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LONDON — A Russian military victory in Ukraine will embolden Beijing and lead to a US-China war over Taiwan, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian magnate and vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, warned in an interview before comments which he will deliver to world leaders at a major security and defense conference in Germany this weekend.
“A lost war in Ukraine is a stepping stone to a war in the Asia-Pacific region,” Khodorkovsky told The Washington Post in London, where he now lives. “You have to understand that when even a big guy gets punched in the face, a bunch of other guys start to doubt if that guy is really that strong and they’re going to want to take his teeth. … If the US wants to go to war in Asia, then the best way is to show weakness in Ukraine as well.”
Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison in Russia before being pardoned by Putin in 2013, said increasing Western military aid to Ukraine and ensuring its victory is the only way for the United States to concede such a military conflict with China avoid.
Khodorkovsky is scheduled to speak at the Munich Security Conference this weekend, where he and two other opposition figures, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Yulia Navalnaya, wife of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, have been invited in place of official representatives from the Russian government.
Your invitations are a clear rebuke from the Kremlin for Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is the first time members of the opposition will be invited instead of Russian officials to the security conference, a high-profile event where Putin delivered a landmark speech against the West in 2007 and where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is usually a familiar face.
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Russia declined to attend last year’s conference, held just before its invasion began, saying the event will “morph into a transatlantic forum” and “lose its inclusivity and objectivity.”
Christoph Heusgen, the chairman of the security conference, said official Russian representatives would not be invited as long as Putin “negated Ukraine’s right to exist”.
In the interview, Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia’s richest man as the majority owner of oil company Yukos, said the West now has three paths to choose from in its strategy to support Ukraine.
President Biden announced plans to supply Ukraine with M1 Abrams tanks on Jan. 25. (Video: The Washington Post)
The current course, despite recent agreements to supply advanced main battle tanks, represents only incremental military support and sets the stage for a protracted and risky war, Khodorkovsky said. In this situation, there is no guarantee Ukraine can maintain its current casualty count, while political infighting in the United States ahead of the 2024 presidential election could prompt lawmakers to halt arms shipments and economic aid.
“If the West thinks that Ukraine has enough strength to continue to lose 350-500 people dead and wounded every day, and if they can ensure a guaranteed and constant supply of arms and ammunition, then that’s fine.” , he said. “But that’s a very big risk.” In the meantime, he said, Putin may try to respond “asymmetrically” by destabilizing governments in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, and possibly the West.
A second avenue would be for the West to rapidly and significantly increase military aid to include long-range missiles and warplanes that would allow Ukraine to destroy Russian supply lines.
“The only thing that can break the situation on the battlefield is aviation,” Khodorkovsky said. “Everything else is secondary.”
Although Western support for Ukraine has been far greater than many expected, “this does not negate the fact that the West needs to do much more,” he said. Support has often had to lag behind events on the battlefield, and “by the time you start using those missiles and tanks, it will already be too late. … When the front moves towards Kiev in three months, they will give planes, but then it will be too late because there are no more airfields,” he said.
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A third route would result in Washington and its allies eventually “turning around and leaving like they did in Afghanistan and Syria and other places,” he said.
“Putin is a person who thinks backwards, and he believes that if something has happened before, it will often be repeated in the same way in the future,” Khodorkovsky said. “And he’s not often wrong about that. Looking back, he sees that every time he’s started a small, new war, he’s able to consolidate society around him, and he’s seen Americans pull away time and time again. … But if he successfully ends the Ukraine operation for himself, then the national patriots, who are now his mainstay, will not allow him to stop, and the next war will begin.”
While Russian aggression would continue beyond Ukraine, Khodorkovsky said, any perceived victory for Putin in Ukraine would also embolden China to move on Taiwan, he said. “When I hear from Americans that we have to choose between helping Ukraine and helping Taiwan because we can’t extend it to both, it seems so primitive that I feel it has to be a ruse.” , he said.
Any negotiated settlement that would force Ukraine to agree to a cession of areas like the Donetsk and Luhansk regions would harden the position of the hawks on which the Russian president must rely to mobilize public support for the war. Khodorkovsky said Putin would then be “pressured” to launch further attacks on Ukraine.
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Khodorkovsky has long used his Open Russia Foundation to fight Putin’s regime and now sponsors a number of Russian opposition political projects. His latest book, How to Slay a Dragon, urges the West to prepare for a post-Putin, post-war regime in which Russia’s presidential system should be dismantled and replaced with a parliamentary republic.
A quick escalation of Western support for Ukraine to quickly end the war and defeat Russian troops would be “for Russia’s best,” Khodorkovsky said. “Fewer people will die and the power gains of the terrible national patriots will be less,” he said.
Otherwise, the country faces an even deeper collapse. The longer the war drags on, the greater the chance the Russians will stop blaming their government for the deaths of their loved ones and instead blame Ukraine, he said.
According to Khodorkovsky, a protracted conflict is also risky for Putin, who faces resentment from both sides of a deeply divided elite: the hawkish patriotic nationalist camp, which believes Putin should act more decisively and radically to conquer Ukraine, and a more liberal camp , who thinks war is a terrible mistake.
So far there is no sign that anyone will take action against the authoritarian president. But if it becomes clear that Putin is losing the war, Khodorkovsky said, history could repeat itself with regional governors refusing to take orders from Moscow as they did in 1999, a situation that ultimately forced weakened President Boris Yeltsin to resign.
Putin is holding on so far. “The propaganda is still able to convince people that they are winning at the front,” Khodorkovsky said, adding that even a botched draft did not undermine Putin. “Mobilization went through easier for him than many expected,” he said, adding, “It’s about what’s happening on the battlefield now. Everything else is of absolutely marginal importance.”
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