A Russian oil tycoon pursued by the Kremlin asked the West to confront Vladimir Putin: “He's a thug, a bandit”

“I have been fighting a personal war with Vladimir Putin for almost 20 years. It led me to be imprisoned in Russia for ten years and then expelled, with the warning that life imprisonment awaited me if I returned. Do I know the man who did all this to me? I think so. That is why I look desperately at the defeatist approach of Western leaders, such as Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Naftali Bennett,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky states in a stark column in The Economist.

The former Russian oil tycoon claims to know how the Russian sees Western leaders as weak. “Part of the problem is that the current leaders of Western countries have never dealt with thugs. His experience and education refer to interactions between statesmen,” he says, adding: “This is not the case with Vladimir Putin. He grew up in the KGB, an organization that relied on force and contempt for the law. While working at St. Petersburg City Hall, in the early 90s, he was responsible for the informal interaction of law enforcement agencies with gangsters. At that time, St. Petersburg was perceived in Russia as Chicago was perceived during the ban. Instead of smuggled whiskey, gangsters sold drugs and oil.”

He claims that times changed, but his way of solving problems remained. “Some of the conversations between his confidants and known criminals, made public after an investigation by the Spanish prosecutor's office, help to understand how the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the poisoning of Alexey Navalny and the Skripals occurred at the direction of the leader. Such acts are the norm in the president's circles, because he is a bully by nature,” he says.

“It is a drastic mistake that he is seen as a normal statesman. Russia's foreign partners don't understand who he really is,” he insists.

He warns that if Western countries say they are not going to give up Ukraine and yet do exactly that, for Putin it means that they are weak. “And that makes it likely that I will look towards other neighbors, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, which were previously also part of the Russian Empire,” he warns.

The exiled businessman claims that Putin, in his head, has long been at war not with Ukraine, but with the United States. He says: “The habit of impunity among thugs does not subside so quickly. And that means that there is likely to be a worse war.”

He recalls that Putin managed to increase his positive image rates when he came to power, in 1999, with the Chechen war. He solved the problem of controlling his “acting president”, Dmitry Medvedev, going to war with Georgia in 2008. Going to war under Putin's orders, Medvedev was forced to abandon his own modernization agenda. And also solved the problem of popularity in 2013-14 by taking Crimea.

And he makes a brutal prediction: “In 2024 there will be elections and Putin will launch a new 'special operation'. Moldova is too small, so it's probably in the Baltic States or in Poland. Unless Putin is stopped in the air over Ukraine, NATO will have to fight him on the ground.”

In addition, he claims that the Russian president has a manic psychosis. “He is obsessed with being a historical figure like Stalin. He has placed a huge statue of Prince Vladimir, the creator of Russia, at the door of his Kremlin. But he's not a suicide. He will only use nuclear weapons if he believes there will be no response.”

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