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Two more superyachts discovered in Putin's possession

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Investigators at the Dossier Centre, founded by Russian political exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have discovered two more superyachts used by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, bringing the Russian dictator's fleet to 10 yachts.

Source: Dossier

Details: The newly revealed yachts are the 71-metre Victoria and the 38-metre Orion, an escort vessel.

Orion yacht

PHOTO: DOSSIER CENTRE

Victoria was built at the shipyards of Russia's Sevmash military plant together with the Graceful yacht. She is currently undergoing repairs at a Turkish shipyard that prepares ships for the navy of NATO member Türkiye.

The Victoria yacht has been described as the flagship of Putin's Black Sea flotilla. The Victoria left Russia's Sochi port on 21 October and docked west of the Istanbul shipyard two days later. The vessel moved to the docks on early 25 October, switched off its AIS transmitter and ceased to appear on the maps of relevant services.

Yacht Victoria in the Turkish port of Tuzla in November 2023

The investigators managed to see the yacht using a drone. A distinctive feature of the ship, the massive letter V, was captured.

F or reference: Early in Putin's second presidential term, the Sevmash military plant, building nuclear submarines, including the modern fourth-generation Yasen and Borey projects, was involved in yacht construction.

The two yachts of the A-1331 project were the only ones produced by the military shipyard. The first one was Victoria, the preparation of which began in 2005, followed by Graceful, the building of which started in 2006.

Graceful took 8 years to build, whereas Victoria was completed in 14 years.

The contract with Sevmash was concluded by businessman Sergey Maslov's company, Julesburg Corp, located in the British Virgin Islands.

Sevmash reported successful testing at the end of 2013. The Victoria was taken to Italy, but the ISA Yachts shipyard never started work, so the vessel was moved to Türkiye in 2015.

The Victoria was completed at the Turkish shipyard AES Yachts on 24 July 2019.

The Victoria can take 28 people on board, but reports indicate that there are usually 11-15 crew members and up to six passengers on the vessel. The cost of the ship, as stated in the 2019 customs declaration, amounts to US$50.1 million. The same document describes the main technical specifications of the yacht, including its design feature: there are two master suites on board. The Graceful boat has as many master suites, and the Russian president's residences always have two separate bedrooms: one for the master and one for the mistress, Dossier noted.

Yacht interior

The Victoria is stationed in Sochi and periodically reaches Cape Idokopas, where Putin's palace lies. The vessel switches off its AIS and disappears from the radar just before the cape.

The vessel left Sochi for Crimea in the summer of 2021. The 38.5-metre Orion boat accompanied the yacht on this journey. It was developed in 2009 in Viareggio, Italy.

The Dossier Centre spotted the Victoria in Sochi in a photo posted on the account of Natalia Belugina, a rhythmic gymnast and choreographer of the Alina festival, organised annually by Alina Kabaeva, another Russian gymnast and Putin's mistress. Belugina is a friend of the latter, and they occasionally travel together. A source familiar with the athlete told Dossier that Kabaeva and her family indeed use the boat.

Quote from Dossier: "Vladimir Putin was never photographed on the Victoria, so there is no direct documentary evidence that the yacht belongs to him. However, as with other Russian president's yachts, there is plenty of indirect evidence: a specially selected crew, the ship's route, passing close to the presidential palace, the nominal owner, and the unusual construction history."

Details: After the arrest of the Scheherazade yacht in Italy, the Victoria reportedly became the largest Putin-related yacht in the Black Sea.

The same " southern flotilla " includes:

The €30 million 54-metre yacht Chaika (formerly Sirius), the only vessel on the balance sheet of the Russian Presidential Affairs Directorate. Putin met with Alexander Lukashenko on board the Chaika in May 2021.

The 46-metre yacht Shellest worth about US$23.9 million. The Shellest serves as a sailing vessel to get to Putin's palace on Cape Idokopas and has been sailing between Russia's Sochi and Gelendzhik since November 2022.

Putin's flagship in the Baltic Sea is the Graceful. The " northern flotilla " also includes:

37-metre Aldoga, completed in Viareggio in 2009. The exact cost of the yacht is unknown; similar ships cost US$14-16 million.

32-metre Nega, built in 2013 by the UK company Princess Yachts, costing US$12.2 million.

a Brizo 46 model boat worth just under US$1.2 million, assigned to Graceful.

Yachts related to Putin

Background: In May 2022, reports emerged that the Italian authorities had ordered the arrest of the 140-metre superyacht Scheherazade, whose owner is believed to be Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the port of Marina di Carrara.

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Putin has a secret palatial home near Finland with yachts, 2 helipads, and a private waterfall: report

• Russian President Vladimir Putin owns a luxurious lake home, a report said. 
• The palace is located near the border with Finland, according to The Dossier Center.
• Putin is estimated by some to be among the world's wealthiest people. 

A secret palatial home belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin has been discovered in northern Russia, according to investigative outlet The Dossier Center.

The property is located in Marialakhti Bay in Karelia, a region in northwestern Russia bordering Finland, according to the outlet, which is funded by Putin's rival and exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The Dossier Center posted a video on YouTube of what it claimed was drone footage of Putin's secret getaway.

Related stories

It said the complex has "three modern-style houses, two helicopter pads, several yacht piers, a trout farm, and a farm with cows for the production of marble beef, as well as a personal waterfall."

The Center said the property is located on the shore of Lake Lagoda, part of a national park, and includes a picturesque waterfall.

It is shielded by fences which are monitored by electronic sensors and protected by special security units. It also has markings on the ground indicating it's protected by air defense systems, said the Center.

The outlet did not say how it was able to get past the security to film the property with a drone.

The report cited locals saying Putin visits the property once a year after making a trip to the nearby Valaam Monastery.

Work on the property started around 10 years ago, and it's one of a portfolio of Putin assets owned via companies managed by financier Yury Kovalchuk, the Center said.

Business Insider could not independently verify the Center's claims and has contacted the Russian embassy in the UK for comment.

Putin's wealth has long been the subject of speculation and rumor.

He has an official salary of $140,000 a year and a relatively modest official apartment. But a range of highly valuable assets, including superyachts and a vast palace by the Black Sea, have been linked to him through complex financial structures.

Watch: Inside Putin's secret bunker and billion-dollar palace

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These are the Russian oligarchs circling Putin

Toy soldiers or a hope for a coup here's a rundown of the oligarchs surrounding the russian president and why the west should lower their expectations of them.

• Who is Alexander Fridman and What is Going on in Silicon Valley?
• Israel's Rick's Café for Russian Jewish Oligarchs
• From Russia with Money: Amid Ukraine invasion investors look toward Israel

The Forbes Ultimate Guide To Russian Oligarchs

For a quarter-century, forbes has been investigating billionaire oligarchs, digging into their political connections, murky holdings and maze of offshore assets. here’s everything you need to know about the wealthy elite who have profited under vladimir putin’s rule., by giacomo tognini & john hyatt.

IN 1997, Forbes put the first four Russians on our World’s Billionaires list. These earliest oligarchs got rich during the chaotic privatization of the 1990s, acquiring state-owned assets for pennies on the dollar. After Vladimir Putin rose to power in 2000, he helped make a number of them richer and rewarded his closest cronies by turning them into billionaires. There are 83 Russians on this year’s Billionaires list; we consider 68 of them to be oligarchs. Another 18 oligarchs were billionaires before the war but have lost too much money since the invasion of Ukraine to qualify for our ranking. Two individuals who Forbes and Forbes Russia do not consider to be oligarchs—Andrey Melnichenko and Oleg Tinkov—are included here because they have been sanctioned by the European Union or the United Kingdom.

Thirty-four billionaires and billionaire drop-offs have been sanctioned by the U.S., the U.K. or the European Union: 11 after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the rest since the Ukraine invasion. The sanctions are taking a toll. The Russian stock market was shuttered for 17 days; it reopened on March 24, initially with severe trading limits. The economy is cratering. Yachts, jets and mansions have been frozen. Forbes estimates that these oligarchs—worth a collective $290 billion as of March 11—have lost $240 billion, nearly half of their prewar net worth, since January. Below is our guide to all those sanctioned so far, and a few who could be next.

Updated on April 14.

RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRES BY YEAR AR

Sanctioned in 2022, roman abramovich, sanctions: eu, u.k..

From penniless orphan to sports mogul to sanctioned outcast, Abramovich embodies the possibilities and pitfalls of Russian oligarchy. He hustled his way into business, catching a big break in 1995 when he partnered with auto oligarch Boris Berezovsky to take control of oil giant Sibneft at a big discount. When Berezovsky ran afoul of Putin in 2000, Abramovich snagged his mentor’s shares on the cheap before cashing out to Gazprom for $13.1 billion in 2005. He was governor, reportedly at Putin’s behest, of Russia’s Far East Chukotka region from 2000 to 2008. In the West, he was known for living large, spending big on his beloved Chelsea Premier PINC League soccer team and giving more than $500 million to Jewish causes. He spent much of his time outside Russia and obtained passports from both Israel and Portugal. Abramovich, who facilitated early talks between Russia and Ukraine, was possibly poisoned while in Kyiv recently. At least four of his assets, including Chelsea, a Gulfstream G650 jet and a 15-bedroom London mansion worth $140 million, have been frozen. His two yachts, worth $900 million, are docked out of reach in Turkey.

Eugene Shvidler

Sanctions: u.k..

Abramovich’s best friend and business partner has lived in London for years. His unseized $109 million, 370-foot yacht, Le Grand Bleu, was a gift from Abramovich; two of his jets were detained by the U.K. in March. Shvidler isn’t a Russian citizen; he was born in the Soviet Union and has British and U.S. passports.

Mikhail Fridman

A Ukraine native who grew up in Lviv, Fridman and his college buddies German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev started commodities trader Alfa-Eco in 1989; it grew into the Alfa Consortium and Alfa-Bank. Thanks to Kremlin connections—one of his employees later served as Putin’s chief political advisor—he acquired additional assets in telecom, banking and oil. Fridman’s properties in London—including the $100 million Victorian-era Athlone House estate, which has five acres of landscaped gardens designed in the style of Versailles—have been frozen by the U.K.

