Is a sex worker a link between Trump and the Kremlin?

Well, it's a question for the New York Times.

Anastasia Vashukevich [...] is a Belarusian woman, a self-described “sex expert,” who is now in a Thai jail and who claims, in a desperate Instagram video, to be the “the missing link in the connection between Russia and the U.S. elections.”

It sounds, of course, like an outrageous scam, and perhaps it is. But Vashukevich, who goes by the alias Nastya Rybka, has a documented link to Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch who figures prominently in one of the scandals surrounding the Trump campaign. Indeed, that link may be why she’s locked up in the first place. Whether you believe her or not, her bizarre, sordid story offers real clues to the chain connecting Trump’s circle to the highest level of the Russian government.

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Deripaska, remember, is the oligarch that the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort offered to brief privately on the American presidential campaign. He’s been connected to Russian organized crime, and Manafort appeared to owe him a lot of money.

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Vashukevich had posted video from an August 2016 trip to Norway on Deripaska’s yacht with several other escorts. And on that yacht was a Russian deputy prime minister, Sergei Prikhodko. In the video, you can even hear Deripaska and Prikhodko talking about Russia’s bad relations with the United States, for which Deripaska blamed Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

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Deripaska filed a claim against Vashukevich and Aleksandr Kirillov, a self-styled “sex guru” she’s close to, for invasion of privacy. And at some point Vashukevich and Kirillov took off for Thailand.

They were arrested there last Sunday, while teaching a “sex training” seminar for Russian tourists in the resort city of Pattaya. (The charges were working without a permit.) From what was apparently the back of an open-air police vehicle, Vashukevich made an Instagram video begging Americans for help. “I’m ready to give you all the missing puzzle pieces, support them with videos and audios, regarding the connections of our respected lawmakers with Trump, Manafort and the rest,” she said, according to CNN’s translation.

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Vashukevich and Kirillov really are being detained, and, speaking from a police van, Kirillov told The Associated Press that he believes Russia is behind their arrests. He has reportedly sent a handwritten letter to the American Embassy in Thailand pleading for asylum in exchange for information.

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Could a social-media-obsessed escort help explain the degrading nightmare of the Trump presidency? It seems like the preposterously lazy plot of a sub-B movie. But these days, so does everything else in our politics.

  NYT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.