, was arrested on the orders of the Kremlin leader and almost 10 years since his unexpected release. Living in exile in London for much of the time since, he has long devoted his energies to how to bring about regime change in his homeland. For the past decade, the very idea looked little more than wishful thinking. But the situation has been transformed by the disastrous invasion of Ukraine in February last year followed by the armed rebellion on June 24 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late and little-lamented head of the Wagner mercenary group. 'There is one thing about Russia that is difficult to understand for Westerners, except perhaps for Italians,' says Khodorkovsky, 60, his hair cropped and dressed in a short-sleeved shirt when we meet at his London headquarters. 'Putin is not a statesman, he is a mafia boss. Russia is a dictatorship but it is based on a mafia structure that is riding roughshod over the state.' Indeed, the extraordinary events that have been playing out in Russia are reminiscent of scenes from The Godfather . Prigozhin, a loyal servant of Putin for decades, had dared to defy him by ordering his mercenaries to march on Moscow, before backing down. This left the boss with a problem: do nothing and he would look weak, but put his wayward henchman in jail and he would start talking and reveal the extent of his backing within the army and security services. He would have to be silenced: it was just a question of how and when. So when a plane that the Kremlin said){kind=link}
In an anonymous white stucco-fronted townhouse in central London, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is plotting the downfall of Vladimir Putin and what should come next. It is 20 years since the erstwhile oligarch, whose wealth was once put at $15 billion, was arrested on the orders of the Kremlin leader and almost ten years since his unexpected release. Living in exile in London for much of the time since, he has long devoted his energies to how to bring about regime change in his homeland.
For the past decade, the very idea looked little more than wishful thinking. But the situation has been transformed by the disastrous invasion of Ukraine in February last year followed by the armed rebellion on June 24 by
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