Free Republic

The proposed sale by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, of his estim-ated $10bn (£5.5bn) stake in the Sibneft oil company to Gazprom, the state-controlled gas group, looks like a neat way of settling accounts with his country. He sails off into the sunset, free to buy yachts and football clubs, while the Kremlin virtually completes the renationalisation of Russia's core energy assets. Smiles all around, not least among the bankers involved. The truth is far less pleasant, for Russia and for Mr Abramovich. This deal, if it goes ahead, will be the latest development in the untransparent privatisation of Russia's...

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...

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.

A Russian journalist accused of posting 'sane people are for peace' about Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been locked in a Siberian clinical psychiatric hospital. Maria Ponomarenko, a 44-year-old mother of two, claims the authorities are seeking to gag her because of her opposition to the war. She is accused of spreading 'fake' news concerning Putin’s 'special military operation' in Ukraine. One comment seen as against the law by prosecutors said: 'It is impossible to remain silent, knowing about the death of thousands of innocent people.' Her 'fake' Telegram posts also included critical comments about the Russian bombing of...

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...

TEL AVIV - Russian-Israeli oligarch Leonid Nevzlin announced on Tuesday that he planned to give up his Russian passport in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Everything that Putin touches dies," Nevzlin wrote in a Facebook post. "I am against the war. I am against the occupation. I am against the genocide of the Ukrainian people." Nevzlin was among the first prominent Russian oligarchs to establish self-imposed exile in Israel, fleeing what he has described as a campaign of politically-motivated persecution by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2003, Nevzlin fled Russia for Israel amid a Kremlin-backed investigation into his Yukos...

[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,...

The Kremlin-Yukos conflict, almost a month old now, has shaken the conventional wisdom many had come to accept about the Vladimir Putin presidency. In a nutshell, the standard interpretation before this happened was the following: Putin's 2000 agreement with the oligarchs called for strengthening the state without big business getting overly involved in politics. In turn, the state would not meddle too much in the affairs of the business empires - basically, in the Russian economy. Of course, there are many nuances, but, essentially, the Yukos fracas has put this 'social contract,' as it were, into question. Eventually, most likely...

The man who spent 10 years in prison for crossing Putin says the Russian regime will fall, one way or the other, and those who want a democracy to replace it need to get organized now. In December 2013, when Vladimir Putin released Mikhail Khodorkovsky from prison after 10 years, the former oil tycoon and political prisoner said he would not enter politics.... “When I left prison, I announced that I am not interested in engaging in politics. I never promised anyone I wouldn’t engage in it and I continue to be not interested in engaging in it,” Khodorkovsky told...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been sent to the wastes of Siberia to serve his 8-year sentence, authorities said on Thursday, sparking outrage among his defence lawyers and rights activists. Khodorkovsky's supporters say the move to send him to the other side of the vast Russian Federation is a continuation of a Kremlin campaign to isolate him as a voluble critic of President Vladimir Putin's leadership and break him psychologically. Penal officials said the 42-year-old oil tycoon, once Russia's richest man, had arrived at camp IK-10, near the border with China and 6,000 km from his native...

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...

MOSCOW — "Russia is like a tub full of dough. You push your hand all the way to the bottom, pull it out, and right before your eyes, the hole disappears, and again, it is a tub full of dough," Nikita Khrushchev once said, assessing the country he ruled. The former premier -- my great grandfather -- who 60 years ago denounced Joseph Stalin and his pervasive security apparatus, must be turning in his grave. Russia's legal institutions are still run along the lines of Stalin's "show trials." Following the politically motivated prosecutions of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and...

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?

MOSCOW -- A new buzzword has permeated Russian business and politics since former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sentenced on May 31 to nine years in prison for fraud and tax evasion: ''fear." Demonstrators confront it at protest rallies, business people concede it as they move their capital abroad, and opposition politicians draw parallels with the onset of dictator Josef Stalin's Great Terror purges. To many, the conclusion of Khodorkovsky's trial appears to be the beginning, rather than the end, of a chapter in Russian history. Igor Shuvalov, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin, called the trial a ''show flogging"...

The Russian “legal system,” which would be funny if it wasn’t so painful, has declared Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty on a dozen or so counts of anti-social behavior. For this, he has been stripped of all assets and will spend the next nine years in jail. Moscow has always been spectacularly obvious about her tolerance for those who rise above the rest. And yet to solely blame the evil Putin would be to underestimate the unbelievable ability of the Russian people to blame the exceptional among them for all ills, and of the West’s unbelievable ability to glaze over the obvious....

Yukos verdict drags into Thursday The trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia and the former boss of oil company Yukos, has been adjourned until Thursday. Earlier, Russian judges read aloud their lengthy ruling in the trial for tax evasion and fraud. A final verdict on the seven counts may come on Thursday but observers say the hearing is likely to drag on for days. Emotions have been running high as one defence lawyer called the trial an "act of reprisal". There have been daily protests outside the court. Stacked odds Mr Khodorkovsky is widely predicted to...