Khodorkovsky’s comments come as experts say Putin is changing his military strategy to avoid losing the war in Ukraine. “This is how Putin now faces obstacles in Ukraine,” said CNN presenter Fareed Zakaria. “Given what you know about his mentality, what is he going to do? Will he turn Ukraine into Chechnya? Will he destroy it? Will he back down? What do you think are his choices?” “For him, the situation today is very complicated. Initially, what he wanted was to change power in Kyiv, put on his puppet and expect that this would be treated with flowers being thrown into the streets by the Ukrainian people,” Khodorkovsky said. . responded. “When that did not happen, he went crazy. The fact that people in Kharkov did not meet him with flowers not only angered him, but I really think he was literally going crazy. That was when he started bombing Kharkov and Kyiv.” The exiled billionaire has said in the past that he believes Putin’s defeat is inevitable as long as the West backs Ukraine. Khodorkovsky was Russia’s richest man in 2003, but was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2005 for fraud and tax evasion. Although Putin pardoned him and released him in 2013, he said he believed his imprisonment was politically motivated and now lives in London. Exiled Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Russian President Vladimir Putin went crazy when Ukrainians did not meet him “with flowers” after his invasion. Above, Putin stands in a hall in the Kremlin in Moscow on March 11. Mikhail Klimentyev During his interview, which was translated from Russian, Khodorkovsky added that he believed Putin had “three ways out” of the war. The first way, he said, is “to continue to put pressure on Ukraine and possibly lose troops in the process.” Khodorkovsky noted that Putin could also “use weapons of mass destruction in the hope that this would force the Ukrainians to retreat,” with the third option being to “start real negotiations.” “When Mr. Biden, when NATO officials say in one voice, that … ‘if you use weapons of mass destruction, you will get the right response from NATO,’” he actually gives Putin only one choice: to “really sit at the negotiating table,” he concluded. Newsweek tried to reach Putin’s office for comment, but received no response before it was published on Sunday afternoon. A former Russian energy official, Vladimir Milov, told CNN in an interview on Saturday that the Russian president was “deliberately cut off from unwanted information” in the midst of the ongoing war. “So Putin is living in a self-inflicted bubble right now,” Miloff said. “He’s kind of two-way: It’s not that there are bad advisers who don’t inform him, he deliberately set up a system where he punished people for bad news and really only listened to what he wanted here.”
