Incarcerated oligarch's mixed view of Russia's future

Now facing new fraud charges related to Yukos, a former oil magnate is still holding out hope for his country, writes Neil Buckleyin Chita, Siberia

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oligarch, yesterday voiced his doubts that Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's likely next president, would be able to undo the damage to the rule of law inflicted during the Putin era.

In his first face-to-face interview since his arrest in 2003 on fraud charges, Russia's one-time richest man spoke about his incarceration, his concerns for his own future and his long-term optimism for Russia.

Speaking in a courtroom in Chita, a Siberian city 6,500km (4,040 miles) east of Moscow where he is now being held, Mr Khodorkovsky stood inside the metal cage in which Russian defendants are kept in court.

Leaning against the bars, he looked gaunt and drawn on the ninth day of a hunger strike in support of an imprisoned manager of Yukos, the oil company he created.

He answered questions during a 40-minute break in a hearing related to new fraud charges that have been brought against him.

Asked if he thought Mr Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's chosen successor as Russian president, could deliver the rule of law, the 44-year-old former oligarch said: "It will be so difficult for him, I can't even imagine . . .

"Tradition, and the state of people's minds, and the lack of forces able to any movement towards the rule of law, everything's against him.

"So . . . may God grant him the strength to do it. All we can do is hope."

Mr Khodorkovsky said that Russia's biggest problem was the lack of the rule of law, which he said was worse than in China.

"Laws can be better and they can be worse. But people must abide by laws, and not use them for their own ends."

The businessman was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced in June 2005 to eight years on fraud and tax evasion charges.

His energy company, Yukos, which he built into Russia's biggest after acquiring it in a controversial privatisation in 1995, was sold piecemeal to pay off punitive $28 billion (€19 billion) back tax charges.

Yukos's assets were, for the most part, gobbled up by Rosneft, the state-owned oil company.

He served the first part of his sentence in a prison colony in Krasnokamensk, a bleak uranium-mining town near the Chinese border.

There the man once worth $13 billion spent his days sewing shirts and gloves.

He was moved to the regional capital last year after new charges were brought against him - of embezzling more than $30 billion of Yukos's oil sales.

Mr Khodorkovsky now spends each day wading through documents for the new trial. If convicted, he faces up to 22 years in jail. He is contemptuous of the various legal assaults on Yukos.

"The accusations are not connected with a real crime, but with a desire - the desire to take away people's conscience, the desire to convince a witness to give evidence.

"It's all about their various, conflicting desires."

The Kremlin insists all charges brought against the former businessman are legally justified and that Mr Khodorkovsky is not a political prisoner but a convicted criminal.

But his supporters in Russia and the West see Mr Khodorkovsky as the victim of a politically motivated response to his political activities.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he planned to continue his hunger strike until his demands were met for Vasily Aleksanyan, a seriously ill former Yukos vice-president on trial on separate embezzlement charges, to be moved from his Moscow prison to a civilian hospital.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he now accepted calmly the dismemberment of Yukos.

"I used up all my nerves in 2004, when a company that was working well was seized and handed over to Rosneft," he said. "Rosneft today is basically Yukos with a bit added on."

The former tycoon declined to comment on the conditions in which he was being held, calling them "standard" for Russia.

Mr Khodorkovsky has been held in isolation since declaring his hunger strike.

He said he did not share the concerns of some civil society and opposition leaders that democratic freedoms would continue to be eroded in Russia: "People can leave freely, the internet works."

It was just "not possible" that Russia could return to the darkest days of its Soviet past, he said.