MOSCOW - Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky will be pardoned, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Thursday in a surprise decision that will let his top foe and Russia’s formerly richest man out of prison after more than a decade.
The move, along with an amnesty for the two jailed members of a punk band and the 30-member crew of a Greenpeace protest ship, appears designed to assuage international criticism of Russia’s human rights record ahead of February’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, Putin’s pet project.
Putin waited until just after his tightly choreographed annual news conference to make the announcement, dropping the biggest news of the day after journalists had already peppered him with questions in a four-hour marathon.
Putin said Khodorkovsky, who was set to be released next August, had submitted an appeal for pardon, something he had refused to do before.
“He has spent more than 10 years behind bars. It’s a tough punishment,” Putin said. “He’s citing humanitarian aspects - his mother is ill. A decree to pardon him will be signed shortly.”
The head of the Kremlin’s United Russia faction said he expects Khodorkovsky to celebrate the New Year at home with his family.
Khodorkovsky’s son, Pavel, tweeted: “Very happy news. Waiting to speak with my father to learn more.”
Putin’s announcement “came as a big surprise for me, totally out of the blue,” Khodorkovsky’s mother, Maria, told RT television.
His father, Boris, said in remarks posted on the Slon. ru online newspaper that the move was clearly linked to the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
“We are old people, and we are waiting, hoping to live to the moment when we can embrace him,” he said.
In October 2003, masked commandos stormed into Khodorkovsky’s jet on the tarmac of a Siberian airport and arrested him at gunpoint. He was found guilty of tax evasion in 2005 and convicted of embezzlement in a second case in 2010.
Critics have dismissed the charges against Khodorkovsky as a Kremlin vendetta for challenging Putin’s power. During Putin’s first term as president, the tycoon angered the Kremlinby funding opposition parties and also was believed to harbor personal political ambitions.
His actions defied an unwritten pact between Putin and a narrow circle of billionaire tycoons, dubbed “oligarchs,” under which the government refrained from reviewing privatization deals that made them enormously rich in the years after the Soviet collapse on condition that they didn’t meddle in politics.
Putin, however, didn’t say a word about the fate of Khodorkovsky’s business partner, Platon Lebedev, who was convicted and sentenced in the same trials. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he hadn’t asked for a pardon.
During the news conference, Putin was asked about whether Khodorkovsky could face yet another criminal case that would keep him longer behind bars. He gave a vague answer, saying he doesn’t see grounds for that but prosecutors must investigate alleged offenses.
At the time of his arrest, Khodorkovsky was estimated to have a fortune of around $15 billion but it’s not clear what is left of it. Khodorkovsky’s oil company, Yukos, was once Russia’s largest but it was dismantled after his arrest, its most lucrative assets ending up in the hands of the state-owned company Rosneft.
At his news conference, Putin also confirmed that an amnesty approved Wednesday by the Kremlin-controlled parliament will apply to the two members of the punk band still in jail and to the Greenpeace crew facing hooliganism charges for their protest at a Russian oil rig in the Arctic.
Putin still stood by his strong criticism of the punk band’s irreverent 2010 protest at Moscow’s main cathedral, describing it as a publicity stunt that “crossed all barriers.”
He also alleged that the Greenpeace activists, who spent two months in jail after their Arctic protest before being granted bail, were trying to hurt Russia’s economic interests.
Putin weathered months of protests against his rule in 2011-2012, when more than 100,000 gathered to oppose his return to the Russian presidency. A demonstration in May 2012 a day before his inauguration for a third term ended in scuffles with police. The amnesty bill included only 8 out of the 26 people tried or awaiting trial in connection with that anti-government protest.
Despite strains in Russia-U.S. ties, the Russian president offered support to President Barack Obama, saying that surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency is necessary to fight terrorism. The U.S. government should “limit the appetite” of the agency, however, with a clear set of ground rules, he said.
Putin, a 16-year KGB veteran and the former chief of Russia’s main espionage agency, said while the NSA program “isn’t a cause for joy, it’s not a cause for sorrow either” because it’s necessary to monitor large numbers of people to expose terrorist contacts.
Asked about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, whom Russia has granted asylum, Putin insisted that Moscow isn’t controlling him and hasn’t tried to learn his secrets.
He argued that any revelations published by Snowden must have come from materials he provided to journalists before landing in Russia. He reaffirmed that Moscow made providing refuge to Snowden conditional on halting what Putin called his anti-American activities.
Putin said he hasn’t met with Snowden. He insisted that Russian security agencies haven’t worked with him and have not asked him any questions related to NSA activities against Russia.
Information for this article was contributed by Laura Mills and Frank Jordans of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 12/20/2013