Mikhail Khodorkovsky told the foreign affairs committee that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman who finally admitted in September 2022 that he had founded the group, had as much access to Putin as official government officials. He said Prigozhin was behind the recent appointment of General Sergey Surovikin as head of the military operation in Ukraine and was working closely with him in Ukraine. The Wagner Group’s popularity in Russia had grown in recent months since it was able to argue that its existence served as an alternative to the broader mobilization, Khodorkovsky said. But he added that the Wagner group, with only about 7,000 forces, would not take responsibility if military operations failed in Ukraine, as Russian forces number 150,000 to 200,000. The two who will claim responsibility will be Yuri Kovalchuk, Putin’s financier, and Shoigu, the men believed to have most of the time pushed Putin to launch the invasion and predicted that Kyiv would be taken in three days. Khodorkovsky accused Putin of using mercenary forces like the Wagner Group, which often recruits people from prisons, because it allowed him to lie, deny responsibility and implement an illegal foreign policy. “They are involved in terrorism and murder,” he said, adding that the UK and other countries have been slow to ban the group as such despite its clear “terrorist” activity in Africa. Resuming the troop mobilization would be a very risky political decision for Putin, Khodorkovsky said, adding that resistance to the mobilization forced him to bring the process to an early end. He claimed that 700,000 people had left Russia after the mobilization and said it represented “a serious blow to Putin’s defense industry and to Russia’s economy”, potentially a more significant blow to the Russian economy than any conventional sanctions imposed by the west. Khodorkovsky urged the UK to take in many of these Russian exiles saying: “These people are the most active and educated people with some financial means, including 30,000 Russian developers who are mainly based in Cyprus. It has significantly damaged Russia’s ability to continue cyber warfare.” Similarly, he said many Russian engineers needed to reproduce high-precision weapons had left the country.
