PATTAYA (Thailand): A Belarusian woman jailed in Thailand for offering sex lessons without a work permit says she has a story to tell involving the Kremlin, Russian billionaires and even the president of the United States.
Anastasia Vashukevich, whose extraordinary claims and racy selfies have propelled her to Internet fame in recent weeks, told reporters from a police van on Wednesday that she fears for her life, and wants to exchange information on alleged Russian ties to Donald Trump’s campaign for her own personal safety.
But she refused for now to offer any such evidence, and it’s not clear if she has any.
Vashukevich said she won’t give details of what she knows until she is guaranteed she won’t be sent to Russia.
“I can say something only when I will be in a safe place, sorry, because I am worried about my life,” Vashukevich said on the way to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre.
Vashukevich shot to fame in early February when Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin’s top foes, published an investigation drawing on Vashukevich’s social media posts suggesting corrupt links between billionaire Oleg Deripaska and a top Kremlin official, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko.
The report featured video from Deripaska’s yacht in 2016, when Vashukevich claims she was having an affair with him.
Russians have focused on the ties between Deripaska and Prikhodko.
But now Vashukevich says – so far without proof – that she can link the Kremlin to Trump and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who worked for Deripaska a decade before Trump hired him.
Manafort has been indicted on money-laundering charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election but Mueller has offered no evidence so far in his investigation that Manafort helped Russia in the US election.
On Sunday, Vashukevich was arrested along with nine other people, including her “sex guru” Alexander Kirillov, in the Thai resort of Pattaya while giving sex lessons to Russian tourists.
Vashukevich had earlier posted a video on Instagram, also apparently made while in custody in Pattaya, addressed to “Dear American media”.
“I didn’t want to tell you about many things. Now they’re trying to lock us up,” she said.
“But now I’m ready to put together all the pieces of the puzzle that you have been missing, and back it up with audio and video regarding the ties of our esteemed lawmakers with Manafort, Trump and all this buzz around the US election. I know a lot.”
Trump has repeatedly denied that he colluded with Russia to influence the US election.
Kirillov, known in Russia for staging high-profile sexual happenings that usually involve sending scantily clad women out in public, said that the Russian government was behind their arrests. — AP
