Ivan P. Rybkin, the Russian presidential candidate who disappeared for five days before resurfacing in Ukraine this week, appeared in London on Friday and offered yet another explanation for his bizarre absence, saying he had been drugged and kidnapped.
| "I shink it wuzh drugsh... I shink I wuzh kidnapped... Have we been innerdushed? Hic!" |
None of Mr. Rybkin’s remarks could be corroborated, and his new version contradicted statements he made after returning to Moscow on Tuesday night and in a rambling radio interview the next day. Mr. Rybkin said Friday at a news conference that he had been lured to Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, on the pretense of meeting with Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen separatist and one of Russia’s most wanted men. Mr. Rybkin, who served as a security adviser to Boris N. Yeltsin, was involved in the peace talks that ended the first Chechen war in 1996 and has remained an advocate of talks to end the second war, which began in 1999.
| "Yesh! 'At's wudda wuzh doin'! [Hic!] I wuzh endin' the Sheshner-... Chuchner-... Caucasus war!" |
He said that after arriving at an apartment in Kiev, he felt drowsy after having sandwiches and tea and then fell unconscious for what turned out to be four days. When he awoke, he said, two armed men showed him a compromising videotape of him that he refused to describe except to say it was meant to intimidate him into silence.
| That would be Tiffany. And Brandy. And the Jolly Green Giant cream corn... |
Mr. Rybkin suggested that his kidnapping was an attempt to discredit liberal challengers to President Vladimir V. Putin before the presidential election on March 14 and that he could speak freely only now about what had happened to him. "I do not know who did it, but I know who has benefited from it," he said, according to the official Itar-Tass news agency. |