Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Russian oligarch who was imprisoned on tax charges in that country after refusing to fall in line with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, has given his two cents on the whole Putin-Donald Trump friendship. Khodorkovsky made the comments in an interview with Forbes.
Call it a friendship or call it a “bromance, ” if you haven’t heard about the special relationship that exists between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin then you obviously live in a cave with no Internet and so would not be reading this story right now. For weeks now the press has reported on how Russian hackers were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in America and the e mails of senior Hillary Clinton campaign staffers. This led to negative news reports which clearly cost Hillary Clinton the election since the results were so close so many states.
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And now both the FBI and the CIA have said that they believe that the Russian government itself was behind the hacks. This concerns many since during the campaign Donald Trump made his intention to pursue warmer relations with Russia clear. This has led many to accuse the Russian government of interfering in the elections on Trump’s behalf.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky told Forbes, “My opinion is that Putin has already worked out the model that he would like to use with Donald Trump. He worked it out on Berlusconi. He’s going to look for some kind of personal understanding, personal relations along the lines of like ‘here we are, you and I, way up on top altogether just the two of us and everybody else is somewhere there below us.’ I’m not sure whether the American political system could handle this kind of style of relations.”
He also criticized Donald Trump’s Secretary of State designee Rex Tillerson, the current state of the Russian economy and Putin in general. Mikhail Khodorkovsky clearly has personal reasons for hating Vladimir Putin, and by extension Trump, after everything that was done to him. But earlier this month he won a court case which led to the unfreezing of more than $100 million of his assets. He is still fighting charges on money laundering brought against him in the EU due to accusations from the Russian government, however.
