Mikhail Khodorkovsky is sounding the alarm. The end of the war in Ukraine, whenever it comes, won’t mean the end of Vladimir Putin, he says – nor the Russian threat to the West. Moscow, he says, has never been very good at demobilising restless, traumatised soldiers. ‘There is a 600,000-strong group that took part in the fighting. The question for Putin is: ‘What to do with this group?’.

Khodorkovsky fears that he knows the answer. ‘These tensions will naturally arise after two or three years,’ he says. ‘And then Putin’s way of thinking kicks into gear. And Putin’s mentality? He has already relieved such points of tension four times [during his rule] by starting a war. This is his modus operandi. Not because there are no other options, but because for him this is a habitual model of behaviour.’

Putin’s is a cult of personality, Khodorkovsky explains, not ideology

Khodorkovsky, formerly an oligarch and the wealthiest man in Russia, now an opposition activist and ex-political prisoner living in exile in London, is far from the only person concerned that Europe is unprepared to deal with the ongoing threat Russia will pose over the coming years.

At the Nato summit in the Hague last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Putin could be ready to attack a member of the alliance in five years’ time. ‘We believe that, starting from 2030, Putin can have significantly greater capabilities.’ Warnings that Russia could launch an attack on a Nato country – most likely one of the Baltic states – have been gathering pace in recent months. The timelines vary, but the consensus is the same: Ukraine won’t be the last invasion Putin tries to mount.

Putin, Khodorkovsky warns, is already waging a ‘hybrid war’ against the West. In the years since the invasion of Ukraine, Europe has seen a dramatic surge in Russia-affiliated acts of sabotage: exploding DHL packages, arson attacks carried out on energy substations and warehouses – and even potentially on properties belonging to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Many of the saboteurs in these cases aren’t Russian, seemingly hired unknowingly by the GRU – Russia’s foreign intelligence branch – through the internet.

This model, Khodorkovsky says, ‘is beautiful in its danger’. He compares it to the augmented reality game Pokemon Go, in which players complete virtual challenges, capturing, training and fighting Pokemon, in the real world. ‘The GRU took this model and began to give such tasks to all sorts of idiots who, for very little money, do God knows what.’ This type of warfare won’t end when the last Russian soldier puts down his gun in Ukraine, Khodorkovsky says. ‘And I do not know how ready the West is for this.’

I met Khodorkovsky at his offices in central London: at 61 he’s short in stature, with greying, close-cropped hair and sharp eyes behind silver-rimmed glasses. For someone who speaks with a great deal of authority, he is mild-mannered and surprisingly humble. ‘I am not a politician,’ he insists. ‘A politician is, after all, a person who fights for power.’ At various points in our discussion, he reaches for other labels to describe himself: first ‘a public figure’, then, rather ambiguously, a ‘fairly effective manager’.

‘Of course,’ he concedes, ‘I have an idea of ​​how I would like to see Russia in the future.’ He is the author of How to Slay a Dragon: Building a New Russia After Putin, which he once described as a ‘detailed breakdown of the steps that can lead us to that bright future’. In 2017, he also launched the Dossier Centre, a non-profit investigative outfit which tracks the criminal activity of Kremlin associates.

Khodorkovsky knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Putin. A former economic advisor to Boris Yeltsin, he remembers being informed in the late 90s that his boss was lining up the young director of the FSB – Russia’s domestic intelligence service – to become the country’s prime minister, and eventually his successor as president. ‘If we had understood what all this would lead to, then we probably would have been up in arms. But we couldn’t sense that then.’

Soon enough, Khodorkovsky – by then, amongst other things, owner of the multimillion-dollar oil and gas company Yukos – began meeting with Putin personally. ‘When I first met him, he made a very pleasant impression on me. He certainly does a good job in that sense, a truly talented person. That is, when you start communicating with him, you feel that you’re on the same wavelength.’

The honeymoon wasn’t to last. In February 2003, Khodorkovsky fell foul of Russia’s president. At a televised meeting with business leaders at the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky – by some reports now well on his way to becoming the world’s richest man – dared to challenge Putin on the full scale of systemic corruption in the country. ‘This is when,’ Khodorkovsky says matter-of-factly, ‘all the fun began’.

Eight months later, Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion. The Kremlin froze shares in Yukos, dissolving much of Khodorkovsky’s wealth with its subsequent collapse. A eight-year jail sentence followed in 2005, before he was subjected to a second trial in 2009 on charges of embezzlement and sentenced to a further 14 years in prison. Khodorkovsky has always maintained that the charges against him were politically motivated – indeed, his experiences fit the pattern of what would soon become widely recognised as the playbook by which Putin punishes his critics.

In 2013, Putin unexpectedly pardoned Khodorkovsky, freeing him that December. He left Russia, spending a year in Zurich while his children finished school, before settling in London in 2015. ‘London, for me as a person who was born and raised in Moscow, is more familiar,’ he explains.

But a presidential pardon didn’t mean he was free from the Kremlin. Men he suspects were ‘Putin’s jokesters’ would harass him: ‘They would stand here opposite the office, take pictures, brazenly follow me from home to work.’ Some, he says, would even try and film him using drones. The police did what they could, but it was only after the war in Ukraine broke out that the harassment really stopped: the British government’s expulsion of many Russian diplomats effectively dismantled the Kremlin’s network of goons.

The prospect of an end to the war in Ukraine currently seems further away than ever. Donald Trump’s administration has been keen to thaw relations with the Kremlin, raising concerns among Ukraine’s other allies over whether Putin will ever face a reckoning for his illegal invasion. And yet, even the Russian president won’t be able to live forever.

‘Who will replace Putin, no one can tell you that today. But it is certain that his initial replacement will come from within his entourage,’ Khodorkovsky says. ‘But then it is clear that the probability that the new person will preserve Putin’s power structure is simply zero.’ Putin’s is a cult of personality, he explains, not ideology. This will make his regime difficult to continue after his death. The West will then face a choice of whether to bring Russia in from the cold, or push it further into China’s arms, he adds.

The next decade will be pivotal for Russia, Khodorkovsky believes. It will, he says, almost certainly involve some kind of ‘violent confrontation’. But what of him? Does Khodorkovsky hope to see his homeland again? ‘Without a doubt, I certainly want to have the opportunity, but what I will be ready to do depends on time.’ He adds, ‘Revolutionary changes, and they will at the very least themes of revolution – these are still the business of the young.’

The interview was conducted by Lisa Haseldine, and it was originally published in the Spectator