German Khan

Khan, who has Israeli citizenship, helmed TNK-BP, a joint venture with British oil firm BP, from 2003 until its sale to state-owned Rosneft in 2013. Khan’s properties in Great Britain, including two apartments worth $35 million and a house in London’s Belgravia neighborhood, have been frozen.

Alexei Kuzmichev

Fridman’s other longtime partner resigned from Luxembourg-based investment firm LetterOne’s board on March 7, along with Khan. His two yachts— La Petite Ourse and La Petite Ourse II —were frozen by French authorities in March.

Putin’s former minister of foreign economic relations was president of Russia’s largest privately held bank, Alfa-Bank, from 1994 to 2011. Three of his homes—including an 18-room estate in Surrey and a $4.4 million villa in Italy—have been seized or frozen. He and Fridman vow to contest the EU sanctions; he stepped down from LetterOne’s board on March 3.

Andrey Melnichenko

The son of a Soviet physicist, Melnichenko dropped out of college when the Soviet Union fell in 1991 to start a chain of currency exchange booths. Two years later, he founded MDM Bank, which became one of Russia's most successful private banks. He later expanded into fertilizer and coal. His two yachts—including the world’s largest sail-assisted yacht, SY A —have been frozen or deregistered by authorities in Italy and the Isle of Man. According to Forbes reporting, Melnichenko is not an oligarch because he built an independent fortune without ties to the Russian government under either Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin. He has been included here because he has been sanctioned. In a statement, a spokesperson for Melnichenko called the EU sanctions “absurd and nonsensical,” adding that they will be disputed.

Alexey Mordashov

Head of Russian steel giant Severstal, Mordashov bought his first factory on the cheap in 1992 at age 27 through Russia’s voucher privatization. His yacht, Lady M, and a $115 million villa in northern Sardinia were both frozen by Italian police, but his other yacht—the 465-foot Nord —was last spotted in Vladivostok, Russia on April 7. He transferred ownership of key assets, including shares of leisure company TUI and mining outfit Nordgold, to his wife on the same day he was sanctioned by the EU. Mordashov told Forbes Russia he doesn’t understand why he has been penalized.

Vadim Moshkovich

Chairman of agro-industrial firm Rusagro, a big manufacturer of pork and sugar, he spent eight years in Russia’s Federation Council, the upper house of the country’s parliament.

Alexander Ponomarenko

With his partner Alexander Skorobogatko, he once controlled one of the biggest ports on the Black Sea. In 2013 the pair, along with Arkady Rotenberg, won a contract to modernize Sheremetyevo, Moscow’s 62-year-old state-owned airport. Like many oligarchs, Ponomarenko has disputed his inclusion on the EU sanctions list.

Dmitry Pumpyansky

Pumpyansky owned metals plants in the mineral-rich Ural region in the 1990s before taking over a pipe factory in 1998 that would become TMK, Russia’s largest pipe maker and a supplier to oil giant Gazprom, in 2000. His superyacht, Axioma, worth $42 million, was detained in Gibraltar in March.

Viktor Rashnikov

A former mechanic, Rashnikov is majority owner of one of Russia’s largest steel producers, MMK. His 459-foot yacht, Ocean Victory, was last seen in the Maldives in early March.

Leonid Simanovsky

Sanctions: eu, u.k., u.s..

A longtime partner of Leonid Mikhelson, who controls gas giant Novatek (and who has not been sanctioned), Simanovsky has been deputy chairman of the budget and tax committee of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, since 2003.

Oleg Tinkov

Tinkov went from selling beer and dumplings to taking his digital bank, Tinkoff, public in London at $3.2 billion in 2013. Before he was sanctioned, Tinkov was arrested in London in February 2020 on a U.S. federal tax evasion charge; he pleaded guilty and paid $509 million to settle last October. He was worth more than $5 billion before the attack on Ukraine. According to Forbes reporting, Tinkov is not an oligarch because he built an independent fortune without ties to the Russian government under either Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin. He has been included here because he has been sanctioned.

Alisher Usmanov

The Uzbekistan-born Usmanov made his first fortune manu­facturing plastic bags in the late 1980s. He later bought up shares in a metals firm that eventually morphed into iron ore and steel giant Metalloinvest. In 2009, while chairing an investment subsidiary of state-owned Gazprom, Usmanov invested in Facebook and other tech startups alongside Yuri Milner, who is now a prominent Silicon Valley VC. His nearly $600 million, 512-foot yacht, Dilbar, is stuck in the German port of Hamburg due to sanctions. In a statement, Usmanov called the sanctions “unfair” and pledged to “use all legal means to protect [his] honor and reputation.”

RUSSIAN ROULETTE

The nation and its oligarchs have lived through many ups and downs over the past three decades., (scroll to view full timeline), sanctioned before 2022, vladimir bogdanov, sanctions: u.s. (2018).

An oil baron who privatized state-owned drilling operations in the ’90s to create Sur­gutneftegas, Bogdanov was made a “Hero of Labor of the Russian Federation” by Putin in 2016 “for special labor service for the country and people.”

Oleg Deripaska

Sanctions: u.s. (2018), u.k. (2022).

Deripaska merged his Siberian Aluminum with the aluminum assets of Roman Abramovich’s Millhouse Capital to form Rusal in 2000. His ex-wife was Boris Yeltsin’s step-granddaughter, and he holds a diplomatic passport. The U.S. Treasury hit both him and Rusal with sanctions in 2018. The measures against Rusal were lifted that December after Deripaska reduced his ownership to below 50%. He sued in American courts to challenge the sanctions in March 2019; in June 2021, a District Court judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed his lawsuit. Deripaska owns nearly $1.4 billion of overseas properties, including a $21 million mansion in D.C. and a house in London’s Belgravia Square; Clio, his yacht, was last glimpsed in the Maldives.

Mikhail Gutseriev

Sanctions: eu, u.k. (2021).

Gutseriev, whose Safmar Group has financial, media and industrial interests in both Russia and Belarus, was sanctioned by the EU for being a “longtime friend” of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. His two jets flew from Moscow to Dubai and Istanbul, respectively, on March 19 and 20.

Suleiman Kerimov

Sanctions: u.s. (2018), eu, u.k. (2022).

A member of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Kerimov made a fresh fortune betting on Russian gold producer Polyus in 2008 after losing his first billions in the 2008 financial crisis. Authorities in France, where he owns four villas worth a combined $280 million, investigated him in 2019 on charges of tax fraud. Kerimov denied wrongdoing, and a court dismissed the case in 2020.

Yuri Kovalchuk

Sanctions: eu, u.k., u.s. (2014).

Russia’s de facto second man has been described by the United States government as Putin’s “close advisor” and “personal banker.” He is the biggest shareholder in the sanctioned Rossiya Bank and, through his holding company, National Media Group, he keeps a tight grip on the news Russians are permitted to hear and see. He and Putin own homes in the same exclusive Ozero dacha cooperative—and, according to Panama Papers disclosures, Kovalchuk owns the ski resort that hosted the wedding of Putin’s daughter in 2013.

Arkady Rotenberg

Putin’s former judo sparring partner won billions in state contracts over the years for building everything from infrastructure for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to a 2018 bridge linking newly annexed Crimea to the Russian mainland. In 2019, he sold his construction group, SGM, to a Gazprom subsidiary for $1 billion and transferred his shares of Mostotrest to a joint venture with a state-owned bank. He owns lots of real estate abroad, including villas in Sardinia and a luxury hotel in Rome. All were frozen by Italian authorities in September 2014; Rotenberg sued the European Union and won a partial reversal of the measures in 2016.

Boris Rotenberg

Sanctions: u.s. (2014), u.k. (2022).

Arkady Rotenberg’s younger brother and business partner; Boris and his wife, Karina, own three villas on the French Riviera and three homes, worth $4 million, in Atlanta.

Andrei Skoch

Alisher Usmanov’s partner has been a member of the Duma since 1999. The U.S. Treasury accused him of “longstanding ties to Russian organized criminal groups,” which he has denied.

Gennady Timchenko

Sanctions: u.s. (2014), eu, u.k. (2022).

At the end of the Soviet era, Timchenko ran a state-owned oil exporting company and became one of its largest shareholders when it was later privatized. He befriended Putin in the 1990s in Saint Petersburg when he and the Rotenberg brothers started a judo club called Yavara-Neva. Today, Timchenko holds stakes in gas company Novatek and petrochemicals producer Sibur; he is also chair of the Russian national hockey league, KHL.

Viktor Vekselberg

The Ukraine-born aluminum baron has done deals with oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska (UC Rusal) and Mikhail Fridman (TNK-BP). Vekselberg’s $90 million superyacht, Tango, and Airbus A319 jet were frozen by the U.S. Treasury in March.

THE VAULT: THICK AS THIEVES

Alisher usmanov had already nabbed a mining fortune in russia—and was eyeing american tech companies—when he sat down with forbes for tea and pastries at his 30-acre compound in the moscow suburbs in early 2010. an early facebook investor, usmanov praised the u.s. as “technological country number one.” but the majority owner of metalloinvest was careful to make his allegiances clear., you can easily find several photos of the prime minister [vladimir putin] among the chandeliers and italian marble at metalloinvest’s moscow headquarters. “i am proud that i know putin, and the fact that everybody does not like him is not putin’s problem,” says usmanov. he stretches for a historical comparison: “i don’t think the world loved truman after nagasaki.” — forbes , march 29, 2010, unsanctioned, alexander abramov.

After Russia’s financial collapse in 1998, Abramov bought up steel companies and coal mines at bargain-basement prices. Today he’s chairman of the board of Evraz, Russia’s largest steel producer.

Vagit Alekperov

A former Caspian Sea oil rig worker and deputy minister of oil and gas in the last Soviet government, Alekperov founded Lukoil in 1991 as a state-owned enterprise. He took it private two years later. It now produces 2% of the world’s oil. Seen as comparatively independent, Alekperov remains unsanctioned, likely because he is viewed by the West as a counterweight to state-owned Rosneft’s sanctioned boss, Igor Sechin.

