World
An oligarch’s last stand
The case against Khodorkovsky is now widely seen as a response to his financial support of political parties that oppose the Kremlin

The case against Khodorkovsky is now widely seen as a response to his financial support of political parties that oppose the Kremlin. This current trial, analysts believe, is a ploy to keep him in jail until after the 2012 elections, when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is expected to take another run at the presidency. Until then, from behind a glass cage in a packed Moscow courtroom, he’s made no secret of his views on Russian justice. His arrest, he noted, was a display of the Kremlin’s power above the law. But, “so far, they have achieved the opposite: they turned us, ordinary people, into symbols of a struggle against lawlessness.”