Putin likely to stage another Salisbury-style attack, exiled oil tycoon says

Mikhail Khodorkovsky says Russian security services may seek to create a ‘sense of vulnerability’ in Britain Vladimir Putin is likely to stage another Salisbury-style attack on UK soil unless the government adopts more aggressive tactics against the Kremlin, the exiled Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has said.

The former oil tycoon has emerged as a leading figure in Russian diaspora opposition circles and claims to be well-informed about current thinking and developments among Moscow’s elite.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, Khodorkovsky – who still fears for his life after spending 10 years in a Siberian prison after clashes with Putin – said the Trump presidency had provided the Russian leader with a “window of opportunity” to threaten Europe.

Khodorkovsky predicted that Putin was likely to mass troops on the border of a Nato country such as Estonia, to “flex his muscles” and said he believed that Russian security services were planning an attack similar to the 2018 Salisbury Novichok poisonings to destabilise the UK.

“The goal […] would not just be to get rid of certain people but to create a sense of vulnerability in the west. Like it was in Salisbury,” Khodorkovsky said. “It’s not important whether the victim dies or not, what’s important is that the sense of vulnerability has been created.

“People in the Kremlin aren’t stupid, they’re quite creative. They’ll be thinking of new ways of doing something. What is clear is that there is going to be some kind of pressure and it will take a similar form [to Salisbury].” Putin had “chosen as his main enemy the UK”, Khodorkovsky added.

The UK government’s best strategy to prevent any further incidents similar to Salisbury may be to go on the offensive against the Russian security services, he said. “If you cast your mind back to the 1950s and 60s when there was also quite a wave of this sort of brutal interactions, it sort of dissipated quite quickly, which was done by just giving the mirror response,” Khodorkovsky said, speaking through an interpreter.

“People who work for the intelligence services are just like you and I, they don’t want to die. They started fleeing, leaving the intelligence services. This is when it was probably decided that they should discount using the worst, the most brutal methods.

I’m not sure whether British society today is ready for this kind of counter-answer, counterstrike.” Khodorkovsky, 62, was Russia’s richest man, with a reported fortune of $15bn (£11bn) built up either side of the fall of the Soviet Union, including via his Siberian oil business, Yukos.

He was arrested in 2003 after challenging Putin by advocating for democratic reforms. He was charged with fraud and jailed for 10 years, a sentence widely considered to be politically motivated. Shares in Yukos were seized by the Russian government and carved up.

After spending a decade in prison, during which he was slashed in the face by another inmate with a makeshift knife, Khodorkovsky went into exile in the UK. Speaking at his London offices, he said it was too late for the west to avoid a new cold war with Russia but that governments’ priority should be to avoid escalation into a “hot war”, despite his expectation that Putin would attempt to provoke Britain’s Nato allies.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future we’ll see some troops amassed on the border with [Nato member] Estonia, for example,” Khodorkovsky said. “I do not believe that Putin in fact is ready to embark on another military conflict.

But it will have an impact.” “He thinks that his window of opportunity is [Donald] Trump in power,” Khodorkovsky said, adding that this window could shut if the Republicans performed poorly in November’s US midterm elections and Trump in effect became a lame duck president.

Putin’s position had not been significantly weakened by the imposition of sanctions against oligarchs or specific products or sectors, Khodorkovsky said. Politicians wanted to “impress their…