I was wrong about the Russian oligarchs [View all]

[iemanja]

I thought the economic sanctions might pressure the oligarchs to get rid of Putin. I didn't fully realize that they are only able to enrich themselves and keep their wealth at Putin's pleasure.

I recently watched the documentary Citizen K on Amazon Prime. It's about the oligarch Mikhail Khordorkovsky. He became extremely wealthy during the immediate post-Soviet years by seizing much of the nation's oil supply. But when he became critical of Putin, he was imprisoned. Released ten years later, he moved to London, where many such oligarchs live, or, more accurately, lived. Putin has had murdered a number of the disgraced oligarchs living in London. We know this from news accounts, but I wasn't fully aware of how important these men had been in Russia. The killings included, for example, Boris Berezovsky, who had big one of the big seven oligarchs of the post-Soviet, early Putin years. Khordorkovsky remains alive, so far.

Putin's major fear seems to be not the oligarchs turning on him but assassination by someone close to him. All the pictures we've seen of him sitting at the far end of an extremely long table in meetings is about not getting close enough to anyone to allow them to kill him. It's not about COVID because when he recently met with a group of flight attendants, he sat near them, as this picture shows.



It's going to be very difficult to get rid of Putin. He's a mean sod who knows how to protect himself, whether through imprisoning critics, murdering them, or keeping himself safe from assassination. He must go down, but how?