# Mikhail Khodorkovsky Once Russia's richest man, owner of the oil company Yukos, jailed for ten years after he challenged Putin, and now an exile in London who leads anti-war opposition work. He is the founding example of the bargain Putin imposed on the oligarchs in 2003: **stay out of politics or lose everything**. Every other oligarch in the vault — [[Oleg Deripaska]], [[Mikhail Fridman]], [[Roman Abramovich]] — operated inside the terms his case set. See [[Russian Oligarchy]] and [[Mafia State]]. ## Rise He co-founded the Menatep bank in the late 1980s (sources give 1987 or 1989) and acquired Yukos in the mid-1990s loans-for-shares auctions for a few hundred million dollars (reported as about $309–350 million) — the process the vault covers in [[Russian Deprivatization]]. ## Fall | Date | Event | |---|---| | Feb 2003 | Confronts Putin about corruption at a televised Kremlin meeting | | July 2, 2003 | Business partner Platon Lebedev arrested | | Oct 25, 2003 | Khodorkovsky arrested at gunpoint on his plane at Novosibirsk airport | | May 2005 | Convicted of fraud and tax evasion; sentence later reduced on appeal | | 2006 | Yukos bankrupted, its assets auctioned — mostly to state oil company Rosneft | | Dec 2010 | Second conviction (embezzlement and money laundering), extending his term | | Dec 20, 2013 | Pardoned by Putin; flies to Berlin | ## Exile He relaunched the Open Russia movement from London in 2014 and after the 2022 invasion helped found the Anti-War Committee. Russia's response has escalated: - **May 2022:** declared a "foreign agent." - **Oct 14, 2025:** the FSB opens a terrorism and "violent seizure of power" case against Anti-War Committee members, including Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov. - **Nov 19, 2025:** added to Russia's official list of "terrorists and extremists." - **June 8, 2026:** sentenced in absentia to ten years for spreading "fakes" about the army. Separately, in October 2025 the Dutch Supreme Court rejected Russia's final appeal against the **$50 billion** arbitration award to former Yukos majority shareholders. Khodorkovsky is not a party to that award. ## Why it matters here The case is the template. In the Kremlin's system, a fortune is a license that the state can revoke — which is why wealthy Russians who deal with Western politicians are never simply businessmen. For the U.S. right, which alternately admires Putin's "strength" and denounces "globalist" oligarchs, Khodorkovsky is a figure it rarely mentions: the oligarch who crossed Putin and paid for it. ## See Also - [[Russian Oligarchy]] · [[Russian Deprivatization]] · [[Mafia State]] - [[Vladimir Putin]] · [[Alexei Navalny]] · [[Garry Kasparov]] - [[Rosneft]] · [[Igor Sechin]]