Free Republic

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia until he challenged Vladimir Putin and was sent to jail for 10 years. Now, he has advice for Western leaders trying to deal with his former adversary, telling CBC’s Terence McKenna that a show of strength is key.

Most of the world is focused on the war in Ukraine, which has created political unrest in most western countries. Although it feels as though Russia is under a microscope, there is a lot of Russian politics that the media has not discussed. One of these things is that there are rivals to Putin, one of whom is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The Munich Security Conference took place two weeks ago. Although Russian officials are usually invited, this year that changed. Due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, organizers decided to invite Russian politicians pushing to replace Putin. Those guests included multiple Russian...

PARIS — Marat Gabidullin's face is lined from years of exposure to the elements, and his hair is thinning. But at 56, he has the trim physique and muscular arms of a man 30 years younger. He wears a chunky ring bearing the image of a skull.The skull is the symbol of the Wagner Group — a private Russian mercenary force believed to be financed by an oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The group is fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. And it's widely believed that at least some of the "little green...

On Wednesday, a Russian-born banker and entrepreneur posted on the social networking website LinkedIn offering a $1 million bounty to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes. In a post that’s no longer viewable on LinkedIn, Alexander Konanykhin said, “I promise to pay $1,000,000 to the officer(s) who, complying with their constitutional duty, arrest(s) Putin as a war criminal under Russian and international laws.” “Putin is not the Russian president as he came to power as the result of a special operation of blowing up apartment buildings in Russia, then violated the Constitution by eliminating free elections and murdering...

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

Rather than the January 24th suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport (that claimed 36 lives and wounded almost 200) giving rise to a soul searching by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, it has sadly given rise to hypocrisy on his part. Moscow’s investigation into the attack is still ongoing. But earlier this month, in a very chilling video, Doku Umarov—the self-styled emir of the Causasus Emirate—claimed responsibility for it.Threatening further attacks, Umarov said, "With Allah's grace, we will make this year for you a year of blood and tears."

MOSCOW — The Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower in June 2016 on the premise that she would deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton has long insisted she is a private attorney, not a Kremlin operative trying to meddle in the presidential election.But newly released emails show that in at least one instance two years earlier, the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, worked hand in glove with Russia’s chief legal office to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud case against a well-connected Russian firm.Ms. Veselnitskaya also appears to have recanted her earlier denials of Russian government...

Bill Browder rose from rebellious grandson of the former head of the Communist Party USA, Earl Browder, to the leading foreign capitalist in Russia, as the founder and CEO of the high-flying hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management. But his rise was matched by a brutal and deadly fall, in which the Russian government would steal and destroy Browder’s company, and physically threaten its employees, culminating in the imprisonment, torture and death of Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky — the man for whom on account of Browder’s lobbying, the Magnitsky Act was named. Browder and a deceased Magnitsky would both be convicted...

Former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has warned that President Vladimir Putin's current policies threaten to trigger a repeat of Russia's 1917 revolution. In an interview with Bloomberg, the former Yukos CEO described Putin as an authoritarian leader "forced to burn the field" all around himself in order to retain power. "All authoritarian regimes, especially ones like this that aren't based on an ideology but on an individual person, are highly unstable," Khodorkovsky, 51, was cited as saying. Citing dismal economic conditions exacerbated by Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, Khodorkovsky told Bloomberg the country was on...

"I would not be interested in becoming Russia's president if my country was developing normally..."  It did come as a surprise last December, when Vladimir Putin suddenly signed an early release for Mikhail Khodorvkovsky, who was the richest man in Russia ($15B) when he was jailed for 'tax evasion' (read: challenged Putin) in 2003... Hard to tell for sure what the thought process was there -perhaps feeling strong and aiming to soften his image a bit- but Putin at the time explained 'Ten years in prison is a serious punishment' and signed the form that freed Khodorkovsky from a decade of harsh detention....

Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, addressing thousands of people at the cradle of the uprising against Ukraine's Moscow-backed leader, accused Russia on Sunday of being complicit in police violence against protesters. To chants of "Russia, rise up", Khodorkovsky, who was jailed for a decade under President Vladimir Putin, told the crowd the Kremlin was lying to its own people by portraying the protesters as "neo-fascists" bent on violence. Wearing a simple dark anorak and jeans, he addressed the crowd from a stage in Kiev's Independence Square, occupied by protesters since November despite police trying to oust them with force which resulted...

