Kim Zigfield (also known as La Russophobe) has a new blog post about Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Nezavisimaya Gazeta article and the Yukos ECHR case as being two fronts of a legal battle against Putinism, published on PajamasMedia:
Make no mistake: If the ECHR determines that Russia, a signatory to its treaty, violated basic international law when it stripped Khodorkovsky and his fellow shareholders of their property rights in YUKOS, it can order that property restored. And if the Kremlin won't pay? The ECHR can order the seizure of Russian assets throughout Europe, and there are plenty of them available for seizure.
More important, though, such a ruling by the ECHR would strip away the last vestiges of legitimacy enjoyed by the Putin regime. It would make the accusations in Khodorkovsky's op-ed the law. The Putin regime has already been convicted many times of state-sponsored murder and torture in the Caucasus region by the ECHR, and it has liquidated three high-profile human rights advocates who tried to tell Russians that story (Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova, and Stanislav Markelov). An earth-shaking hundred-billion-dollar judgment would bring international attention to those rulings as well.
It's simply amazing that, even from behind bars, Khodorkovsky could so masterfully arrange these proceedings in Europe to correspond with his own trial back in Russia. There's no telling how far this man could have taken his country if he'd been given a chance to lead it.