Alekperov was sanctioned by the U.K. on April 13, 2022.

Igor Altushkin

A scrap metal trader in the early 1990s, Altushkin is the founder and largest shareholder of the Russian Copper Company, the country’s third-largest copper producer. He’s a key supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church; Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship in 2017.

Andrei Guriev

The former communist committee leader got his start at Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s investment company, Menatep. After Khodorkovsky was jailed in 2003, Guriev bought out his former boss’ stake in fertilizer manufacturer PhosAgro. His son, Andrei A. Guriev, is PhosAgro’s CEO and was sanctioned by the EU on March 9.

Guriev was sanctioned by the U.K. on April 8, 2022.

Vladimir Lisin

Lisin cut his teeth in Russia’s brutal aluminum wars of the 1990s. He managed factories for Trans-World Group, a collection of commodities traders with stakes in aluminum smelters. Trans-World was later investigated for bank fraud by Russian authorities. In 1995, Lisin himself was reportedly interviewed by Russian police in connection with the death of a local politician; he denied wrongdoing. Today he chairs NLMK Group, a big manufacturer of steel products.

Vladimir Litvinenko

Since 1994, Litvinenko has been rector of Saint Petersburg Mining University, where Putin wrote a 1997 dissertation (alleged by the Brookings Institution to have been plagiarized) on the city’s mineral resources. He owns more than one-fifth of PhosAgro, which he was given for his political support and lobbying, sources tell Forbes. Litvinenko claims he obtained the stake in return for consulting services.

Iskander Makhmudov

The Uzbekistan-born Makhmudov is the main owner of metals conglomerate UGMK, which controls 300 mining companies scattered across Russia. In 2003, Makhmudov and his former business partner Oleg Deripaska were accused in American courts of leading a “massive racketeering scheme.” They denied it, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. UGMK spent $100 million building the Shayba ice arena for the 2014 Sochi Olympics, which it gave to the Russian government after the games.

Leonid Mikhelson

The founder and chairman of natural-gas producer Novatek and a 36% shareholder in petrochemical company Sibur, Mikhelson bought some of his Sibur shares from Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s former son-in-law. Sanctioned oligarch Gennady Timchenko is his partner in both companies.

Mikhelson was sanctioned by Canada on April 4, 2022 and by the U.K. on April 8, 2022.

Vladimir Potanin

A former Soviet bureaucrat, he served briefly as Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister in 1996 and 1997 and helped oversee the privatization of various state-run enterprises. Potanin spent $2.5 billion developing a ski resort, snowboard park and freestyle skiing center for the 2014 Olympics. He runs Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest nickel producer. Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, he stepped down from the board of the Guggenheim Museum foundation, on which he served for two decades.

Potanin was sanctioned by Canada on April 4, 2022.

Dmitry Rybolovlev

Built his fortune investing in newly privatized shares in the 1990s. He sold his stake in Uralkali, Russia’s largest producer of potassium fertilizer, for $5.3 billion in 2010. He has spent roughly $1 billion on property in Europe, including $400 million for La Belle Époque, a Monaco penthouse in which he lives. He also owns Skorpios, a Greek island, and soccer team AS Monaco.

Click here to see the complete list of all other Russian oligarchs.

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What is an oligarch? The circle of businessmen who made their wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union

Soon after Mikhail Khodorkovsky's private jet landed at a Siberian airport in 2003, a convoy of dark vans arrived on the tarmac.

Masked Russian special forces agents stormed the cabin, pushing down doors and ordering passengers to put their "weapons on the floor or we'll shoot".

The richest man in Russia was swiftly arrested and sent to Moscow to face charges of fraud, tax evasion, and other economic crimes.

It was the start of what would be a rapid fall from grace for the head of the country's largest oil company, Yukos.

Khodorkovsky had made his fortune in the 1990s when his bank Menatep acquired shares in companies that were privatised at cheaper prices. A decade later he was estimated to be worth $26 billion.

His vast wealth afforded him a life of luxury, the ire of the Russian public and the freedom to fund any political party of his choosing.

It also enabled him to openly oppose the newly elected President Vladimir Putin. And that's exactly what Khodorkovsky did.

Just seven months before his arrest, the oligarch went head to head with Putin at a televised meeting at the Kremlin.

The billionaire challenged Russia's leader, accusing government officials of taking huge bribes, as some of the wealthiest businessman in the country watched on.

Putin was reportedly livid. As the meeting wrapped up, he responded with a threat: a takeover of Khodorkovsky's company .

Within months, the oligarch's business partner and associates were under arrest. By October, Russia's richest man was sitting in a prison cell awaiting trial.

The dramatic arrest and subsequent dismantling of Khodorkovsky's oil company sent a chilling signal to other oligarchs.

In one move, Putin was able to consolidate his power and defy those who opposed him, according to analysts.

And Russia's powerful oligarchs quickly fell into line.

Russia's oligarchs emerged from Soviet collapse

The first wave of Russia's oligarchs emerged in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Under then president Boris Yeltsin, Russia underwent 'shock therapy' — a speedy process of reforms designed to sell state-owned assets to private enterprises.

In the massive scramble that ensued for the Communist spoils, a circle of men who came from nothing or had links to big firms or the Kremlin emerged the biggest winners.

From 1992 to 1994, some  15,000 companies were transferred from state to private ownership .

These individuals saw an opportunity to buy blocks of privatisation cheques, which were freely available to all Russian citizens, to secure a larger share in the firms.

Their wealth continued to grow during Boris Yeltsin's re-election bid in 1996 when they managed to acquire the crown jewels of the country's economy in exchange for their support.

Under what became known as loans-for-shares, a few Kremlin-favoured banks lent the Government money in return for a chance to buy shares in some of the state's most valuable assets at cheap prices, the New York Times reported at the time .

With large swathes of the energy, telecommunications, and metallurgical sectors under their control and vast wealth at their disposal, the oligarchs held enormous power and influence.

But that all changed once Putin rose to power in 2000.

He accused Russia's wealthy of having looted the country's wealth and utilised the backlash against these individuals to strip them of their power.

"Over the years, any oligarch who stepped out of line and opposed Putin [has been] exiled or jailed in Russia," says  corruption expert and visiting fellow at Chatham House Thomas Mayne.

In the case of Khodorkovsky, analysts say it was Putin's act of revenge for defying him so publicly. It also delivered a warning to the country's narrow circle of tycoons.

"[It] taught everybody a lesson, and made it clear who had a say in the new system under Putin," author and Russia observer Elisabeth Schimpfoessl told the ABC.

"Putin, since then, has had the power in his hands," she said.

While some oligarchs fled for distant shores, those who remained were only able to do so under a new bargain that required them to stay out of politics.

The elevation of Putin's inner circle

With the Soviet-era oligarchs either gone or under Putin's arrangement, the Russian leader soon turned his attention to creating a new generation.

Putin's close allies and friends now make up a second cohort of oligarchs, according to Schimpfoessl.

In return, these oligarchs provide useful backing for the Kremlin.

"So the oligarchs kind of maintain perhaps a lot of the hidden wealth of Russia, and in some cases use that wealth to support the Kremlin's foreign policy goals," Mayne said.

Nowadays oligarchs tend to fall into three types, analysts say: They are either Putin's friends, leaders of Russia's security services — the police and the military — or they are outsiders who have no personal ties to the Russian President.

But oligarchs do not act as a collective. In fact, these billionaires have mostly sought to outcompete their rivals for access to government money.

Each one seeks to maintain a relationship with the Kremlin in order to retain his position, according to Mayne.

"Some of them will maintain close relationships to the Kremlin, and some will perhaps have a more distant relationship now, and perhaps have not been as involved with the actual internal machinations of Russian politics for years," he said.

Whatever their relationship might be, few have been willing to speak out against the Kremlin.

Since the war in Ukraine began only a few oligarchs — such as Mikhail Fridman  — have criticised the invasion. The majority have kept silent.

"As long as Putin retains his control over the siloviki – the current and former military and intelligence officers close to Putin – the other oligarchs, in my view, will remain hostages to his regime," Stanislav Markus writes for The Conversation .

The oligarchs have also found little favour among the broader Russian public.

The disparity between Russia's rich and poor

The former Soviet Union's uber-wealthy are not viewed favourably by the masses, who resent them for their power and wealth, according to analysts.

In her book Rich Russians, Schimpfoessl writes of how the large majority of Russians regard the accumulation of wealth by a small circle of individuals in the 1990s as "highly illegitimate".

Tens of millions of Russians were left impoverished during the country's disorderly transition to a market economy.

Only a select few were able to benefit from the opportunities at the time. And Putin has been able to use it to his advantage, according to Schimpfoessl. 

"Putin can tap into widespread popular opposition against Russia's rich elite if it suits his interests," she writes.

On the other hand, he can win the favour of oligarchs by helping "shore up their position by using his authority to protect their property rights".

Perhaps in recognition of the precariousness of their position, Russia's wealthy have also sought to legitimise their status outside of the Kremlin.

For a time in post-Soviet Russia, the fashion was to find some "blue blood" in one's family lineage. But by the 2000s, it shifted toward combining — if not replacing — noble ancestors with intelligentsia ancestors, according to Schimpfoessl.

This was a particular social elite that is hard to define but in Soviet times came to describe people "engaged in mental labour".

"[They were] professionals or white-collar workers who defied Marxist social classification, such as engineers, teachers, educationalists, cultural workers, medical doctors, scientists, researchers, writers, and artists, as well as state and party functionaries," Schimpfoessl writes.

Those who could trace their origins to the Soviet intelligentsia were able to accelerate their journey from the "middle class".

But as oligarchs have been attempting to rewrite their own histories, their links to the Kremlin have drawn global attention.

Why are we obsessed with oligarchs?

The world is fascinated with the lavish lifestyles of Russia's uber-rich.

