ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- Kazakh authorities have banned Russian citizen and sex trainer Aleksandr Kirillov from the Central Asian country following online protests in Kazakhstan against his plans to offer training in Almaty on what he called "seducing Kazakh girls."
The Almaty city police department said on November 16 that Kirillov had been barred from entering Kazakhstan for one year. Department officials told RFE/RL that the decision was made due to online protests by Kazakh citizens.
Kirillov, who calls himself sex trainer Alex Lesley, had advertised his training session online. There were no details on how many people had signed up.
Kirillov was at the center of a scandal in 2018 when he and his associate, a Belarusian escort and self-described sex trainer Anastasia Vashukevich, also known as Nastya Rybka, were arrested in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya while giving a class in sexual relationships. They spent about nine months in jail on charges of soliciting to provide sexual services before being released and deported in 2019.
Months before the arrests, Vashukevich was the focus of a geopolitical scandal when Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny published an exposé based largely on photos and video she had posted on social media.
The photos and videos appeared to show her on a yacht with Kremlin-connected tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Sergei Prikhodko, a Russian deputy prime minister at the time and a longtime former foreign policy aide to President Vladimir Putin.
Vashukevich claimed to have recordings of Deripaska talking about interference in the 2016 U.S. election that resulted in victory for Donald Trump, but never released them and suggested in comments after her detention that she would not do so.
In September, the United States charged Deripaska with violating sanctions imposed on him over Russia's ongoing unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The United States accused him of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrange to have his partner flown to the United States twice to give birth to his children.
Prikhodko died aged 64 in January last year of an unspecified illness.
