War in Ukraine
The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Exiled oligarch calls on other Russian tycoons to break with Putin

Mikhail Khodorkovsky says they must denounce the invasion of Ukraine if they want to be above suspicion of collaborating with the Kremlin.

By
April 3, 2022 at 3:18 p.m. EDT
Mikhail Khodorkovsky speaks at a media briefing hosted by the Center for Liberal Modernity in Berlin on March 23. (Bernd von Jutrczenka/DPA/AP)
5 min

LONDON — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the self-exiled Russian oligarch and vocal Kremlin opponent, has called on Russian billionaires and officials who have fled Russia to publicly denounce President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine as criminal.

“Public figures cannot leave quietly and then sit quietly. If you have left, then you should publicly dissociate yourself or we should be forced to suspect that you are acting on [the Kremlin’s] behalf,” Khodorkovsky said in an interview last week in his London office. “You should step up to the microphone and say that Putin is a war criminal and that what he is doing is a crime, that the war against Ukraine is a crime. Say this, and then we’ll understand that Putin doesn’t have a hold over you.”