FRANCE 24’ Marc Perelman spoke to exiled Russian opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was jailed for a decade until he was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin in 2013. Over the past few weeks, Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump have spoken to each other and agreed to work toward ending the war in Ukraine – a huge diplomatic shift after years of tensions. Putin “has presented this in the country as his legitimisation; a breakthrough in Russia’s international isolation”, Khodorkovsky said. 

After suffering “a series of strong blows” at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Khodorkovsky said, Putin now sees an opportunity: “not only to eliminate those problems with the US, but to move forward where he wants to go; that is to be on equal footing and have cooperation with the US”.

“Whether Trump wants to engage in that exactly as Putin does, I don’t know,” he cautioned.

Negotiations without Kyiv would be ‘a big mistake’

The US and Russia plan to appoint high-level teams to negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the end of key talks in Saudi Arabia this week that excluded Kyiv. 

“If Trump conducts negotiations and signs an agreement without the participation of Ukraine and the West, that will, in my view, be a big mistake,” Khodorkovsky said. “Because to implement such agreements will be impossible. Agreements have to be implemented by Ukraine and have to be guaranteed by European countries”. 

Could the prospect of Ukraine ceding territories to Russia also weaken the Russian opposition’s hand?

“The main weakening of the opportunities of the opposition took place when Western countries, including European countries and the US, reacted with too little, too late in response to Putin’s aggression,” Khodorkovsky asserted. “If the reaction had been in 2023, Putin would have lost everything that he had conquered and as a result of that would have probably lost power.”

Once Russia’s richest man as head of the Yukos oil company, Khodorkovsky now lives in exile in London, where he has become a staunch Putin critic. “Quite frequently I receive reports or messages that in the Kremlin list of enemies, I am number one or number two,” he said.

The article and the video interview at the FRANCE24 programme Tête à tête was originally published here.