Senior members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) met the wife of the Russian billionaire who allegedly gave financial support to a woman accused of being a secret agent for Moscow in the US.
The
NRA members met Svetlana Nikolaeva, who is the head of a gun company that supplies sniper rifles to the Russian military and intelligence services, during a trip to Moscow during the 2016 election campaign.
Accused spy Maria Butina met with Russia's former US ambassador
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Nikolaeva’s husband, Konstantin Nikolaev, allegedly provided funding to Maria Butina, a young Russian woman charged with carrying out an illicit spying operation in Washington. Nikolaev reportedly once invested in his wife’s gun company.
The finding sheds further light on the links forged in recent years between America’s powerful gun lobby and well-connected Russians. US prosecutors allege
Butina’s activities were directed by Alexander Torshin, a senior Russian state banker and an NRA member.
The NRA and Nikolaev’s companies did not respond to requests for comment.
No senior NRA official has made any public statement about Butina’s case since news of the charges was announced by the US justice department on 16 July.
Butina, 29, was arrested this month and charged with illegally operating as a foreign agent. She is accused of working to infiltrate the NRA as part of an attempt to influence the Republican party and establish secret backchannels with American politicians. She has pleaded not guilty and denies any wrongdoing.
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Prosecutors said that her emails and online chats contained details of a Russian billionaire with “deep ties” to the Kremlin, who was described as Butina’s “funder”. He was not identified in the charging documents, but was said to have a personal fortune valued at $1.2bn by Forbes magazine.
During her testimony to the Senate intelligence committee in April, Butina said Nikolaev had given her financial support,
the Washington Post reported. The Russian newspaper
Kommersant reported that a representative for Nikolaev confirmed he gave money to Butina’s gun rights group between 2012 and 2014.
Forbes
currently estimates the net worth of Nikolaev, a transportation magnate, as $1.2bn. Nikolaev has been involved in several business projects connected to allies of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. His son, Andrey, volunteered for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to the Post.
Nikolaev’s wife, Svetlana, is an accomplished gun user who has competed in shooting competitions in the US and Israel. She is the president of Promtechnologies, the parent company of Orsis, and has played a prominent role in the firm’s expansion.
Last year,
Orsis began supplying its acclaimed T-5000 sniper rifle to Russia’s armed forces and Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB. The company’s general director and chief gun designer, Vladimir Zlobin, is a former FSB official, according to
his biography at a university operated by Russia’s ministry of foreign affairs.
Nikolaev has been named in several Russian media reports in recent years as an early investor in Orsis’s parent company. But the company insisted he was not currently an owner of the firm. “Mr Nikolaev is not connected with the company,” an unidentified spokesperson said in an email. Asked whether Nikolaev held a stake in the company in the past, the spokesperson said: “He is not involved with the company today.” Further questions were not answered.
In December 2015, an NRA delegation including Pete Brownell, then the NRA’s first vice-president, and David Keene, a past NRA president, visited
Russia for an expedition partly funded by Right to Bear Arms, a Russian pro-gun group run by Butina with help from Torshin, her alleged government handler.
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Maria Butina has been charged in the US with espionage for Russia. Photograph: Facebook
On 11 December, the NRA group visited the Orsis headquarters, where they met with Nikolaeva and other executives, as shown in
video footage posted online by the company in 2016, which was first reported by Mother Jones. Several major NRA donors were also part of the delegation.
The NRA group, which also included David Clarke, then the sheriff of Milwaukee county and later a prominent campaign surrogate for Donald Trump, enjoyed meals and meetings with influential Russians including Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister. Rogozin’s son was previously an executive at Orsis. Clarke posted a photograph of himself holding an Orsis rifle
to his Twitter account.
Nikolaev’s son, Andrey, is studying at Columbia University in New York. Andrey was quoted
in an article about far-right speakers on campus that was published last year by a student journalist, and identified as a member of the Columbia University College Republicans. But his name was
removed from the article following the identification of his father as a supporter of Butina.
Konstantin Nikolaev also has American business interests. He is a director on
the board of American Ethane, a Texas-based energy company that recently signed $26bn dollar export deal with China. The agreement, signed as part of Trump’s official visit to Beijing last year, was championed by the president.
The Guardian
disclosed earlier this month that a former chief of staff to Putin had a previously unreported investment in American Ethane. The former Putin aide, Alexander Voloshin, is part of a consortium of Russian investors in the firm that also previously included the London-based oligarch Roman Abramovich.
