France 24 spoke with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an opponent who spent ten years of his life in prison, accused in particular of tax evasion by the Kremlin.
An accusation still denied by our guest.
This former oligarch, who was once the richest man in Russia, now lives in exile in London, since his release in 2013.
For him, Vladimir Putin was "deeply upset" by the events in Ukraine since 2014, which he considers an American maneuver to bring him down.
His decision to invade Ukraine is of an "emotional" nature according to our guest, Vladimir Putin noting that things were not changing in his favor.
Even if Mikhail Khodorkovsky recognizes in the septuagenarian president "signs of senile paranoia", the latter is not, according to him, a "madman in the clinical sense".
The master of the Kremlin nevertheless planned this operation by committing "many errors", believes Mikhail Khodorkovsky, because of his isolation, which is symptomatic of "all authoritarian leaders".
He even committed "a historic error", without which he could have remained in power until his death according to the businessman and opponent.
The Russian president is committing "suicide" because "he cannot win in Ukraine even by taking Kiev and Kharkiv".
Mikhail Khodorkovsky predicts the "decomposition" of the Russian regime within "one or two years".
Our guest concedes that the Russian public opinion "rather" supports the war, because of the propaganda of the power, for the moment.
But he says this will change "under the influence of facts": when Russian soldiers return to their country in coffins and when the population pays the economic price of the international isolation of a Russia hit by enormous inflation. .
The former oligarch believes that Vladimir Putin is trying to "buy time" in the face of the anti-war protest that is developing within the Russian population: to stem the demonstrations, he will have to resort to the intervention of his army and therefore "stripping naked" the Ukrainian front.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky joins the call to demonstrate against the war launched, from his prison, by the opponent Alexei Navalny.
The Russian opponent recognizes that a week ago, he "would have laughed" at the mention of a nuclear war.
But "not today", he explains: "Putin is ready to use tactical nuclear weapons".
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, however, "assumes" that the strongman in Moscow is not ready to attack a country protected by the nuclear umbrella like Ukraine, nor that he would "endanger the destiny of all mankind" simply to test the reaction of countries like the United States or the United Kingdom.
The summary of the
France 24 week invites you to come back to the news that marked the week
I subscribe
Take international news everywhere with you!
Download the France 24 app
google-play-badge_EN