Displaying the killer instincts of a chess grandmaster, Vladimir Putin rang out 2013 with an exceptional list of accomplishments. The Russian president humiliated the United States by sheltering NSA leaker Edward Snowden, brokered a Syrian chemical weapons deal that averted a seemingly inevitable U.S. military strike and outmaneuvered the 28-nation European Union in the wrestling match for influence over Ukraine.

The big Sarah Palin news today is that she has lost her longtime foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. Scheunemann is a well-known neoconservative who worked for Jesse Helms and was intimately involved in the push for the Iraq war. He later became an aide to John McCain on the 2008 presidential campaign, where he met and linked up with Palin. He's been associated with her ever since. The question is: Why did they Scheunemann, who runs the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, leave Palin now?

Some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) deemed yesterday’s resolution on Russian non-compliance with the rule of law to be much too soft, and now seek sanctions against Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses. As reported in the media, the European Parliament has three enumerations: there is the ‘Khodorkovsky list’, which includes those involved in imposing harsh sentences in the Yukos case; the ‘Magnitsky list’, with the names of those accused of the death in jail of the lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management; and the ‘Nemtsov list’, in which appear the persecutors of Russian opposition leaders. The latter list...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised on Thursday the sentencing of former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to six additional years in prison, saying the ruling appeared to be politically motivated. "The impression remains that political motivations played a role in this trial," Merkel said in Berlin. "This contradicts Russia's frequently repeated intention to pursue full adoption of the rule of law." The sentencing of Khodorkovsky by a Russian judge on charges of multi-billion dollar theft and money-laundering means he will serve a total of 14 years in prison and not be freed until 2017.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was convicted Monday of stealing oil from his own company and laundering the proceeds, a verdict likely to keep the oil tycoon who once challenged the power of Vladimir Putin behind bars for several more years. The unrelenting legal attack on Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, has come to define the country's transformation under Putin. The outcome of the second trial exposes how little has changed under President Dmitry Medvedev despite his promises to strengthen the rule of law and make courts an independent branch of government. Putin, now prime minister, remains the more powerful leader. Any lingering...

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian tycoon, has lashed out at Vladimir Putin, describing his nemesis as a pitiable but dangerous leader steering his country towards degradation and chaos. In a newspaper article published on Friday, three days before a judge begins reading the verdict in a fresh trial that could keep him in jail until 2017, Mr Khodorkovsky said the Russian prime minister was trapped in the cynical political establishment he had created, indifferent to the fate of its people. “I suddenly realised I was sorry for this man – no longer young, but vigorous and horribly lonely in the...

I can recall October 2003. My last day as a free man. Several weeks after my arrest, I was informed that president Putin had decided: I was going to have to “slurp gruel” for 8 years. It was hard to believe that back then. Seven years have gone by already since that day. Seven years – quite a long stretch of time, and all the more so – when you’ve spent it in jail. All of us have had time to reassess and rethink many things. Judging by the prosecutors’ presentation: “give them 14 years” and “spit on previous court...

February 26, 2009 Many Kremlin-watchers point to oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky's October 2003 arrest as the point when it became crystal-clear where Vladimir Putin's Russia was headed. Opposition leaders are now saying that Khodorkovsky's fate has again become a litmus test -- this time for President Dmitry Medvedev. On March 2, Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev will face new charges of embezzling and laundering more than $20 billion. Critics say the case -- like Khodorkovsky's 2005 trial in which he was convicted of tax evasion and fraud and sentenced to eight years in prison -- is a fabricated...

Russia Is the Occupied State for Khodorkovsky Mikhail Khodorkovsky regards Russia an occupied state and blames the lack of the nation’s initiative exactly on this occupation, Novaya Gazeta reported with reference to Khodorkovsky’s talk with the lawyers. According to Khodorkovsky, quite a few different thinkers arrived at one and the same conclusion - mentality of the Russians, the relations of people and elite, the place of special services in public life are characteristic not for the country at war but rather for the occupied country. Since the time of Tatar and Mongolian invasion, Khodorkovsky went on, the nation has humbled...