by Anastasiya Vashukevich, a 21-year-old model and escort who goes by the name Nastya Rybka. Vashukevich said she had been hired to spend time with the men on the yacht on a trip off the coast of Norway.

“An oligarch takes a top government official on a ride on his own yacht – that’s a bribe,” Navalny said in a video that has had more than 4m views. “An oligarch pays for all of this, including young women from escort agencies. Believe it or not, that is also a bribe.”

Navalny also alleged, without offering proof, that Deripaska was briefing Prikhodko on information on the 2016 US presidential campaign that he had received from Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager.

Manafort, who has had business dealings with Deripaska, offered private updates to the oligarch on Trump’s election campaign in a 2016 email, the Washington Post reported last year. Deripaska says he was not contacted by Manafort about such briefings.

Deripaska has not disputed that the meeting on the yacht with Prikhodko took place, but he denies the allegations of bribery and says Navalny’s investigation is part of a planned campaign to damage his reputation.

“These scandalous and mendacious assumptions are driven by sensationalism and we totally refute these outrageous false allegations in the strongest possible way,” a spokesman for Deripaska told AP.

He won an injunction on Saturday from a court in his native Krasnodar region ordering the removal from websites of the videos and photographs, which he says are a violation of his privacy.



Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications watchdog, has given YouTube and Instagram until the close of business on Tuesday to delete the material or face censure. Neither company responded immediately to a request for comment. 



The watchdog also ordered Navalny to delete his investigation into the meeting from his website. Navalny has described the order as an unprecedented case of state censorship, and has urged his supporters to share his video on Deripaska’s meeting with Prikhodko as widely as possible.

Prikhodko, who advises the Kremlin on foreign policy, said the issue should have been settled with Navalny “man to man”, but he supported Deripaska’s decision to appeal to the court. The Kremlin has not commented.

Navalny, who is barred from challenging Vladimir Putin in next month’s presidential election, has been using social media to try to persuade Russians to boycott the vote, in which Putin is all but certain to secure another six-year term in office.</s>Thirteen links to a video investigation by opposition leader Alexei Navalny into billionaire Oleg Deripaska and a senior government figure stand in the way of YouTube and Instagram being blocked in Russia.

A court injunction in Deripaska’s native region ordered the removal of several Instagram posts and YouTube videos that breach his right to privacy, in a move that threatens to see both platforms shuttered by Wednesday.</s>YouTube could soon be blocked in Russia because of videos featuring a billionaire linked to Paul Manafort, a social media-savvy model and a government minister close to Vladimir Putin.

Oleg Deripaska, a Russian metals magnate known to Americans for dealings with the former Trump campaign chair during his time in Ukraine, was seen briefly in a video posted by Nastya Rybka, a model and writer who has written a book about seducing oligarchs.

That clip was spotted by the team of anti-Kremlin opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whose investigation into the circumstances around it found that Deripaska was aboard his yacht off the coast of Norway and was joined by Russia's deputy prime minister Sergei Prikhodko.

Navalny said that beyond cavorting with what he said were women in the "escort services industry," Prikhodko was accepting a bribe from the billionaire by traveling on his ship.

Rubio dismisses report on Warner attempt to get Steele testimony

The opposition leader also noted that Rybka's video filmed weeks before the 2016 U.S. election captured a conversation about former U.S. State Department employee Victoria Nuland, and connected the Deripaska-Prikhodko conversation to speculation that the oligarch could have been a link between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

Deripaska, who emails show was offered briefings on the Trump campaign by Manafort, went to court only days after the investigation's publication, and a judge agreed with his claim that they violated his privacy.

That led Russia's media watchdog to demand that YouTube, owned by Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, take the content down.

Russian law says that internet service providers must block access to sites that host "illegal" content if they do not delete it.

Manafort took 18 trips to Moscow during work in Ukraine: report

Navalny's team, which has published previous investigations about the vast real estate holdings of Russian government employees with relatively low salaries, said that YouTube had asked them to take down a video about the yacht affair.

He wrote that seven outlets were asked to take the information down before a Wednesday deadline including Maxim's Russia website, where a list of jokes about Deripaska and Rybka had been taken down as of the early afternoon.

