Mikhail Khodorkovsky welcomes visitors at his London offices, a discreet address in a wealthy neighborhood in the British capital. At 61, the former oligarch and owner of the Yukos oil group, who became one of Putin's main Russian opponents, has been a refugee in the United Kingdom since he was pardoned by Putin at the end of 2013 after 10 years in prison. With his close-cropped gray hair, he has the same slim face as in photographs taken 20 years ago, when, brutally deposed, he faced the judges in his fraud trial, widely regarded as political.

On Tuesday, March 4, a few hours after US President Donald Trump announced the suspension of US aid to Ukraine, he spoke to Le Monde and three other European media orgnaizatinos, sharing his thoughts on the transatlantic relation crisis and the misreadings, from his point of view, of Europeans and Ukrainians on the practices of the US and Russian presidents, Trump and Putin.

Once Russia's richest man in the early 2000s and, at the time, close to the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky now believes "Europeans really haven't understood Putin and Trump," he said. "They are leaders of a special kind. Imagine if the British prime minister announced that he wanted to acquire Greenland. We'd either think he was crazy or expect him to send in the British army. It's nothing like that with Trump. What he says is just words, often subterfuge to distract people."

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