Kremlin Takes its Revenge on the Oligarchs
In a comment for The Independent, Shaun Walker writes that Mikhail Khodorkovsky's second criminal trial has already lasted nearly a year. But his real "crime" is to have crossed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Already sentenced to eight years in prison, Khodorkovsky is now undergoing a second trial, widely dismissed as even more of a farce than the first that could see him put behind bars for a further two decades. Walker notes that the courtroom is an "exercise in the absurd that could come straight from the pages of Gogol or Kafka".
They have been through all this before. Khodorkovsky's conviction was widely seen as a message from Putin, then Russia's President. Khodorkovsky became the poster boy for what happens if you break the unspoken agreement with the Kremlin.
Various reasons have been found to ensure that Khodorkovsky was continuously denied early release. While Russia's authorities insist that both trials were instigated by purely legal concerns, supporters of Khodorkovsky have said that the second trial was initiated "due to a fear of what would happen if he were released".
President Dmitry Medvedev has promised to reform the country's notoriously weak court system. But most observers in Moscow say he would be powerless to go against Putin and the system and have Khodorkovsky released, even if he wanted to. However, even some normally loyal figures have suggested that trying Khodorkovsky a second time on similar charges is ill-advised.