Champagne wishes and caviar dreams...
The Russians may try to kill the internet itself (at least within Russia) to stop a YouTube/Instagram video.
Fortunately the Web doesn’t drink polonium tea, and as the WH tells us, there’s no Russian-Trump collusion; it’s a hoax, don’t you know. So the genie is out of the bottle and the Russians won’t be able to prevent publication, but can certainly exact revenge, since that’s a feature.
However, this story has been percolating for many months and while its emphasis has been in Russian domestic politics, a new video has taken its #TrumpRussia association to become a social media threat against the Putin regime.
The important part is that the video (Russian with English subtitles) begins with “ladies of low social responsibility” who interestingly get around enough to serve a variety of employers and in this case allowed opposition politician Alexey Navalsky to connect Deripaska, an oligarch whose planes have interesting destinations, Russian deputy PM Prikhodko, and Paul Manafort.
And more amusing could be that the Steele Dossier’s 2013 “tape” of Agent Orange in Moscow seems more plausible and could support the notion that he’s being blackmailed with the threat of leaks(sic).
Before getting all squishy about Alexey Navalsky, one should remember he’s not exactly a social democrat but a politician with apparently some dislike of various migrant populations. But he has been getting arrested by Putin for a variety of nuisance crimes to keep him off the ballot.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous.
Last week, a 25-minute video published by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny alleging a new link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign made headlines around the world. Now the Russian government wants it scrubbed from the internet—so much so that it is taking steps that could block millions of its own citizens from using YouTube or Instagram.
The video was released last Thursday and accused Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko—a top foreign policy official—of having been a conduit between the Kremlin and Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch linked to the Trump campaign. In making his case, Navalny mined the autobiography and Instagram feeds of Nastya Rybka, a Russian model and escort who claims to be Deripaska’s mistress. Drawing on video and audio Rybka posted that captured her, Deripaska, and Prikhodko relaxing on a yacht while the two men discuss US-Russia relations, Navalny’s video alleges that Deripaska hosted Prikhodko for a secret meeting at sea in the company of several female escorts. Deripaska immediately denied the claim and threatened to sue media outlets reporting on it, assailing the video as a “planned campaign aiming to damage my reputation.”
[...]
To comply with the Roskomnadzor order, they’ll instead have to block access to YouTube and Instagram entirely—unless the owners of the offending posts opt to delete them independently.
“It’s impossible for internet providers to block certain pages on Instagram and YouTube,” Karen Kazaryan, chief analyst at the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an internet lobby group, told Bloomberg on Monday.
Navalsky has his own agenda, but it is instructive to note how the arguments for kleptocratic crime do show how the Kremlin and the WH share similar relationships.
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, whose fortune is estimated at $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.
www.thedailybeast.com/...