Khodorkovsky Plans to Return to Russia 'if Regime Falls Apart'

Former head of the now defunct Yukos energy company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who left Russia after being pardoned in 2013, announced plans to return to the country should President Vladimir Putin face a "crisis of loyalty," in an interview published Friday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Arrested in Russia on October 25, 2003, Khodorkovsky spent 10 years in a prison for fraud and tax evasion before being pardoned. Following his release he left the country.

In December 2015, a Russian court charged Khodorkovsky, who was then in London, in absentia for organizing the 1998 murder of Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of the western Siberian town of Nefteyugansk. In 2007, former Yukos security head Alexei Pichugin was convicted of planning the mayor's killing.

In February, Russia sent a request to the global police service, Interpol, asking for Khodorkovsky to be placed on the international wanted list.

"I plan to return to the country; I will come back as soon as the regime begins to fall apart… The model that he [President Putin] is constructing now is not able to live long — in 10 years, he will have a crisis of loyalty, when he is over 70 years old and his bureaucrats will be only 40 years old," Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast.

According to Khodorkovsky, he is doing his best to make the change in leadership as smooth as possible for Russian society to avoid the chaos experienced following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s.

"And now I am doing a lot, everything I can, to arrange it so that when this regime begins to fall, the collapse happens in a different way, so the damaging mistakes made in the early ‘90s are not repeated," Khodorkovsky noted.

The former businessman has previously stated that he will be ready to return to Russia on the condition that he is given guarantees that he will be allowed to leave as he chooses.