Former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky (he’s still worth about $170 million), who spent 10 years in President Vladimir Putin’s prison system, said on Friday that Moscow is lying about what it’s doing in the Ukraine, and called on Russians to go out to protest and demand an end to an “unequal” war, Reuters reports.
“We could and we can stop what is happening. It would be enough to take to the streets, to go on strike, ” Khodorkovsky, now living in Switzerland, declared.
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President Putin has been accused of sending troops and weapons into the Ukraine, in support of an illegal, separatist insurgency. Putin denies everything. The Russian Ministry of Defense is saying it has no soldiers in the Ukraine.
“We are fighting Ukraine – for real, ” Khodorkovsky insisted.
Of course we are. The whole world has been aware of it. But the Russian State is allowed some luxuries smaller states are not.
Khodorkovsky says they’re lying “just like they did about Afghanistan back in the ’80s and about Chechnya in the ’90s.”
Oh, they’ve been lying since the early 1890s, maybe earlier.
Poor Khodorkovsky, 51, used to be the richest Russian alive. He owned the old Yukos oil company, then, in February 2003, at a televised meeting at the Kremlin, he told Putin he was surrounded with corruption, that major government officials were accepting millions in bribes.
Well, that was that, and the tycoon spent 10 years behind bars. He was given a pardon by Putin last December. Now he’s trying to make things a little rough for the man who made him rich and then made him less rich and way less free.
And so it goes.