Oligarchs conjure images of wealthy families hitting Europe's famous ski slopes or spending big at luxury stores.

People like Roman Abramovich — who has been targeted in both UK and EU sanction lists over alleged ties to the Russian leader, though he has repeatedly denied having close links to Putin — have become household names because of their associations with sporting clubs.

Others have developed reputations in the business world.

And as sanctions have targeted the prized assets of Russia's tycoons, a small corner of the internet has been obsessed with tracing the journey of these assets in real-time.

Yet oligarchs aren't unique to Russia. They operate in many countries, including the United States, according to Brooke Harrington, a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College .

It appears as if a "glamorous mythology" has been built around Russia's elite, Rachel Dodes writes in an article for Vanity Fair .

Now, she says, that fairytale is being punctured before our eyes.

As global sanctions start to take effect, perhaps the wealth and influence of oligarchs will face a similar fate.

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The rise and fall of the oligarch-maker

How one mysterious financier came to sit at the top table of oligarchs and power.

He had glittering success – a long career managing one of the world’s biggest trust companies and making millions from Russia’s oligarchs. Even as his clients mysteriously died, one by one, he managed to stay in the shadows and remain ahead of the game.

Until undercover reporters from Al Jazeera’s I-Unit caught him on secret camera agreeing to sell an English football club to a convicted Chinese criminal, in breach of football regulations.

Keep reading

Investigation reveals how football can be used to launder money, how a convicted criminal can buy a famous english football club.

Who was this man? And how deep did his business connections go?

A helicopter falls from the sky

At 7:41pm (18:41 GMT) on a spring evening in 2004, an Agusta 109E helicopter cratered into a field in rural Dorset, southern England, two tonnes of steel, wiring and fuel exploding into a fireball.

Nick Kenchington started at the roar of rotor blades above his cottage, fearing the helicopter would “take the roof off”.

“The helicopter flew very low and drowned out the TV,” he later said. His wife got up and opened the curtains. “Then, I saw a white flash in the sky,” Kenchington said. “A second later, we heard a bang. You could see flames all over the meadow below.”

The pilot and his single passenger – lawyer Stephen Curtis – had died in the flames after the helicopter nose-dived into the field, according to air accident investigators.

Curtis had faced threats in the weeks before the crash. Private investigators told him his telephones were tapped. His bodyguards found a bug at his house, according to reports. A message was left on his phone: “Curtis, where are you? We are here. We are behind you. We follow you.”

He was an obscure English lawyer with a remarkable job, running Menatep, a company that controlled Russia’s biggest oil company, Yukos.

Yukos was in conflict with the Russian government, allegedly over unpaid taxes. But it was more than that: it was about the political threat posed by Yukos’ chief, oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky , to spymaster-turned-President Vladimir Putin . Powerful adversaries locked in a battle of wills.

In a twist that would emerge in the weeks after his death, Curtis had approached the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) – the British police-intelligence liaison agency – and offered to serve as an informant. Days before his fatal flight from a London heliport, he had met an agency handler. The morning after his death, Swiss police raided Yukos-related entities in the country; $5bn in assets was frozen.

“The timing could not have been worse for the company,” lawyer for Yukos shareholders Robert Amsterdam told Channel 4 News in 2004.

Curtis understood Yukos’ elaborate offshore structures and was said to keep a lot of the information in his head as Yukos tried to stay one step ahead of the Russian government.

Who would run the beleaguered Yukos oil empire? Khodorkovsky had been arrested at gunpoint and thrown in jail a few months earlier, and now Curtis had just fallen out of the sky. In the vacuum, one man stepped out of the shadows and offered to fill Curtis’ shoes.

It was an ambitious – and risky – undertaking in the fraught and suspicious atmosphere at that time. But the dapper Englishman volunteered his services.

Outside the world of finance, few had ever heard the name, Christopher Samuelson . He has been described as a “company administrator”, “fiduciary”, “trust manager”, as well as “money manager”, “businessman”, and “financier”.

But to really understand what Samuelson was good at, you need to add the word “offshore” to those titles. Offshore is shorthand for secretive tax havens where billions of dollars – legitimate or otherwise – are stashed in banks, away from the prying eyes of taxmen, creditors and spouses.

“He’s a very pleasant, charming man, there’s no doubt about it. He’s good-looking, and he’s got a very easy grace to him… one of those guys who gets on with everybody,” said a source, who used to do work for Samuelson. “He hobnobs with some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and some of them are not particularly nice.”

From his bases in Bermuda, Geneva, and Gibraltar, Samuelson ran Valmet, one of the biggest offshore trust companies in the world and starting in the late 1980s, he nurtured a newly discovered rich seam of wealth: the former Soviet Union.

His links to the world’s richest would soon include “Godfather of the Kremlin” Boris Berezovsky; Berezovsky’s partner, the white-moustachioed Georgian oligarch Arkady Patarkatsishvili (known as “Badri”); oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky; banker Vitaly Malkin, one of the top oligarchs of the Yeltsin era; Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich; and Boris Zingarevich, the pulp and paper billionaire.

“He has access to the most incredible people: very wealthy, powerful people,” said the former associate.

Samuelson and Valmet, later known as Mutual Trust Management (MTM), set up and managed offshore trusts, companies and bank accounts for oligarchs and their businesses. Critics said the money was siphoned out of Russia, that it was capital flight that cost the Russian treasury billions and leeched from the state. Valmet would say the arrangements were above-board.

In meetings between Samuelson and undercover reporters from Al Jazeera’s I-Unit looking to “buy” a football club for their fictitious Chinese boss, the money manager was expansive about his business dealings with Russia.

In the covert recordings in plush hotels across London, the always impeccably dressed Samuelson spoke not only about football and the “sale” being discussed, but also about his decades-long relationships in Russia.

He spoke of travelling to Moscow more than 500 times, of how he even knows Vladimir Putin. How well he knows him, he did not explain, but Samuelson’s emails, seen by the I-Unit and disclosed during litigation, appear to show he was able to get meetings in the hard-to-access sanctuary inside the Kremlin.

Yet his involvement with Russia attracted the attention of investigators, who suspected him of leading a group involved in money laundering and corrupt practices, spawning investigations across Europe.

As Stephen Curtis’ helicopter plunged through cloud and drizzle into Dorset’s lush pastureland, Christopher Samuelson was island-hopping across the Caribbean’s tax shelters, on business in Antigua and the British Virgin Islands. He had spoken with Curtis just two days before, one of many conversations during the preceding months.

With the crisis precipitated by his friend’s death, the action was now miles away, back in London. Samuelson – described by the former associate as an “obsessive” workaholic who would chase even “whacky” opportunities – was soon in town, with a plan.

Khodorkovsky’s personal lawyer, Anton Drel, had stepped in to manage the emergency, so Samuelson typed out a letter understood to have been delivered through trusted intermediaries, by hand, to Mr Drel.

In his “letter to Anton”, the money manager made a pitch to replace Curtis as head of Menatep.

“Stephen was a close friend. Stephen’s tragic death has dealt an additional blow to our mutual client’s business and leaves a large vacuum,” Samuelson wrote to Drel.

“It has been suggested to me … that I would be an ideal choice to at least partly play Stephen’s role. I am ready to help in this matter,” he continued. “I am probably the nearest thing to Stephen and in fact, he and I often discussed strategy etc.”

Among his proposals, Samuelson said he could call on people in Houston, Texas, with influence in the White House, then occupied by US President George W Bush, to help Yukos. He also mentioned his links – through a prominent Gibraltar lawyer he had known for a long time – who could reach out to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, for help.

Samuelson went on to tell Drel that the previous autumn he had “discovered the location of the liquid assets of the holding company” during a meeting with the Menatep team in London and “insisted very loudly that it was imperative to move these at once” because of the threat of an imminent freezing order by the Russians.

In playing the game of cat and mouse between Yukos and Russian investigators, Samuelson told the Russian lawyer he had “inside sources in many corners” and was “monitoring actions and requests emanating from Moscow closely every day”.

“I am the master at where to put liquid assets securely (and how to structure such things),” he said.

Drel’s short visit to London the month after Curtis’ death was a whirlwind of meetings with lawyers, company officials and lobbyists. Yet according to documents seen by the I-Unit, Drel still found time to schedule a meeting with Samuelson on April 28. What became of Samuelson’s offer to step up amidst the chaos is not known, nor of his plans to solve some of Yukos’ challenges.

Samuelson later claimed to undercover reporters from the I-Unit that he had warned Khodorkovsky about the risk of arrest he faced over his fight with Putin.

“I told him it was going to happen; he didn’t want to listen. They [the Russians] didn’t want to arrest him. They wanted him to leave, but he decided to stay. So, they arrested him, and they convicted him of something he never did. They said it was tax evasion. Bulls**t, he was the one person who had paid his taxes.”

Khodorkovsky was tried, convicted and jailed. The Russian state effectively seized Yukos in a barely disguised raid.

So how did Samuelson know so much? How did he come to sit at the top table of oligarchs and power? To hear him tell his story in the I-Unit’s recorded interviews is to hear something of a maestro at work.

“He is a man in the shadows,” said the former business associate. “He keeps a low profile, which is one reason why he’s so successful. He plays shell games with companies, labyrinthine, complicated offshore companies… And you can never actually find out who the directors are. And that’s the whole point. Because the root of the money is what he’s protecting.”

In 1988, Valmet’s Paris office had a “walk-in”. A Russian businessman asked Samuelson’s partner at the firm whether they would be interested in financing a Moscow circus tour in the West, Catherine Belton, respected author and Russia specialist, wrote in a 2005 profile of Valmet’s role in Russia.

The Paris office director thought it must be a joke but it was the beginning of Valmet’s entry into the Soviet Union. Later, the walk-in phoned to say there were some young people in Moscow trying to start a bank; he wanted to introduce them to Valmet.

Three years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, all was chaos and the biggest asset grab in history was on. By then Valmet had joined with Riggs Bank, an illustrious US bank, to seek out opportunities in the former Soviet bloc. While other capitalists were scrambling to find out who to call and partner up with, Valmet already had a client in Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partners and had been working with the flannel-shirted future oligarch for more than two years.

