Mikhail Khodorkovsky is sounding the alarm. The end of the war in Ukraine, whenever it comes, won’t mean the end of Vladimir Putin, he says – nor the Russian threat to the West. Moscow, he says, has never been very good at demobilising restless, traumatised soldiers. ‘There is a 600,000-strong group that took part in the fighting. The question for Putin is: ‘What to do with this group?’.

Khodorkovsky fears that he knows the answer. ‘These tensions will naturally arise after two or three years,’ he says. ‘And then Putin’s way of thinking kicks into gear. And Putin’s mentality? He has already relieved such points of tension four times [during his rule] by starting a war. This is his modus operandi. Not because there are no other options, but because for him this is a habitual model of behaviour.’

Putin’s is a cult of personality, Khodorkovsky explains, not ideology

Khodorkovsky, formerly an oligarch and the wealthiest man in Russia, now an opposition activist and ex-political prisoner living in exile in London, is far from the only person concerned that Europe is unprepared to deal with the ongoing threat Russia will pose over the coming years.

At the Nato summit in the Hague last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Putin could be ready to attack a member of the alliance in five years’ time. ‘We believe that, starting from 2030, Putin can have significantly greater capabilities.’ Warnings that Russia could launch an attack on a Nato country – most likely one of the Baltic states – have been gathering pace in recent months. The timelines vary, but the consensus is the same: Ukraine won’t be the last invasion Putin tries to mount.

Putin, Khodorkovsky warns, is already waging a ‘hybrid war’ against the West. In the years since the invasion of Ukraine, Europe has seen a dramatic surge in Russia-affiliated acts of sabotage: exploding DHL packages, arson attacks........

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