Instagram photos were also among those that the watchdog wanted to block, though Rybka, whose pseudonym means "fish," appears to have deleted the original images of Deripaska from her account.

She has been posting edited Valentine's Day photos of him from a vacation in Dubai, and also posted on Wednesday that she is interested in shooting pornography.</s>The Russian government has threatened to block YouTube and Instagram over videos and posts relating to Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch who has been linked to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

A 25-minute video was posted on Thursday by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny. It sources Instagram videos and social media accounts published by a model and escort who posted videos in 2016 linking Deripaska to Russian deputy prime minister Sergei E. Prikhodko, according to the New York Times.

Deripaska won a court injunction ordering the video to be taken down, along with six other videos and 14 Instagram posts. Communications regulator Roskomnadzor added them to its list of prohibited websites and ordered internet providers to block them or face investigation. But since many internet providers don't have the technical capability to block specific URLs, complying with the order would mean removing access to YouTube and Instagram entirely.

Deripaska previously invested in a private equity firm run by former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who also offered him "private briefings" on the campaign in July 2016. The two have since fallen out, with Deripaska taking out a lawsuit against Manafort in January.

YouTube and Instagram did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</s>Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor included the materials on its register of blacklisted sites following the court order. Its press office declined immediate comment. Internet providers must block access to online services within days unless information declared illegal is deleted.

Anti-Kremlin campaigner Alexey Navalny said the order also threatens to block his website after he published an online film alleging that the videos and photographs posted by the woman, who calls herself Nastya Rybka, showed evidence of a corrupt relationship between the aluminum tycoon and the senior minister.

Deripaska won an order from Ust-Labinsk court in his native Krasnodar region ordering the removal of 14 Instagram posts and seven YouTube videos that breached his right to privacy, according to a spokeswoman for his Basic Element company.

(Bloomberg) — Russia may block access to YouTube and Instagram after billionaire Oleg Deripaskawon a court injunction against videos and photographs that showed him and Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko relaxing on a yacht with a woman described as an escort.

Deripaska denied wrongdoing after Navalny published his video Feb. 8, calling it a ‘planned campaign‘ to damage his reputation. The injunction was granted Feb. 9. Navalny’s allegations ’should have been answered in a manly way, but we’ll stay within the law,‘ Prikhodko said, the RBC newspaper reported on Feb. 9.

Navalny, who was barred from running against Vladimir Putin in March’s presidential elections, has built a massive online following in Russia for investigations accusing government ministers and top officials of corruption. He inspired the largest anti-government protests since 2012 last year after releasing a video showing lavish estates allegedly belonging to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who denied the accusations.

YouTube and Instagram may be blocked in Russia as early as Wednesday unless they comply with the order and remove the material, Vedomosti newspaper reported, citing the watchdog. Representatives of Facebook Inc., which owns Instagram, and YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., declined to comment.

Deripaska is seeking removal of only the 14 Instagram posts and seven YouTube videos, and not to block access to the two services entirely, the spokeswoman for Basic Element said in an email.

‘It’s impossible for internet providers to block certain pages on Instagram and YouTube,’ and they’ll have to block the services unless the material singled out by the watchdog is deleted, said Karen Kazaryan, chief analyst at the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an internet lobby group. There’s also a ’high chance that Navalny may need to remove this information to avoid being blocked.‘

The action against his investigation is ’a brazen act of censorship," Navalny wrote on his website, which remained accessible on Monday. ‘I urge everyone to spread this video wherever you can.’

Billionaire Alisher Usmanov took to YouTube last year to post his own video responses to Navalny’s allegations that he donated real estate to a fund benefiting Medvedev, calling the anti-corruption campaigner a ‘loser‘ and saying ’I spit on you.’ Usmanov later won a defamation lawsuit, in which a court ordered Navalny to retract the allegations.
Russia wants YouTube and Instagram to remove videos posted by Alexey Navalny, a prominent opposition figure, describing his investigation into Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, with bribing Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko and offering information about the 2016 U.S. election he had received from Paul Manafort.