PRAGUE -- About three weeks after Ukraine's military launched a surprise incursion into Russia's western Kursk region, the operation remains "an important element of the war," said leading Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky in an interview with Current Time.
The operation on Russian territory, after years of fighting almost exclusively in Ukraine, has proven a morale boost for Ukraine and has struck a blow at Russian President Vladimir Putin's domestic support, Khodorkovsky said on the sidelines of the Globsec international security conference in Prague on September 1.
"The assistance that the [Russian] state is providing to people who have been caught up in it is clearly inadequate," Khodorkovsky said, saying most of Russian society doesn't view the incursion as a military action but rather as a sort of "natural disaster."
"Putin's 10,000 rubles [$110] is just spitting in people's faces. And that is how the public perceives it."
This reaction makes it even more politically risky than before for the Russian government to institute a new mobilization of troops for the war against Ukraine, Khodorkovsky argued.
"Deciding to turn the war into a national effort," he said, "is a decision [Putin] is afraid to make."
Putin's government has used the media to prevent the onset of "war fatigue" by convincing the broad public that "there is no war."
"As soon as he creates the feeling that there is a war, the clock will start ticking," Khodorkovsky added. "How much time is left on the clock, given that the special military operation has already been going on for a while, we just don't know."
For Ukraine, the incursion is part of Kyiv's effort to convince its Western partners there is no sense in establishing "red lines" regarding offensive operations against Russia.
"It is clear that the bureaucracies in all countries -- particularly the United States -- are very cowardly," Khodorkovsky argued. "They need to prove that red lines don't exist or at least that they are not located here. This step has made [Western] bureaucracies very angry, although they haven't shown it yet. But like it or not, they have been shown that any red lines are not where these bureaucracies imagine them to be. That makes [the incursion] very important."
Khodorkovsky, 61, was once Russia's richest man. He was arrested in 2003, ostensibly on fraud charges that supporters say were trumped up to punish him for his political activity and to facilitate the takeover of his business assets by figures close to Putin. In 2005, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. However, Putin pardoned him in December 2013 and expelled him from the country.
Since then, based in London, Khodorkovsky has funded a number of Russian opposition initiatives. In May 2022, the Russian government designated him a "foreign agent."
In April 2023, Khodorkovsky was one of a large group of prominent exiled Russian oppositionists who signed a Declaration of Russia's Democratic Forces that proclaimed the Putin government "illegitimate and criminal" and demanded that Russian troops withdraw "from all occupied territories" in Ukraine.
