LONDON A Russian military victory in Ukraine will embolden Beijing and lead to a war between the two US and the China because of Taiwanwarned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian magnate and dissident Wladimir Putinin an interview ahead of remarks he will deliver to global leaders at a major security and defense conference in Germany next weekend.
“A lost war in Ukraine is a stepping stone to a war in the AsiaPacific region,” Khodorkovsky said in an interview with the Washington Post from London, where he currently resides. “You have to understand that even if a big guy gets punched in the face, a lot of other guys will start to doubt if that guy is really that strong and they’re going to want to knock his teeth out. … If the US wants to go to war in Asia, then the right way to do that is to show weakness in Ukraine as well.”
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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 the US could avoid such a military clash with China .
Khodorkovsky will address the Munich Security Conference this weekend, where he and two other opposition figures, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Yulia Navalnaya, wife of the jailed opposition leader, will speak Alexei Navalnywere invited in place of official representatives of the Russian government.
His invitations are a clear rebuke to the Kremlin over Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is the first time members of the opposition have been invited instead of Russian officials to the security conference, a highprofile event where Putin delivered a historic speech rejecting the West in 2007 and where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is usually a confidant Face.
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, chairman of the security conference, said officials from Russia would not be invited as long as Putin “denied Ukraine’s right to exist”.
three ways
In the interview, Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia and the majority owner of oil company Yukos, said the West now has three paths to choose from in its strategy to support Ukraine.
The current course, despite recent agreements to supply advanced main battle tanks, represents only incremental military support and paves the way for a protracted war fraught with risks, Khodorkovsky said. In this situation, there are no guarantees that Ukraine can maintain its current casualty count, while political infighting in the United States ahead of the 2024 presidential election could prompt lawmakers to cut arms shipments and economic aid.
“If the West thinks that Ukraine has enough strength to continue losing 350 to 500 people a day in deaths and injuries, and if they can guarantee a guaranteed and constant supply of arms and ammunition, then that’s fine.” , he said. “But that’s too big a risk.” In the meantime, he said, Putin may seek an “asymmetrical” response 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 longrange missiles and warplanes that would allow Ukraine to destroy Russian supply lines.
“The only thing that can affect the situation on the battlefield is aviation,” Khodorkovsky said. “Everything else is secondary.”
While Western support for Ukraine has been far greater than many expected, “this does not take away from the fact that the West needs to do much more,” he said. Aid often accompanies events on the battlefield, and “when you start delivering those missiles and tanks, it will be too late. … When the front moves towards Kiev in three months, they will give planes, but it will be too late because there will be no more airfields, ”he said.
A third route would eventually see Washington and its allies “turning back and going like they did in Afghanistan and like they did in Syria and elsewhere,” he said.
“Putin is a person who thinks backwards and considers that if something has happened before, it will often happen the same way in the future,” Khodorkovsky said. “And he doesn’t usually do anything wrong. Looking back, he sees that every time he starts a small, new war, he’s able to consolidate the society around him and see Americans leave again and again. … But if he successfully ends the operation in Ukraine 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 continues beyond Ukraine, Khodorkovsky said any apparent victory for Putin in Ukraine would also encourage China to push into Taiwan, he said. “When I hear Americans say that we have to choose between helping Ukraine and Taiwan because we can’t extend to both, it sounds so primitive that I feel like it has to be a gimmick,” he said .
Any negotiated deal that would require Ukraine to agree to a cession of areas like the Donetsk and Luhansk regions would harden the position of the hawks, which the Russian president must rely on to mobilize public support for the war. Khodorkovsky said that Putin would then be “put under pressure” to launch new attacks on Ukraine.
Khodorkovsky has long used his Open Russia Foundation to fight the Putin 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 postPutin, postwar regime in which Russia’s presidential system must be dismantled and replaced with a parliamentary republic.
A quick escalation of Western support for Ukraine to quickly end the war by defeating Russian troops would be “better for Russia,” Khodorkovsky said. “Fewer people will die and the power accumulation of terrible national patriots will be less,” he said.
Otherwise, the country faces a much 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, prolonged conflict is also risky for Putin, who is met with resentment from both sides of a deeply divided elite: the patrioticnationalist camp that believes Putin should act more decisively and radically to conquer Ukraine, and more liberal policies . mental field that thinks war is a terrible mistake.
So far there is no sign that anyone will take action against the authoritarian president. But if Putin turns out to lose 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 the weakened president Boris Yeltsin resign.
Putin has stood firm so far. “Propaganda is still able to convince people that they are winning at the front,” Khodorkovsky said, adding that even a failed recruitment attempt did not harm Putin. “Mobilization was easier for him than many expected,” he said, adding, “Now it depends on what’s happening on the battlefield. Everything else is of absolutely secondary importance.”