Exiled oligarch urges other tycoons to break with Putin

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the self-exiled Russian oligarch and vocal Kremlin opponent, has called on Russian billionaires and officials who have fled Russia to publicly denounce President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine as criminal.

“Public figures cannot leave quietly and then sit quietly. If you have left, then you should publicly dissociate yourself or we should be forced to suspect that you are acting on [the Kremlin’s] behalf,” Khodorkovsky said in an interview last week in his London office. “You should step up to the microphone and say that Putin is a war criminal and that what he is doing is a crime, that the war against Ukraine is a crime. Say this, and then we’ll understand that Putin doesn’t have a hold over you.”

Khodorkovsky — who was Russia’s richest man before he was arrested in 2003 and imprisoned for 10 years while his Yukos oil company was taken over by the Russian state — was referring in particular to the high-profile Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven of Alfa Group. They were once his comrades among Russia’s seven original oligarchs of the 1990s, who then controlled much of the country’s economy. Fridman and Aven left Russia in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only to be put under sanctions by Britain and the European Union over alleged close ties to the Putin regime.

Khodorkovsky was also referring to Anatoly Chubais, the Kremlin special envoy whose departure from Russia late last month made him the highest-ranking official to step down from his post and leave the country since the invasion. Chubais had overseen the 1990s-era privatizations of state-owned enterprises, which were the source of Khodorkovsky’s, Fridman’s and Aven’s fabulous wealth.