In 1991, Platon Lebedev, Menatep’s financial director, told a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor that Riggs [meaning Riggs-Valmet] were “our teachers”.

Of Samuelson and his Valmet partners, Menatep shareholder Mikhail Brudno told then-Moscow-based Belton: “They taught us a great deal. They taught us about the principles of organising business: from both the financial and the business sides. We didn’t know anything. Until we met, we couldn’t even imagine how these business processes were built.” It was a good foot in the door for Riggs-Valmet: Menatep’s founders would become billionaires and go on to buy Yukos.

They were not Samuelson’s only Russian clients.

Samuelson claimed to undercover reporters from the I-Unit that he helped oligarch Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea football club owner, get his start in business. “I met Roman Abramovich in Moscow when a million dollars was a lot of money … Roman became a client.” Abramovich has denied having a personal relationship with Samuelson.

Even bigger and more controversial clients beckoned. In 2000, Samuelson told colleagues in a somewhat breathless note: “Our new clients are Boris Berezovsky and Arkady Patarkatsishvilli [sic]. …” The two oligarchs, close business partners who would soon fall foul of what Samuelson has called “regime change” under President Putin, who had replaced Boris Yeltsin.

He added that the two businessmen owned Russia’s fourth-biggest oil company and two-thirds of Russia’s aluminium smelters. They had “political clout… I cannot see any reason to refuse accepting BB and AP as clients.”

Badri, whose underworld name was allegedly “Badar”, was suspected – by government officials, due-diligence professionals, and experts – of being close to organised crime, particularly in Georgia where he was linked to a so-called “thief-in-law” (a major Russian criminal). Badri become Samuelson’s client and Samuelson became Badri’s personal trustee for the oligarch’s main offshore trust. The trust held hundreds of millions in assets and was a reflection of Badri’s confidence in Samuelson.

Samuelson rattled through the complex offshore structures he envisioned creating for the two men. “Other assets that we have to deal with include cars, planes (costing $70m), yachts (two presently worth about $40m), holdings in other businesses, other properties, trusts …”

The set-up fees for the first year alone, he added, were $1.6m. Valmet was doing well. And so was Samuelson. That same year, 2000, according to an internal company review, Samuelson’s salary alone was just under $300,000.

His proximity to oligarchs, and his financial dealings captured the attention of officers at an elite police agency that would focus increasingly on Samuelson, as well as Stephen Curtis’ oddly timed death in the helicopter crash.

In August 2005, the year after Curtis’ death, Dutch financial law enforcement agency FIOD-ECD raided the Dutch office of Samuelson’s firm, Mutual Trust – Valmet’s successor – carrying away boxes of documents. An adviser to Boris Berezovsky complained that while Samuelson had proved very expensive in setting up offshore structures that would frustrate inquisitive investigators, he had, ironically, kept all the documentation in one place only for it to be seized by authorities, thereby blowing the very secrecy the structures were meant to protect.

Two FIOD agents, in particular, doggedly pursued Samuelson in an investigation that lasted years, following the threads of the corporate webs spun by the trust manager. Later, in a letter sent in 2008 to a London financial investigator – and seen by the I-Unit – the FIOD agents asked: “Are there any notes made by Curtis… showing the information he possibly gave to the NCIS, especially relating to Samuelson?” The Dutch agents wanted to know if Curtis had disclosed to police any secrets about his friend Samuelson, his companies or his oligarch clients.

By 2005, Samuelson – the man with “inside sources in many corners” knew Dutch detectives were investigating him and his company: according to a previously confidential FIOD-ECD legal document, written in 2005 and obtained by the I-Unit, they suspected Samuelson was the “de facto” leader of an international organisation involved in money laundering and corruption.

Warning lights were flashing as investigations popped up across Europe. The I-Unit has seen heated emails Samuelson sent to a colleague in late 2006, spelling out impending dangers: “you and me are under suspicions [sic] of laundering money on behalf of AP [Arkadi Patarkatsishvili]”.

“You already have investigations by the Dutch, Spanish, Germans and French,” Samuelson said. He complained about the spiralling costs, stress, and unpaid bills. “AP and BB [Boris Berezovsky] are targets of investigators in the Netherlands and France, and those investigations are active and the investigators have obtained the help of the Germans and Spanish.”

Samuelson worried the US and UK might take an interest. In the emails to the same colleague, he mentioned, “the Netherlands and subsidiary Swiss investigations”, meaning the FIOD agents who asked their Swiss counterparts to raid Samuelson’s Swiss office, seize documents and interview him.

In a glimpse into Samuelson’s usually cloistered world, he added that his other clients were angry because he could not complete their work. Dutch investigators had taken “all our files” and not returned them. Samuelson underlined the risks: “The Netherlands case highlights the dangers of having clients with political exposure and why we charge appropriate trust fees.”

Dutch secrecy laws meant that little of this investigation became public, bar fleeting references in legal papers in other cases. However, Samuelson claimed the Dutch prosecutor dropped the case and “all claims against Mutual Trust Netherlands and its directors including me”. In a memo seen by the I-Unit, he mentioned he had a letter from his lawyers, Simmonds and Simmonds, confirming the case had been dropped.

Samuelson, the Teflon fiduciary, escaped the Dutch authorities but his friends, associates and clients working in and out of Russia were not so fortunate.

First, his friend and business associate Stephen Curtis had died in a crash doubts still lingered about. An inquest concluded it was an accident. A British Home Office review did not conclude foul play. But Boris Berezovsky remained suspicious, as did many others.

Then Khodorkovsky – Samuelson’s former client who he allegedly warned to get out of Russia – spent 10 years in a Siberian prison. He is out now, living in Europe, and is a vocal critic of Putin.

In 2006, another client, Berezovsky’s security adviser, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London using polonium.

Then in 2008, Patarkatsishvili died at home in Surrey. Questions arose over his death – which also unleashed a bitter struggle over his fortune.

Then in 2013, Berezovsky was found hanged at home. At the inquest, the coroner returned an open verdict saying he could not prove either way whether the oligarch had died by suicide or been murdered.

In 2018, Berezovsky’s close associate Nikolai Glushkov was found strangled at home.

The coincidences are chilling. If there is a Russian “ring of death” – a trail of assassinations and suspicious deaths tracing back to Moscow – Samuelson seems to have a ringside seat.

But Samuelson is still doing the deals. Salvaging gold-laden shipwrecks off Ireland, drumming up investments in Africa, hobnobbing with senior officials in different countries – and pursuing his love of football, helping rich foreigners buy English football clubs .

The Zingarevich family, old Russian clients of his, tried to buy Everton football club in 2004 but the deal fell through after Zingarevich’s identity was leaked to a Sunday paper. In 2012, hebought Reading instead in a deal where Samuelson joined the club’s board.

In keeping with the times, Samuelson turned towards a new reservoir of billionaires: China.

First, he helped billionaire Chinese businessman Tony Xia buy England’s Aston Villa FC in 2015.

Then along came Bill – another “walk-in” – and his courteous, dependable assistant Angie. And the whole circus started again … it just so happened that they were undercover reporters from Al Jazeera’s I-Unit this time.

Christopher Samuelson’s lawyers told the I-Unit that he is an experienced businessman who built an established reputation in the financial trusts and football industries and would never take part in any deal where criminality was involved. They said that Samuelson had never been told that our fictitious Chinese investor had a criminal conviction for money laundering and bribery and that he would have ended discussions immediately had he been told of any criminality or money laundering.

A spokesman for Mikhail Khodorkovsky denied that Samuelson had advised him and said that it was “highly likely” that he had never met Samuelson.

Lawyers for Roman Abramovich described Samuelson’s claims about him as “false” and denied that he’d had any business relationship with Samuelson.

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A Dutch court has rejected a final argument in a legal battle over former Russian oil giant Yukos

FILE - Exiled Russian businessman and opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky poses during an interview in London, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024. An Amsterdam court on Tuesday rejected Russia’s final argument in a years-long legal battle over a $50 billion arbitration award that is centered on claims by former shareholders that the Kremlin deliberately bankrupted Russian oil giant Yukos to silence its CEO, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin. CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint in 2003 and spent more than a decade in prison as Yukos’ main assets were sold to a state-owned company. Yukos ultimately went bankrupt. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — An Amsterdam court on Tuesday rejected Russia’s final argument in a years-long legal battle over a $50 billion arbitration award that is centered on claims by former shareholders that the Kremlin deliberately bankrupted Russian oil giant Yukos to silence its CEO, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin.

A panel of international arbitrators ruled in 2014 that Moscow seized control of Yukos in 2003 by deliberately crippling the company with huge tax claims. It ordered Russia to pay the former shareholders $50 billion.

CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint in 2003 and spent more than a decade in prison as Yukos’ main assets were sold to a state-owned company. Yukos ultimately went bankrupt.

Tuesday’s ruling by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal rejected a final ground of appeal filed by Russia alleging fraud by former shareholders. The court said in a written statement that Russia made the claim too late in the proceedings. It added that even if Russia had raised the alleged fraud at an earlier phase of the drawn-out case it would not have altered the outcome.

“More than 20 years after the brazen expropriation of Yukos, and more than 10 years after being ordered to pay the largest award of damages in the history of arbitration, more than $50 billion, the Amsterdam Court has rejected Russia’s last remaining legal excuse: time to pay up,” said Tim Osborne, director of GML, a company that unites the former majority shareholders.

“We will continue to focus our attention on the ongoing enforcement against Russian state assets in the Netherlands, England, and the United States, and we do not rule out we will start enforcement proceedings in other countries as well,” Osborne added in a written statement.

The original case was handled under the Permanent Court of Arbitration, headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands. As a result, Russia appealed the arbitration decision in the Netherlands, kicking off years of litigation.

In the 2014 arbitration, the panel ruled that Russia launched “a full assault on Yukos and its beneficial owners in order to bankrupt Yukos and appropriate its assets while, at the same time, removing Mr. Khodorkovsky from the political arena.”

