The time of former President Donald Trump in power has damaged the image of the United States among ordinary Russians, according to one of the greatest critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The transfer of power and the Capitol riot “affected America’s reputation as the world’s moral leader, especially in the eyes of the Russian public,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky told NBC News in an exclusive interview in London.
The former oil tycoon, who was once considered the richest man in Russia, also asked President Joe Biden to use targeted sanctions against Putin’s inner circle.
“Western leaders should not deal with Putin as a leader,” said Khodorkovsky, 57. “They must understand that the man in front of them is a mafia boss, a totalitarian ruler, a godfather.”
Putin last year referred to Khodorkovsky as a “fraudster”.
Khodorkovsky was exiled from Russia in 2013, after spending 10 years in prison for fraud, tax evasion and other economic crimes. Several international human rights groups said the accusation was political retribution for their public criticisms of Putin and the funding of opposition parties in Parliament and that it has become a symbol of what critics say the Kremlin is abusing the courts for purposes politicians. His sentence was criticized by the United States and Europe.
Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics
After engaging in small business as a communist student leader in Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms in the late 1980s, Khodorkovsky was still in his 30s when he emerged from the cruel chaos of the Soviet collapse as one of the most “oligarchs” wealthy under Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
But his company Yukos was spun off and sold, most going to state-owned Rosneft, allowing the Kremlin to regain control over much of the country’s oil sector.
Pointing to “discord and fragmentation in American society” and false claims that the US election was rigged, Putin and his allies used the final weeks of the Trump presidency to advance their own cause, said Khodorkovsky. They used chaos in America to cast doubt on the US system and to praise their own, he added.
But, he said, four years of Trump showed that American institutions are “very strong”.
“They are resistant even to populists like Trump,” he said, adding that Putin had “destroyed institutions in Russia”.
Recent protests against the arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will not be enough to change the system, said Khodorkovsky.
Navalny, 44, was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison last month after a Moscow court turned his suspended sentence from a 2014 fraud case to a full prison sentence. The European Court of Human Rights had previously found the conviction to be politically motivated.
The decision came days after thousands of people were detained across Russia in demonstrations in support of Navalny, who was poisoned and nearly died while conducting a corruption investigation in Siberia in the summer. He was flown to Germany for treatment after Russian doctors found no signs of poisoning.
It was later determined that he had been poisoned by the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, which Navalny claims was commissioned by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any involvement.
It was learned on Sunday that Navalny had been transferred to a penal colony in the Vladimir region, according to a statement from the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission, which defends the rights of prisoners and has access to people in custody.
Russian state news agency TASS said Navalny would serve time in penal colony No. 2 in the city of Pokrov, about 96 kilometers east of Moscow.
Khodorkovsky said peaceful protests would not work if he tried to get Putin out of power. “If they want to change the regime, they must be prepared to use force,” he said.
Pointing to Navalny’s poisoning and the deaths of other prominent Putin opponents, Khodorkovsky said he was “quite resigned” to the idea that he too could be the target.
“I’ve taken so many risks in my life,” he said, “I’ve faced them and maybe, if necessary, I would have to do it again. Putin has the resources of the entire country; if he decides to remove me, the only thing, of course, that could save me would be God. “
Reuters contributed to this report.