Former President Donald Trump’s reign has damaged the image of the United States among ordinary Russians, according to one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strongest critics.
The handover of power and the Capitol riot “have damaged America’s reputation as a moral leader in the world, especially in the eyes of the Russian public,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky told NBC News in an exclusive interview in London. said.
The former oil tycoon, formerly believed to be Russia’s richest man, has also called for President Joe Biden to use targeted sanctions against Putin’s inner circle.
“Western leaders should not treat Putin as a leader,” Khodorkovsky, 57, said. “They must understand that the man in front of them is a mafia boss, a totalitarian ruler, a godfather.”
Putin last year referred to Khodorkovsky as a “deceiver.”
Khodorkovsky was deported from Russia in 2013 after serving ten years in prison for fraud, tax evasion and other economic crimes. Several international human rights groups have said the prosecution is political retaliation for his public criticism of Putin and the funding of opposition parties in parliament, and he is becoming a symbol of what critics say is the Kremlin’s abuse of court for political purposes. His sentence has been criticized by the US and Europe.
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After Khodorkovsky’s reform in the small business world as a student communist leader of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, he was still in his thirties when he emerged from the pervasive chaos of the Soviet collapse as one of the richest “oligarchs” among Putin’s predecessor Boris. Yeltsin.
But his company Yukos has been broken up and sold, most of which goes to state oil company Rosneft, which enables the Kremlin to regain control of much of the country’s oil sector.
Referring to “disagreement and fragmentation in American society” and false claims that the US election was hampered, Putin and his allies have used the last weeks of the Trump presidency to advance their own cause, Khodorkovsky said. They used the chaos in America to call into question the American system and praise their own, he added.
But, he said, four years of Trump has shown that American institutions are “very strong.”
“They are resistant to even populists like Trump,” he said, adding that Putin had “destroyed institutions in Russia.”
The recent protests against the detention of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will not be enough to change the system, Khodorkovsky said.
Navalny, 44, was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison last month after a Moscow court upheld his suspended sentence in a 2014 fraud case for a full term. The European Court of Human Rights has previously ruled that the conviction was politically motivated.
The decision came days after thousands of people across Russia held rallies in support of Navalny, who were poisoned and nearly died while conducting a corruption investigation in Siberia during the summer. He was transported to Germany for treatment after Russian doctors found no signs of poisoning.
It was later determined that he was poisoned by the Soviet nerve agent Novichok, who according to Navalny was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any involvement.
According to a statement from the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission, which defends the rights of prisoners and has access to people in custody, it emerged on Sunday that Navalny had been transferred to a penal colony in the Vladimir region.
The Russian state-run news agency TASS has said Navalny will serve his term in penal colony no. 2 in the city of Pokrov, about 60 km east of Moscow.
Khodorkovsky said peaceful protests would not work if he tried to remove Putin from power. “If they want to change the regime, they must be willing to use force,” he said.
Referring to Navalny’s poisoning and the deaths of other prominent Putin opponents, Khodorkovsky said he was “reasonably thankful” for the idea that he too could be targeted.
“I have had so many risks in my life,” he said, “I have faced it, and if necessary, I would have to do it again. Putin has the resources of the whole country; if he decides to removed, of course, is the only thing that can save me. ”
Reuters contributed to this report.