New Times, New Thinking.

• War in Ukraine

“He has embarked on a war he can’t stop”: Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Putin’s next move

Jailed for a decade by Putin, the exiled oligarch explains how the Russian leader consolidated his power – and why the West still fails to understand him.

By Will Dunn

In January 1995 a 31-year-old Mikhail Khodorkovsky travelled to Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum. At a café in Davos one morning he saw a fellow Russian businessman, Boris Berezovsky, speaking to the Hungarian financier George Soros. It was a small place, and he sat close enough to know they were speaking about Russia’s first post-Soviet-era election, which would be held the following year. “You’ve had a good life so far,” Soros told Berezovsky, “and now the communists are coming back, and it’s time to flee.”

That evening Khodorkovsky had an opportunity to ask the communists themselves, who were also attending the summit: would a victory for them mean disaster for Russia’s emerging business elite? Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader and presidential candidate, told him: “Mikhail Borisovich, we’re full of respect for what you do, and so we will keep you. We will keep you as the CEO of one enterprise.”

Khodorkovsky had already built or acquired a number of businesses – starting with a café of his own, then a computer and software business, then a titanium manufacturer, then a banking group. He knew how time, effort, intelligence and resources were squandered in the command economy. He found Berezovsky and told him that something had to be done.

This was a sentiment shared by plenty of Russians. The state still owned many of the country’s largest companies and most were managed, by a cadre of “red directors”, as if they were still communist organisations. They struggled to become real businesses: the oil company Yukos had not paid its workers for six months and owed the government $4bn (then a huge sum, more than 1 per cent of GDP) in unpaid taxes. As the election approached, oil workers “were ready to block the export pipelines”, Khodorkovsky recalls when we meet in late April. “That would have meant a collapse of the government.”

Later that year Khodorkovsky was asked to attend a meeting at the Kremlin with a group of other bankers and businesspeople. “They told us there were 800 [state-owned] enterprises and: ‘Take as many as you can.’”

There were conditions attached: the bankers had to make their own deals with management, and they immediately needed to cover the wages of the workforce of any enterprise they took over. Finally, the state asked its financiers to commit “all the money you have” to the deal. “Your entire capital. If you have a little, give it all. If you have a lot, also.”

Khodorkovsky thought he could bring in foreign investors, and keep some of his own money, but no one wanted to take the risk. “The investors said, ‘In six months you’ll have communists in power, and you want us to lend you money? No, no, no. Come to us in six months’ time, and we’ll have a look.’”

Six months passed, and Khodorkovsky no longer needed a loan. With the support of Russia’s bankers and CEOs, Boris Yeltsin had returned to power and a new class of oligarchs helped themselves to the country’s freshly privatised companies. Khodorkovsky took Yukos, the oil and gas producer, and began turning it into an efficient and extremely lucrative business that would make him the richest man in Russia, and the richest person under 40 in the world.

What the oligarchs failed to realise at the time was that it was not only Yeltsin – who they assumed “might still have four to five years” in the Kremlin – with whom they had made a deal. Unwittingly, they had also cleared a path for Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent who would become head of the security services in 1998, take over the presidency at the end of 1999, and send Mikhail Khodorkovsky to prison for a decade.

Khodorkovsky’s office in Marylebone, central London, is a place of muted tones and dark wood, more suited to a very expensive psychiatrist than an exiled oligarch. He tells me his avoidance of demonstrative consumption – a rule he has imparted to his four children – has been one of his better decisions.

He speaks in a soft Russian but understands my questions, which are in English (he also switches to English occasionally, to clarify a sentence). Smiling often, sometimes with a slight wagging of the head, Khodorkovsky seems slightly incredulous at all that has happened to him. As a potential Kremlin target, he takes his security seriously without letting it take over: “I lead quite a risky life,” he smiles. “But I’m used to it.”

He can’t remember the first time he encountered Putin. “It was not a major event at the time. There was nothing dramatic about meeting him.” It is tempting to draw parallels between Putin, the ignored securocrat, and Stalin, who before he came to power was described by Trotsky as an “eminent mediocrity”, and by the writer Nikolai Sukhanov, in his eyewitness account of the Russian revolution, as a “grey blur, which flickered obscurely and left no trace”. (Trotsky was rewarded with an ice pick to the brain, Sukhanov with a firing squad.)

But Khodorkovsky does remember vividly the moment in 1999 when his business career peaked: on the Priobskoye oil field in Western Siberia, an expanse of 2,000 square miles that had been deemed by Soviet research to be relatively unproductive; Yukos discovered it was capable of producing more than five billion barrels of oil. He can still see the line of heavy goods vehicles, stretching into the distance, ready to begin developing the riches that lay beneath. His childhood dream had been to run a huge factory, to command the behemoth machines: “That was the thing I really liked.”

This appetite for scale was also what made him dangerous to Putin. Under Khodorkovsky’s leadership, Yukos had grown to become Russia’s biggest oil company, producing a fifth of the country’s supply. It used European technology, raised capital from American markets and was exploring a merger – possibly with a US oil giant – that would have made it one of the largest energy companies in the world.

The early years of Russian privatisation were dangerous times. “Those who scared easily either perished in the 1990s or found a different, less risky job for themselves,” Khodorkovsky says. But Yukos was moving more quickly than others towards global standards: its senior management and record-keeping were more transparent than any major Russian business, and Khodorkovsky planned for it to comply with America’s Sarbanes-Oxley rules on corporate governance. Still, he knew this wouldn’t happen unless he addressed the wider problem of endemic corruption in the Russian economy. It was this subject – and his readiness to raise it – that led to the confrontation with Putin that would seal his fate.

When he talks about that meeting at the Kremlin on 19 February 2003, Khodorkovsky smiles and shrugs, almost as if telling a joke. He wasn’t nervous, he says: “It was for me largely a business issue.” He had already discussed corruption with senior cabinet ministers. A regional spokesperson had agreed to raise the matter with Putin, but then got cold feet. “So I thought, ‘Well, OK – I’ll take over.’”

In front of the assembled delegates (and live TV cameras), Khodorkovsky embarrassed Putin with his portrait of a Russia that still ran on bribes. He challenged the president on the sale of another oil company, Severnaya Neft (Northern Oil), which had been acquired by a senator and former deputy finance minister, Andrey Vavilov, for $25m. Northern Oil had been awarded the licence for one of the country’s most valuable oil fields before being sold to the state-owned Rosneft for $623m.

What Khodorkovsky did not realise at the time was that Putin and his allies, he claims, had “already pocketed” hundreds of millions of dollars from such practices. Footage of the meeting, included in the 2019 documentary film Citizen K , shows Putin deprived of his usual calm, shifting in his seat, waving a pen as he furiously rebuts Khodorkovsky.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest on 25 October 2003, when he was hauled from a Yukos plane at gunpoint, was a decisive moment for Russia’s business elite. Many of those not allied to Putin had already fled, including: one of Yukos’s co-founders, Yuri Golubev, who died suddenly at his home in London in 2007; the Georgian oil magnate Arkady Patarkatsishvili, who died suddenly at his home in Surrey in 2008; and Boris Berezovsky, who died by strangulation at his home in Berkshire in 2013. Those who retained their money and power did so with Putin’s permission, Khodorkovsky claims, granted in exchange for their ongoing service.

In some cases, he says, the wealth of Russia’s business elite is used directly to influence political outcomes. His organisation, Open Russia, has evidence of Russian money being used to agitate and amplify the Catalan independence movement in Spain, the migration crisis in Germany in 2015 and the far right in France. “I would probably find it difficult to prove it in court,” Khodorkovsky says. “But for me personally, the information was sufficient to think that that was the case.”

Links between Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and the Putin regime may have influenced the recent French presidential election, in which Le Pen reached the second round but was defeated by Emmanuel Macron the night before we spoke. When Khodorkovsky, who seems to have an appetite for uncomfortable meetings, was asked to speak to the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Interference in May 2021, he talked about the Russian connection to Le Pen’s proposed foreign minister, Thierry Mariani. “The link to the Kremlin was obvious,” he tells me, “and I thought that was a case worth investigating by French law enforcers.” Mariani, sitting in the audience, offered no comment.

Khodorkovsky argues that in sowing political division, particularly within the EU, the Putin regime, like many large businesses, values market share above all: “It’s much easier to agree with each individual national government, because economically they’re smaller than Russia. He is like a monopoly supplier talking to differentiated buyers.”

When it comes to oil and gas, he says, this is literally the case. “If somebody has a 30 per cent share [of the energy market], and if you cannot replace that 30 per cent with anybody else, they’re already a monopoly supplier.” The anti-monopoly legislation of Western countries has been set up to prevent such situations, Khodorkovsky points out. But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Western governments had a choice between spending huge sums on energy security or keeping their voters warm with cheap Russian fuel. Exceptions were made, the cost-of-living crisis was postponed to another decade, and the West entered “a situation where the supplier can dictate his own terms to the clients… a situation where the West, with its money, is paying for the war that Putin is waging”.

At the same time, he says, Putin’s oligarchs have made the West more like Russia, a situation that bolsters support at home. If Russians know that people with connections to the Kremlin are among the biggest donors to Britain’s ruling party, for example, they are more likely to accept that the work of corrupt elites within Russia is “nothing special… these things happen in the West as well”. The trick is to keep people from appreciating the difference in scale: “One is to scratch your finger, another is to lose your whole arm.”

As a Russian national in Britain – “I am a guest here” – Khodorkovsky argues that it is important not to consider every ethnic Russian an asset of the Putin regime. But there is, he says, “an easy way of checking” whether a Russian businessperson “is a normal person, or whether they are potentially the Kremlin’s agent. You just come up to them and say, ‘What do you think of what Putin is doing today? Is it a war crime? Is he a war criminal? Just tell me, on the record…’ If the person tries to avoid the question, then they have some kind of noose around their neck.”

