Mikhail Khodorkovsky: ‘Whatever Trump or Putin say means nothing until they agree on their mutual interests’

Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Moscow, 61 years old) went from being the richest businessman in the Russian Federation to spending almost a decade of his life in a Siberian prison, on the orders of his arch-enemy, Vladimir Putin. He knows the Russian president’s tactics well. And he is not at all surprised that he gets along so well with Donald Trump.

“There have been times in my life when I have witnessed something similar to what we are seeing now: whenever two gangsters spoke to each other. It’s the same style. The same method. In Putin’s case I understand it perfectly, coming from where he comes from. I’m not so sure why Trump is like that. Perhaps it’s because he was a real estate developer in a complicated market like New York. The fact is that he knows how to handle that type of conversation,” he explains to a small group of European media outlets from the LENA alliance, including EL PAÍS, at the headquarters of his foundation Open Russia in London, where Khodorkovsky lives in exile.

In all the ceremony of confusion that Trump has generated through his statements, his changes of tone, or his humiliating reprimand of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, says Khodorkovsky, Europe has failed to interpret the messages from the White House or the Kremlin and, what is worse, Zelenskiy has not understood how to interpret what his European allies were telling him.

In part. Firstly, nothing that the Russian and U.S. presidents have said so far is relevant, warns the former businessman. “Everything that Trump or Putin say about Ukraine means nothing, for the moment, until they agree on their respective interests. Once they have that clear — and everything they risk if they do not comply with the agreement — there will be an agreement,” he explains.

But Zelenskiy, although not guilty of the position he finds himself in, says Khodorkovsky, is in a difficult situation. Firstly, because he does not understand or have a rapport with Trump, much less with Putin. And above all — “Eastern Europe and Western Europe have always spoken a different language,” he points out — because the Ukrainian president has not been able to grasp the message that European leaders were transmitting to him in London last Sunday, amid hugs and hospitality.

“Zelenskiy has not understood the message that European leaders were sending him, which was basically that they could not help him without the participation of the United States. I think he thought that what Europe was telling him was that they were going to support him anyway, even if the United States did not. He interpreted that as giving him a free hand. And what they were telling him was that either he reached an agreement with Washington, or he was finished,” he says.

The result of the confrontation

Khodorkovsky cannot avoid a shadow of realism-pessimism in his analyses, which derives from his long stay in prison, his belief that there is no truly solid opposition to Putin’s regime, and his conviction that it will be necessary to wait at least a decade, when the Russian president is over 80 years old, to begin working on a change of regime.

Beyond the imperialist expansionism that many analysts attribute to Putin, Khodorkovsky sees the invasion of Ukraine as a political maneuver to maintain his popularity in the country. It is the fourth time, he notes, that faced with serious internal difficulties, Putin has started a war. “And it is clear, from what we are seeing, that he has not lost.”

If Putin were to press ahead with this conflict and occupy Ukraine entirely, he says, Europe would be at war within two years. “Without money to invest in all these territories, he wouldn’t know what to do with all the unemployed men who have been fighting for three years. And a similar, though lesser, problem exists with the Russian ex-combatants. The solution is to start another war to get rid of these people. The Baltic states? Moldova? Romania or Poland?” says Khodorkovsky.

The most realistic solution — almost the optimal one according to Khodorkovsky — would be to preserve the current combat lines in Ukraine and enter into a period of frozen conflict that would last as long as Putin remained in the Kremlin.

And if Trump, with his particular negotiating style, he notes ironically, achieves something along these lines, he should be lauded internationally. “If the war is stopped on the current front lines, and Trump manages to preserve Ukraine’s status as a sovereign state; if he manages to ensure that Ukraine maintains its ability to defend itself, and with its own arms industry, and if he also guarantees that the Western allies will continue to provide aid to Kyiv — without joining NATO,” Khodorkovsky says, “if he achieves all that, he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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