MUNICH – “I’ve learned that I’m popular with Munich taxi drivers,” laughs Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He is surprised that they recognize him. They have been peppering him with questions about Russia’s future and whether its President Vladimir Putin will resort to nuclear weapons or can stay in power.
They’re not the only ones eager to get Khodorkovsky’s answers here Munich Security Conference, On the margins of the conference the search is on for Khodorkovsky, the former Russian tycoon, political prisoner for life and now a prominent Putin critic. And in bilateral talks, on the final question about Putin staying in power, Khodorkovsky says the only way the Russian leader can help the West is by losing courage, engaging in premature talks and pushing Ukraine into an ambiguous position. Offer to help. deal.
“Let’s call it the Minsk 6,” he tells me as I sit with him and other Russian opposition figures at a hotel bar after an exhausting day in the Bavarian capital. The bar is filled with other rumbles deep in serious discussion.
While conference organizers rejected a delegation from the Russian government, Russia’s opposition politicians and activists were welcomed, including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and former independent Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov. Khodorkovsky’s first season was packed.
Ukraine’s leader is wary of dissidents from Russia, arguing they are not immune to extremism and “largely ignored the eight-year war against us, even before the February invasion,” Ukrainian lawmaker as Lesia Vasilenko recently told me, “To be a Russian we can trust,” Vasilenko said, “you really have to prove that you’re not Now against your own regime in Russia, but you oppose the war in Ukraine and you stand up for all the values Ukraine is defending – namely territorial integrity, Ukraine’s independence within internationally recognized borders.
Here in Munich, however, what Khodorkovsky and others are saying is music to Ukrainians’ ears. On the spectrum between hardliners and skeptics those who worry about escalation are the most militant and determined to steel Western nerves and allay fears of nuclear escalation.
This is similar to Khodorkovsky’s “Minsk 6.” But goes back. As always, he argues in a systematic manner, inviting his interlocutor to follow his argument step by step in imitation of the Socratic method, asking and answering questions to draw out ideas and underlying assumptions. Is.
Some Western leaders have expressed their concern about the coup in Moscow to him. They are afraid that someone worse will take Putin’s place. On this Khodorkovsky says that nothing can be worse than this. He turns through his cell phone to show me a bizarre video clip posted on the Internet, where one of Putin’s top nuclear advisers enthusiastically discusses how Russia may soon be using planned eugenics through cloning and incubating Will be able to racially correct future generations. Possibly the discordant gene will be removed.
He feels that some people in the West want talks, feel and are under the impression that Putin wants to talk soon. “They’re testing the waters,” he says. But he is adamant that the talks will end badly for Ukraine, the West and the Russians.
“Let’s say we have negotiations for a peaceful solution. Let’s call it Minsk 6,” says Khodorkovsky, a fictional revival of the Minsk agreements that sought to end the war in the Donbass, but on February 22 last year Putin was declared dead a few days before launching his invasion.
He added: “What does Putin get from this? He says okay, I get to keep Crimea and give me all of Luhansk and Donetsk and I’ll give back most of what I captured on the Black Sea coast, but I get to keep Crimea. Leave a corridor for Let’s say Zelensky is squeezed and agrees to negotiate. You will destabilize Ukraine, which will be thrown into civil strife because 87 percent of Ukrainians would not be able to digest such a deal – it would have an equivalent effect, say, if Zelensky had accepted the US proposal at the start of the war in the country. an elevator out of
Khodorkovsky explains what will happen then. Putin will regroup, mobilize more, and draft people into the occupied territories, building up his arsenal and replenishing his dwindling arms. The Russian leader would then accuse the Ukrainians of not keeping their part of Minsk 6 as civil strife raged in Ukraine, which he would say poses a threat to Russians in the occupied territories and the possibility that there will be occasional attacks on border posts or otherwise.
“You see, Putin has no choice but to wage war. His support base is now limited to so-called national patriots – to get more support, he needs to improve the economic well-being of Russians and that Can’t do it because of corruption and nepotism and things like that,” says Khodorkovsky. At the same time, he has to deal with the destroyed territories of occupied Ukraine, and he is faced with Western sanctions “and no one will be in a hurry to remove them.” And the basis for his support would be that he has failed to Nazismize Ukraine or move NATO away from Russia’s borders.
“He will have absolutely no choice. He will have to start a new war. Only now he will have his eyes on the NATO countries, primarily on the Baltic countries, Khodorkovsky concluded.
After talking with Khodorkovsky and other interlocutors, Dmitry Gudkov told me that he agreed with his compatriot. And he also shares his view that it is unlikely that Putin will resort to tactical nuclear weapons, despite threats and saber-rattling and comments from the likes of Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s partner and now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.
Medvedev recently warned Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine could spark a nuclear war. “The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war could trigger a nuclear war,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Gudkov sees such threats as empty, but the aim of the intimidation exercise is to frighten the fearful and faint-hearted in the West, and to strengthen his hand in urging a veiled and cautious calibration of support for Ukraine. Is.
But Gudkov says Western leaders should offer their own persistent warnings to everyone in command of Russia’s nuclear chain. Gudkov says, “They should say over and over again, ‘We know who you are and where you live and if you push a button, we will target you and catch you — and you will never be able to seek justice and retribution. Will not be able to escape from’.”
Medvedev is one of Putin’s lieutenants who draws particular derision from Russian dissidents in Munich. Once keen to present himself as a moderate, Western-leaning modernist and reformer, his recent fiery tirade has caused many in the West to scratch their heads and ponder, “What happened to Dmitry Medvedev?”
The overall view is that he has gone through a change in line with his mentor’s voice, but is also positioning himself to be more relevant, such as technocrat Sergei Kiriyenko, former prime minister and current first in the presidential administration. Deputy Chief. Kiriyenko has taken a macho-posture around the occupied regions of Ukraine’s Donbas, clad in camouflage.
But Medvedev’s comments had a special poisonous and extreme flavor of their own. He described Joe Biden as a “creepy grandpa with dementia”, labeled EU leaders “insane” and promised that Russia would make sure Ukraine “disappeared off the map.” All of his genocidal rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the hip image he once presented with his love for blogging and gadgets and a trip to Silicon Valley to be handed a new iPhone 4 by Steve Jobs.
In recent months Medvedev has become so paranoid that it prompts Anastasia Burakova, founder of the NGO Kovcheg (The Ark), which supports Russian political refugees abroad, to joke that he “must be an American spy”. who uses his retainers to send secret information.” CIA. Or maybe Putin wants him to say the especially crazy things “I can be replaced by someone worse than me” as a way of telling West look to make sense of him.
And here we come full circle. Russians in Munich say that ultimately how long Putin will rule will be largely determined by whether the West holds its nerve.