The Ark Interview with Former U.S. Political Prisoner

In history there have been multiple patronesses of the European farmers and skilled workers who flocked to Russia, most famously the German-born Russian Empress Catherine the Great. During the late 18th century, while the Americans were winning their independence and seeking out the Russian Empire as a vast friendly power (John Quincy Adams the son of our second President was the first US Ambassador to the Russian imperial court), Ekaterina, as Russians still fondly call her was settling thousands of German immigrants in the Volga River valley's then-virgin lands, as well as other Europeans including Greek colonists in Crimea and Serbs in the coastal lands of Tauridia along the Black Sea that would be later branded Novorossiya. This term Novorossiya would be resurrected during the Russian Spring revolt against a U.S.-installed Kiev regime after the Maidan coup in March/April 2014.

We've mentioned in a previous post a Ekaterina of our time, Maria Butina, a State Duma member representing Kirov Oblast, a heavily forested rural region roughly the size of Pennsylvania about 600 miles east of Moscow. Before she was an elected official in Russia, Maria was one of the most prominent political prisoners associated with the British and U.S. Democratic Party deep state manufactured Russiagate panic aka 21st century McCarthyism that swept across the Atlantic after Donald Trump's shocking (for the bipartisan Beltway Blob) electoral victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Essentially, Maria was sent to one of the worst women's federal prisons in the United States for the political high crime of being a young, educated and attractive Russian woman who advocated for gun rights as a bridge of peace between America and Russia. The U.S. government never proved its laughable allegations of her involvement in espionage, and her ex-boyfriend former Overstock CEO Patrick M. Byrne wrote a tell-all book about his years as an FBI informant and how the Justice Department railroaded Butina.

Photo credit (above): Maria Butina speaking with Timur Beslangurov, picture reproduced from Charles Bausman's Substack, The Ark

Charles Bausman, the son of an AP journalist who resided in Soviet Moscow as a child during the late 1960s, has previously been the publisher of Russia Insider. Today he is a January 6th refugee living in exile from the USA for the 'crime' of peacefully reporting what was actually happening during the FBI informant provocateured 'MAGA insurrection' inside the U.S. Capitol of 01/06/21.

Charles wrote a nice profile of Butina, who happens to be friends with our friend, Russia's leading legal expert on Western migration, Timur Beslangurov. If you don't know who Butina is or missed her small part in the media's fabricated #RussianCollusionHoax storyline, read on:

Some of you in the US may recall her from 2018, at the height of the Russia!, Russia!, Russia! hoax, when she made headlines and a 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl from jail when the FBI arrested the 28 year old who had been studying in the US for three years, accusing her of being a Russian spy. She landed in prison for 18 months and was then shipped back to Russia. It made for a good story because Butina was a beautiful, tall, 2nd amendment activist well-connected in Republican party circles and with senior officials in Moscow. Photographs of her posing with guns flew around the internet.

I won't get into the story here because I find what she is doing now, and the woman she has grown to be more interesting. The nutshell: she always insisted that the idea that she was a spy is ridiculous. She was never convicted of that, and welcomed back to Russia as a heroine.

“I’ll always love guns. I used to have a lot more time for that and would go to shooting ranges a lot, which we have a lot of here in Russia. They’re very popular.”

Advocating for gun rights in Russia before she left to study in the US.

As a journalist who covered the Russia hoax story from day one and understands it well, I would wager this is probably correct, because the FBI lies about pretty much everything it does, and has become a traveling theatrical troupe staging false flags for the Democrat party. They don’t call it the FBLie for nothing. The 60 Minutes segment is actually interesting, and to their credit, gave her a chance to tell at least part of her side of the story.

One thing I never understood is that the “incriminating” texts with her friends in Russia were on non-protected messengers, on Twitter, if I recall correctly. If she was some kind of super spy, why was she using Twitter to send “secret” texts? To me and to many people who looked at this, it looks like she was exactly what she claimed to be, and became a useful pawn in DC political games, paying a very high personal price, the victim of a serious injustice.

(A recent video, visiting a new city of 50,000 which is interested in attracting immigrants from the US and Europe. Video in English.)

She says she was deliberately maltreated in jail to break her spirit and force a confession never received: 120 days in solitary, sleep deprivation, no mattress or blanket, 50 hours of interrogations, no daylight, disgusting food, a squalid, cockroach infested cell, returning home with serious health issues. Again this rings true because they’re doing the same to the January 6 political prisoners. There’s plenty about the whole episode on the internet if you’re curious. What you find from the mainstream media will be misleading.

Read the full article over at Charles Bausman's Substack, The Ark, where Charles discusses Maria Butina's recently created Telegram group for potential immigrants to Russia managed by a small staff of English-speaking Russian university students.

Before watching ESW CEO VJ Varghese's recent interview with Timur and Tim Kirby, we highly encourage our readers to check out the related free content on the ESW:

ExitStrategy.World Eurasia Editor Stanislav Krapivnik Comments on Russia's New Migration Decree August 29, 2024

Did Western YouTube Vloggers in Russia Encourage the Kremlin's Decree Welcoming Westerners to the RF? August 27, 2024

The Russian Ark is Officially Under Construction August 25, 2024

If you wish to schedule a consultation with us and Timur about emigrating to Russia, reach out today: stanislav@exitstrategy.world