Putin should be hanged, Gazprom defector says
Just hours into the war, business executive Igor Volobuyev started receiving videos from childhood friends showing shells dropping onto his Ukrainian hometown of Okhtyrka, near the border with Russia.
Volobuyev had spent more than two decades at Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas giant, rising to become a vice-president at Gazprombank, which is owned by the conglomerate and is the country's third-largest bank.
“I was glued to my phone. I felt like I was sitting in a cosy cinema watching a horror film,” Volobuyev said.
“It's such a miserable feeling when people call you and say: Russians are killing us. You work in Gazprombank. You're an important guy. Can you do something to stop this?”
Volobuyev fled Russia days after the start of the war only to resurface in Kyiv last week, in arguably the most dramatic defection of the conflict.
“Putin has to be put on trial and hanged. But only in accordance with the law,” he said.
Volobuyez was born in Okhtyrka, which saw devastating shelling early in the war. When he graduated in Moscow, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and he received Russian citizenship. Volobuyev had little interest in politics and voted for Putin in 2012. But Ukraine's pro-EU uprising in 2013-2014 and the annexation of Crimea opened his eyes to the Kremlin's hostile policy toward his home country.
“For eight years I was in this internal turmoil: I didn't just work in Russia, but I worked for Gazprom. I worked for the Russian state,” he said.
The grey-haired executive said he had been thinking about moving to Ukraine all this time but he was held back by family obligations. When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on Feb. 24, all of his plans shattered.
“I couldn't live like this much longer: I had to choose between my family and my
I had to choose between my family and my motherland, and I chose my motherland.” Igor Volobuyev
motherland, and I chose my motherland.”
Although never expressed in public, there is a lot of unhappiness with Kremlin policies even at state-owned giants such as Gazprom, Volobuyev said. He quoted recent conversations with senior executives at Gazprom and elsewhere who privately grumble about Putin's disastrous war.
There is, however, very little appetite for protest or any public stands among senior figures at Gazprom, he said.
The first thing Volobuyev did on arrival was volunteer to join Kyiv's territorial defence but he was told there was no immediate need for 50-something men with no military background.
“I was told it's impossible but I'm taking steps to see what I can do,” he said.