Russia is 70 times the size of the United Kingdom. Its borders contain more than 10 per cent of the Earth’s land mass and nearly 200 ethnic groups. After sentencing, Khodorkovsky was sent by train to the penal colony of Krasnokamensk, more than 3,000 miles from Moscow, close to the border with China; the journey took a week.

His short memoir of his life behind bars, My Fellow Prisoners , uses ten sketches of his fellow inmates to describe the Russian prison system, which in 2003 held more than 900,000 people. Drug abuse and beatings were common. His face was slashed with a knife as he slept; another inmate, a 23-year-old man named Kolya, disembowelled himself in protest at being framed for a robbery he did not commit. 

I ask him if the title of the book could also be addressed more broadly, to Russians in general. “What I tried to show is that the people in prison are exactly the same as people outside,” he says. “Prison culture in Russia projects itself, in a very significant way, onto the rest of society.”

This is reflected in the highest reaches of government: a few eyebrows were raised in Russia in February when the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, described an international agreement with the phrase “ patsan skazal, patsan sdelal ” – which, as Russian prisoners know, affirms that the word of a patsan (literally lad, fella; an accepted member of the prison community) is his bond. “This prison slang shows that there is not much difference between the foreign minister and somebody actually sitting behind bars.”

Khodorkovsky was released on 20 December 2013, one of a number of high-profile prisoners to be freed before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Were he to return to Russia now, however, he would immediately be arrested. In 2015 he was accused of having been connected to the murder of Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of a Siberian city who was shot on 26 June 1998 (Khodorkovsky’s birthday). In 2006, while Khodorkovsky was in prison, the former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko testified that he had seen a video of the hitman being paid a large sum of money by a member of the security services. Litvinenko was himself murdered the same year, in London, after accusing the Russian government of having assassinated the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in the lift of her apartment building on 7 October (Vladimir Putin’s birthday).

Even Putin himself is now trapped by the system through which he has risen to power, Khodorkovsky says, and this fact will dictate what he does next. If Putin’s offensive in Donbas is successful, he will be compelled to make another assault on Kyiv; if it fails, he will have to withdraw, and find some other way to claim success. If he commits to using nuclear weapons, it is likely he will be abandoned by his allies in China and India, and possibly his own generals. “This is why he’s so tense at the moment,” Khodorkovsky observes. “He has embarked upon a war he can’t stop.”

Putin is often cast as an icily capable authoritarian, the man who never quite left the KGB, a diplomatic chess player. But Khodorkovsky says the strongman image is incidental to a more fundamental truth about how power is distributed in his country. In a Russia ruled by Moscow, every leader becomes a tsar.

“I think many Russians, but also a lot of Westerners, make a very serious mistake in trying to look for… a better person” to become president, he says. “They are searching for such a person in [Alexei] Navalny, in myself, but that’s a mistake. Anyone who replaces Putin is going to take Russia along the same imperialist route.”

In his view, Russia’s sheer size makes authoritarianism and conflict with its neighbours inevitable. “It is a very large and very diverse country, and if you want to manage it from one central spot, you have to have a very strong bureaucratic apparatus. To have such a huge apparatus at the centre has to be explained by having to protect the country from an outside enemy – there is no other explanation that people will accept.”

This, he says, is the key to understanding Putin – not as a particularly strong leader, but as a product of history. “It is his office as president that makes him what he is. You need to change the whole system, so that that position doesn’t exist.”

Even if Putin wins in Ukraine, Khodorkovsky says, he will face a powerful resistance movement that he will have to explain to Russians as the work of Nato – and to keep his legitimacy he would be forced to respond.

“In his head, of course, he is already fighting Nato,” says Khodorkovsky. “Look at what the Russian media is writing – that we’re fighting Nato. Public opinion has already been trained on that. So if he crosses the Baltic countries or Polish border, that will not be news to Russian society.

“He will have to go on. In the end he will be defeated. The question is which soil he will be defeated on.”

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Exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky: ‘Putin cannot stop the war in Ukraine but he also cannot win it’

Once russia's richest man, the businessman is doing his best to undermine the regime that jailed him.

For a man who spent 10 years of his life in Russian jails and gulags, twice went on hunger strike and now has a $500,000 bounty on his head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks reassuringly healthy and relaxed these days. He has a light-hearted sense of humour too: opening a copy of i   on the desk in his central London office, he begins to chuckle, holding up a photo of Liz Truss dressed in combat gear while  riding in a tank . 

“O Bozhe!” he remarks. What does that mean? His translator laughs too as she replies: “Oh God!”  

This is not a judgement of the new Prime Minister’s qualities. It seems the businessman just doesn’t think much of military photoshoots. It’s the kind of imagery that Vladimir Putin specialisies in (although the Russian dictator normally wears less clothes ). 

Khodorkovsky was once the wealthiest person in Russia. But daring to stand up to Putin – over the president’s alleged corruption rather than his dress sense – led to the oil billionaire being arrested at gunpoint in 2003 and imprisoned on charges of fraud and tax evasion. Widely seen as a warning to the other oligarchs to fall into line, the accusations against him were deemed by experts outside Russia to be wholly fabricated; Amnesty International declared him a “prisoner of conscience” .

It is thought that it was only Putin’s desire for good publicity ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics that led to Khodorkovsky’s surprising release in 2013 . Two years later, he moved to the UK.

“I’m here as a guest,” says Khodorkovsky, “so I try to never speak out on British politics.” He expects Labour will win the next election, but on what he thinks of Truss, he says: “I’ve never had any chances to meet her, unlike Boris Johnson. But colleagues and friends tell me that on the UK’s Ukraine policy, they are quite inspired by her. She takes a very clear-cut position on what she can and cannot do… I just hope she doesn’t have to face the dilemma she was asked about on a talk show recently: whether she would be prepared to push the nuclear button.” More darkly this time, he gives another laugh. 

Before Putin made him a political prisoner, Khodorkovsky’s wealth was calculated by Forbes to be $15bn . These days, it’s closer to the  $100m that was held in a trust in Ireland while he was jailed. 

“I’m still engaged in business, though not as active as in my past life,” says Khodorkovsky, dressed in jeans and a Ralph Lauren jacket, wearing a smartwatch. “Historically I’ve been involved in real estate, although I don’t like it very much. I like anything to do with information and technology. My son and a number of my colleagues are involved in bio technologies. A niche, purely because of my interest in it, is independent cinema.” 

It’s an impressive list of pursuits for one person, but he is best known for his political lobbying and activism against the Putin regime. “I continue working with the public opinion in Russia and among Russians living abroad,” he says. 

His building here in Mayfair – valued online at up to £6m – feels like his own personal embassy for this international role. It has four storeys of elegant offices and reception rooms, many of them lit by chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. Next to his desk, above a packet of cigarettes, is a curved computer screen, presumably for conference calls. “I even have a TV studio here,” he says, “and I have hundreds of thousands of followers .” 

He funds Dossier Center , an investigative unit that “tracks the criminal activity” of Putin associates, hoping to enable future Russian courts “to open criminal cases against corrupt criminals in and associated with the Kremlin”. Until last year, he also ran MBK Media which covered “news ignored by Kremlin-controlled media outlets” – until it was forced to close over safety concerns for its journalists. 

He also has a new book out,  The Russia Conundrum . Written with former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith, it charts his personal experiences with Putin – from a barbecue held by the Russian president in May 2000 to discuss a “non-aggression pact” between government and the oligarchs, to the threats still made at him by Kremlin cronies today. It explains how Putin ruthlessly consolidated power, became a dictator, fooled the West and ended up invading Ukraine. It also considers the ruler’s future and argues how a post-Putin Russia could one day become a fair and functioning democracy. 

“I think it’s fair to compare Putin with Hitler because what he is building now is a fascist regime,” says Khodorkovsky. “The level is not as strong as it was in Nazi Germany, but it has already appeared.

“Perhaps the number of casualties [in Ukraine now, compared to the Second World War] is not as high. But tens of thousands in today’s world, which is much more humane, looks quite a formidable figure.  

“They both use the same ‘Weimar syndrome’,” he explains. Just as the German far right felt their emasculated country was unfairly exploited after surrendering in the First World War – when the Weimar Republic was forced to give up land, money and military power – so ultra-nationalists in Russia felt their division from countries like Ukraine after the downfall of the Soviet Union deprived their state of its deserved might and influence. Khodorkovsky continues: “They both consider their occupation of other countries’ territories as their mission and the legacy they want to leave behind.” 

Rise and fall

The tale of the original oligarchs is now legendary. There were seven of them, according to the late Boris Berezovsky, and one was Khodorkovsky. Becoming known as the “Semibankirschina”, these businessmen leaped on the chance to buy up cheap shares in the huge state-owned monopolies that were privatised after the fall of the Soviet Union and saw their values balloon. In 1995 Khodorkovsky’s bank acquired the oil firm Yukos, which had debts of $3.5bn at the time. He turned it around and two years later he was one of the first four Russians to be ranked as dollar billionaires by Forbes. 

One noticeable absentee in The Russia Conundrum is another oligarch: Khodorkovsky’s former rival in the oil business, Roman Abramovich. The former owner of Chelsea FC was involved in organising unsuccessful peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in the spring, and has been sanctioned by the UK but not by the US. 

“I think I know him quite well,” says Khodorkovsky. “If he were to face a choice, he would prefer to lose quite a lot rather than quarrel with Putin. When he’s involved in negotiations with Ukraine, he is doing that because he doesn’t want it to be sanctioned… Putin condoned his talks because he doesn’t want Abramovich to be sanctioned, not because he needs Abramovich as a member of the negotiations team.”

Some argue it was the vast wealth these seven men accumulated in the 90s – and the political influence that came with it – that made Putin want to restore the state’s overarching authority, convincing the former KGB man to claw back power and seducing the jealous leader into wanting a mega fortune of his own. Does he fear, at least to some degree, that he helped create the Putin whose wrath the world is suffering from today? 

Khodorkovsky argues he and the other oligarchs accrued their assets fairly, “through the cut-and-thrust of business”. He writes: “Many of the firms we bought turned out to be hard to resurrect, several produced no returns and one even went bankrupt; but all enterprise involves an element of risk. When things worked out for us, we were accused of buying businesses on the cheap, but the fact is that we played by the rules that were in force at the time.” 

