Ryan Chilcote:

He is a self-made tycoon, one of Russia's wealthiest businessmen, who controlled, for years, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, Rusal, and a number of the nation's industrial giants, employing hundreds of thousands of Russians.

Like other Russian magnates, the U.S. government says Oleg Deripaska is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin. Over the last two years, Deripaska's name has come up in American news reports as a figure with ties to some of the targets of special counsel Robert Mueller's now concluded Russia investigation.

Deripaska's interactions with the eventual chairman of President Trump's 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, go back years. More recently, Deripaska and Manafort came into a financial dispute, with Deripaska charging that Manafort owes him millions of dollars.

In an e-mail revealed by The Washington Post by an associate by the name of Konstantin Kilimnik, who the U.S. believes has ties to Russian intelligence, Manafort even considered on his own whether to give Deripaska private briefings about the campaign.

Last year, the U.S. slapped sanctions on Deripaska and his company. At the time, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the aim was to hit at the Russian government. While the sanctions against Deripaska remain, they have been lifted from some of his largest holdings, after Deripaska agreed to reduce his stake and control in the firm.

And where are you going now?

Today, I sat down with Deripaska in Nizhny Novgorod, home to GAZ, Russia's largest maker of commercial vehicles, a company still under American sanctions.

Do you feel that the attorney general's summary of the Mueller report has exonerated you?