(RoyalPatriot.com )- An exiled Russian oligarch told the media that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin badly misjudged the reception he’d get for sending troops into Ukraine, indicating that he “really believed he would be received in Ukraine with flowers” when he launched the so-called “special military operation” in the country.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky said that Putin lives in his “own world” and that he believed the Ukrainian people would welcome him as a “liberator” of their country – which is baffling, given that just two eastern regions of the country, Donetsk and Luhansk, are pro-Russia. The rest of the country decidedly is not.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4 on the “Today” program, Khodorkovsky said that Putin has effectively gone “mad” and that the response to his invasion of Ukraine was unexpected.
Khodorkovsky is an oil tycoon who was jailed in Russia after publicly disagreeing with Putin. He fled the country and moved to London in 2013.
He predicted during the interview on the BBC that Putin will eventually be forced to withdraw his troops to stop anti-war uprisings in the country. And with Western sanctions bringing the Russian economy to a halt, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where the Russian people don’t eventually get angry at Putin for destroying their lives with a pointless war.
The Russian oil tycoon also said Western governments should continue imposing increasingly devastating sanctions on Moscow, including sanctions on the Russian central bank, predicting that they will have the desired effect.
“I think that the West has taken a very important action. The blocking of the accounts of the central bank is, in my opinion, the only sanction which can in the short-term stop the aggression in the short term,” he said.
He added that Western governments should block the Kremlin’s ability to use any kind of foreign currency.
If Khodorkovsky is right, though, might Putin be crazy enough to continue with this war even if it destroys his economy?
