December 20, 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin released the ex-head of Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who wrote a petition for clemency a few days before his release. During ten years of imprisonment, Mikhail Khodorkovsky has become one of the most famous prisoners not only in Russia, but in the world. It was customary to call him only prisoner number one, the personal prisoner of Vladimir Putin.
Since no official statements about the swift release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky have been made, there are many versions of the answer to the questions for what and why the personal prisoner of the Russian president was released. These include a few basic choices, voiced by those familiar with both key figures in this dramatic story.
Two main directions prevail: humanitarian and mercantile.
Humanitarian versions
They sounded from a variety of people, on the one hand, who were not inclined to trust the sudden good impulses of the mighty of this world, on the other hand, who did not possess any other factual material, who were inclined to correlate the event that had taken place solely with the personal beginning of Mr. Putin.
The authors of the humanitarian direction suggest that the world community and Mr. Khodorkovsky himself owe the mysterious release five months before the end of the second term of imprisonment to the beautiful gesture of the President of Russia, who decided: a) to pardon the prisoner in connection with the serious illness of his mother; b) to prevent prisoner number one from triumphantly released and earn PR dividends on this, but, on the contrary, by personally giving the order to release, the president improved his own far from cloudless image on the eve of the Sochi Olympics; c) German diplomats carried out a brilliant special operation to free the most famous prisoner of conscience; d) the version voiced by the ex-prisoner himself: he was released as a warning to presumptuous representatives of power structures.
Khodorkovsky: “… first of all he wanted to send a signal to his entourage - stop fucking. Apparently, in any other way, except for such a strong enough, he already cannot put things in order there, without resorting to landings,”.
Mercantile versions
These versions were expressed to a greater extent by political scientists, businessmen and opposition-minded economic analysts.
The bottom line is this: the ex-head of Yukos, one of the largest Russian oil companies, was released not for what, but because. Because he made a deal of the century with the head of Russia: he removes from Russia, which is entering an economic collapse, the threat emanating from the Hague Arbitration Court, which contains the claim of Yukos shareholders to the Russian Federation for 100 billion dollars, and in exchange for this, freedom does not come out only he himself, but also those who remained hostage to the system: former Yukos employees, one of whom, namely Alexei Pichugin, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The European Court of Human Rights recognized that Pichugin was deprived of the right to a fair trial. However, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, contrary to Russian law, refused to cancel the defective sentence.
A less beautiful, but no less mercantile version connects the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky with the real threat of freezing, both in Europe and in the United States, of personal financial assets in the first circle of the country, due to the existence of a closed list compiled under the Magnitsky Act.
PACE: The Assembly should recommend that Council of Europe member states follow, as a last resort, the example of the United States in adopting targeted sanctions against individuals (visa bans and freezing of accounts).
In any case, the secret of the conditions for the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the answers to the questions - why was Mikhail Khodorkovsky released or why he was released, and why it will be so quickly, effectively and sweepingly that it will not be revealed very soon.
With the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the countdown of the political secrets of the early twenty-first century begins.