Even so, does he regret how he acted on his way to the top? The film director Alex Gibney, who made the 2019 documentary Citizen K with Khodorkovsky about his life, was taken aback by finding “jaw-dropping archival footage” of the businessman speaking in his youth “about how much he enjoys being greedy and how people who are poor clearly just deserve to be poor”.  

When I quote these words to Khodorkovsky, he pauses, reflecting on this deeply. He does not bristle. 

“I started doing business when I was 24. At that time, I thought: why don’t others? Anybody can do that. If you don’t do business, you either don’t want to or you’re just a lazy person. It is something you can’t quite grasp at 24: that some things are given to some, but not to others. You can do it but others cannot. 

“Could I have done some things differently in my life? I could have. Could I have made the choice in my life at the time to do more for promoting democracy than doing business? Perhaps, yes. Would it have had any impact? I’m afraid I don’t think so. I’m a talented businessman. I’m a talented manager. I’m not sure of my talents as a politician. So could I have changed some things? I don’t think so – but I would have felt better for it.” 

But did the inequality created by their rapacious attitudes, at a time of financial crisis in Russia, go some way to persuading ordinary Russians that they needed a strongman like Putin to take control? 

“I think both yes and no,” he says. “Yes, because had we given people the feeling that everything was shared equally or fairly between them, they wouldn’t have had this terrible feeling of being left behind, forgotten and being dealt an unfair hand.” 

On the other hand, he argues, the affluence of the oligarchs in the 1990s was overplayed. Their fortunes were tied up in their companies in a volatile economy, they were not flush with cash. “People think of wealth purely as money, not business. Today’s symbol of luxury is yachts – none of the oligarchs of 2003 had a yacht.”

It seems hard to believe, but Khodorkovsky claims with a laugh that if we saw where he lived back then – reportedly a three-storey house in an elite gated community on the outskirts of Moscow – we would understand that he was not living an ostentatious lifestyle. “This is why I found it quite easy to be in prison!” 

I’m a talented businessman. I’m a talented manager. I’m not sure of my talents as a politician Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Life in jail

Khodorkovsky believes it was his criticism of corruption by Putin’s inner circle in a televised meeting with the President and other leading businessmen in February 2003 that led to him being jailed.

His allegations concerned $400m pocketed through the acquisition of an oil company – though Khodorkovsky claims he did not realise at the time it was probably Putin himself who took the money. 

The last time they met was on 26 April 2003, when the President asked Khodorkovsky to not help opposition parties in elections. The businessman refused to commit to this and later heard that Putin “flew into a rage” as a result. A few months later, he was arrested at gunpoint. His conviction came in May 2005. 

While The Russia Conundrum is about far more than Khodorkovsky’s own tale, his descriptions of life as a political prisoner are particularly compelling. 

Of the 766 penal colonies the authorities had to choose from, Khodorkovsky was sent to one in Siberia, 3,000 miles away from Moscow, where the temperatures ranged from 45°C in the summer to -45°C in the winter. Prisoners were exposed to radiation because IK 14/10 was next to a uranium mine. 

The word “gulag” evokes the harshest images of inhumanity. The 21st-century versions are different to the infamous Soviet ones, writes Khodorkovsky, but still incredibly cruel places where “beating and killing can and does happen”. “Prisoners are not worked to death through slave labour any more. Sometimes there’s even the opposite problem of camps with no work at all. In these places, prisoners become stupefied, like animals, and lose all their social skills (if they had them in the first place).” 

Despite all this, Khodorkovsky – who was made to be a porter – felt that “life in the camp is better than in prison. In prison, you’re locked in a small room with the same people all day; in the camp, you can walk around as much as you want… You can have a family visit four times a year, each time for three days, and you spend it in a room that feels a bit like a provincial hotel. In prison, the only visits are by intercom.” 

This all ceases to be true when you are placed in a cramped punishment cell, however. 

In 2006 another prisoner attempted to stab him in the eye. Told he needed to be put in a “safe place”, Khodorkovsky was forced into solitary confinement, which he knew in reality was a “direct road the cemetery”. He responded with a dry hunger strike, refusing water as well as food. 

“When you go ‘dry’, your blood thickens and your blood pressure shoots up,” he explains in the book. “Mine reached 180 and the doctors said the next thing on the horizon would be blood clots and a stroke. But the advantage is that this forces the authorities to make quick decisions. You’re at risk of dying as early as the third day and almost no one survives more than 10, while the usual ‘wet’ hunger strike gets dangerous only after 30-60 days.” By the fourth day, “I couldn’t walk and I was fainting” – but he won. His demands were accepted and he was taken to the infirmary to recover. 

Around this time, however, he began to fear he would never be free again. “It was in the year three, when they told me that there was going to be another trial, I thought at the time I would never leave prison, which was hard to admit. It wasn’t the length of my prison term ahead. It was understanding that there was no limit to it.”

He remains eternally grateful to Angela Merkel, who as German Chancellor lobbied for his release in 2013 together with Germany’s former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. 

Had it not been for Putin wanting to look benevolent before the Sochi Olympics, would Khodorkovsky still be in prison? “It’s a good question, I often think about that,” he says. For a moment it looks as if his mind is drifting back to another time and place. Slowly, gently, he sweeps his hands across his table and his notebook, like he is brushing away invisible dust. “I think so,” he confirms. “There was a very short window of opportunity when I could be released – three months.” 

He cannot take his continued freedom for granted, however. In March 2021, he was listening to the Moscow Echo radio stations when he heard that “a bounty of $500,000 will be paid for the capture of the former head of the Yukos Oil Company, Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, who is currently hiding in London. The reward will be payable to any Russian citizen who brings the former oligarch back to Moscow.” 

The man behind the announcement was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former gangster turned Putin confidante, who is accused of running the infamous Wagner Group of mercenaries to carry out the Russian army’s dirty work. One of the projects Khodorkovsky funded was a probe into what these private military contractors were doing in the Central African Republic, but during the investigation three Russian journalists were murdered . The businessman believes it was this exposure of Wagner’s activities that led to Prigozhin offering cash for his capture. 

Despite this, and the poisonings of other Putin opponents such as politicians Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza , Khodorkovsky tries to stay calm about his own safety. “It’s like being a pilot in a fighter plane,” he says. “Every day, when they get into a plane, they don’t think about crashing. If they were, they would go mad.” 

“Beating and killing can and does happen” Mikhail Khodorkovsky on conditions in Russian prisons

Hopes for Russia’s future

Despite all that he went through in Russia, Khodorkovsky was still surprised to learn how Russia is often portrayed in the UK. “One programme that caught my attention was the weekly quiz show Have I Got News For You ,” he writes, explaining how a similar show had been banned in Russia for mocking Putin. He was glad to see how the British version “poked fun at the people in power”, but the intro cartoon still shocked him. 

“They showed an evil-looking Russian man in a fur hat and military greatcoat grinning wildly as he closed down a pipeline carrying gas and oil to the West, followed by a sequence in which Wetsern Europe is plunged into darkness. It was so far removed from the self-image that Russians have of themselves that I jumped out of my chair.” 

It is an image that feels more relevant than ever right now given the energy crisis. “I’m not a huge fan of, say, blocking oil supplies – not because I think that Putin should be given the opportunity to fund this war using energy, but I do know very well how energy markets work,” says Khodorkovky. “It’s like shutting your mouth and saying I refuse to breathe not to use the air in this room. You either die or you will keep breathing. The only alternative is to go outside and take a breath of fresh air.” 

Europe’s energy security can only be resolved “by building or extending the life of nuclear power plants – and in the UK, the mass introduction of heat pumps and quickly creating storage capacities for green energy. Not only do I think the UK can do that, but it’s actually going to be advantageous.” 

He is certainly not advocating the West should go easy on Putin – in other ways, he believes, it should be much harder on him. He wants to more supplies and training offered to Ukraine’s military, and calls for stricter industrial sanctions. “Putin is still manufacturing weapons using Western technologies. It’s harder for him to do but still he continues, so there should be much more serious work on the implementation of sanctions.” 

Asked to mark the West’s responses to the invasion of Ukraine out of 10, he says the US and UK deserve eight or nine out in the circumstances, while Europe gets a six or seven. 

As for the outcome of the invasion, he says: “Putin cannot stop the war, but also he cannot win it. He can pause it, there might even be peace talks… But ultimately he’s going to lose it.” This is because it would be impossible to suppress armed resistance and rule Ukraine effectively, he explains. 

“Perhaps there will be a point when peace talks will be necessary. But Putin is the kind of person you cannot talk to when he considers himself to be in a stronger position. No long-term agreement with Putin is possible because he just deceives people. Three months before the Crimean campaign, he said he had no ambitions to go there. The same happened months before the war in Ukraine. What you could say to Putin is: ‘I don’t want to shoot at you once again, but I could do that – so let’s just agree that we are keeping each other in our own sights.’” 

Khodorkovsky dreams of a free Russia, and brushes aside suggestions that it would be impossible for the country to be a functioning democracy – this, he says, is based on enduring Western misunderstandings of his country and his people. 

He predicts: “After Putin leaves, there is likely to be a brief period of rule by his appointed ‘heir’, followed by an inevitable political crisis and a relaunch of how the country is run.” 

But who could lead such a country? He rules himself out in his book. He also tells me: “Undoubtedly, Navalny sees himself as such a leader… But it’s not really a problem of who comes next, whether it’s Navalny or myself or anybody else.” The President’s power would need to be reduced through a “deep federalisation” he explains, to spread power across the country. 

As for the country’s ruler for the last 22 years, he says: “I really do think that Putin will stay in power until he dies. The question is whether this is going to be a natural death. That depends on his luck. Having started the war in Ukraine, he has really reduced the period of his political life.” 

The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin’s Power Gambit – and How to Fix It by Mikhail Khodorkovsky with Martin Sixsmith, is out now (£20, WH Allen)  

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