Telegraph: Khodorkovsky’s son fears father will fall to Kremlin forces
After Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s jail term was extended, his son tells Andrew Osborn the fallen oligarch is at risk from the Kremlin’s shadowy defenders
As he gazes out over New York’s frozen cityscape, Pavel Khodorkovsky makes sure one of his most prized possessions is safe: a yellowing Aeroflot plane ticket.
The ticket, which he keeps in a small bag at home with his passports, was supposed to get him back to Moscow on New Year’s Eve seven years ago so that he could see 2004 in with his family.
But a couple of months before the planned visit, his father, Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested by masked gunmen on an icy Siberian runway, and Pavel, then just 18, never did make his plane or see his father again.
Fast forward seven years and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’srichest man, is languishing behind bars on fraud charges that many in the West believe are punishment for his crossing of the country’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin.
Last Thursday, amid an international outcry, a Moscow court added another six years to the eight year sentence he is already serving, having convicted him on new multi-billion dollar embezzlement charges.
In a rare interview, Pavel Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon’s eldest son, has told The Sunday Telegraph why he believes that Mr Putin still nurses a personal grudge against his father, how his father’s incarceration has ripped their family apart – and why he fears his father could now suffer the same fate as that other noted Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko.
“My father runs a very high risk of being killed,” said the quietly-spoken 25-year-old. “The Litvinenko case is certainly on my mind, as are a lot of other cases, such as that of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.”
