As someone who has suffered at the hands of the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky knows what the men he rubbed shoulders with are capable of. Once Russia’s richest man, who flourished during the wild west years of the Yeltsin era, Khodorkovsky had his wings clipped for criticizing and not signing up to the new regime Vladimir Putin carved out in the early 2000s. An attempt to sell a stake in his Yukos oil company to ExxonMobil turned out to be a step too far. His subsequent arrest on charges of tax fraud and the dismantling of Yukos, one of Russia’s post-Soviet giants, marked the moment when Putin moved the country away from political and economic integration with the West, instead putting it into a path to kleptocracy. and authoritarianism.
