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Mikhail Khodorkovsky

@khodorkovsky_en

Mar 13

The West spent four years building an energy strategy to make Putin irrelevant.

A war in Iran could collapse it in months — not by restoring Russian supply, but by proving the alternative is just as fragile. (🧵Read on — 1/13)

When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he committed a strategic error that had nothing to do with the battlefield. He demonstrated to every European buyer that Russia was an unreliable energy supplier.

[2/13] eia.gov/todayinenergy/…

Europe responded by cutting dependence on Russian oil and gas. New LNG routes, Gulf suppliers, diversified pipelines — four years of infrastructure built to ensure the continent would never again be vulnerable to Putin's use of energy as a weapon.

[3/13]consilium.europa.eu/en/infographic…

Read 13 tweets

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

@khodorkovsky_en

Mar 13

Journalists have exposed Center 795 — Russia's newest assassination unit.

It was caught because one of its officers used Google Translate to talk to a hired killer, and did so under the watchful eye of the FBI. 🧵[1/12]

Center 795 was created in December 2022 after Unit 29155, the GRU squad behind the Skripal poisoning and the Montenegro coup attempt, was exposed.

Investigators identified officers by name, by photo, and even by their passports, which had been issued with consecutive numbers.

[2/12]

Moscow did not try to fix the old unit but built a new one instead. Center 795 was set up as Military Unit 75127 and placed inside Kalashnikov Concern, the arms manufacturer. Its roughly 500 officers are listed on the company payroll as regular employees.

[3/12]

Read 12 tweets

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

@khodorkovsky_en

Mar 12

iPods now cost up to $7000 in Moscow — when your music streaming dies mid-commute because there is no mobile signal, you need one.

🧵The center of the capital has had no mobile internet for an entire week. [1/9]

Mobile internet across the center of Moscow stopped working on March 6. At first, a handful of government-approved sites still loaded: public services, state railways, VKontakte. By March 12, six days into the blackout, nothing opens at all, with or without a VPN.

[2/9]

Without a mobile signal, arriving passengers at train stations have no way to compare taxi fares. Drivers outside the stations know this and charge five times the app price. A sixty-year-old woman stops strangers asking for directions because her map app shows a blank grid.

[3/9]

Read 9 tweets

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

@khodorkovsky_en

Mar 10

In this photo, a baby taken from an orphanage in occupied Kherson is being baptized into the family of a major Russian party leader. They gave her a new name and erased her birthplace.

🧵A new UN report traces the system Putin built to do this at scale

The girl's name is Margarita Prokopenko. She had a legal guardian in Ukraine, Darina Repina, who was also caring for her sister Anna.

After the occupation, the family reached Greece. Repina wants both sisters together but the Putin's regime has not returned Margarita.

[2/12]eng.obozrevatel.com/section-news/n…

This week, the UN commission of inquiry on Ukraine published its latest findings: it documents at least 1,205 children taken from five Ukrainian regions and moved to 21 regions across Russia.

The commission calls it a state-run system that doesn't qualify as humanitarian evacuation:

[3/12]ohchr.org/sites/default/…

Read 12 tweets

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

@khodorkovsky_en

Mar 3

Putin's shadow war on EU is no longer run by professionals. The Kremlin lost most of its spy networks and replaced them with desperate people willing to work for cash.

🧵One taxi driver shows what that looks like in practice

Western security officials say Aleksei Kolosovsky, a 42-year-old from Krasnodar, has become a key facilitator in the Kremlin's sabotage campaign across Europe.

He is not a trained intelligence officer. He is a former cab driver who investigators say works closely with the GRU.

[2/20]

Kolosovsky is believed to have helped co-ordinate attacks including an IKEA fire in Vilnius and arson that destroyed over 1,000 businesses in Warsaw.

He is also suspected of plotting to place incendiary devices on cargo planes bound for Britain, Germany and Poland.

[3/20]

Read 20 tweets

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

@khodorkovsky_en

Mar 2

Over 12,000 complaints about commanders killing their own soldiers, filed with Russian military prosecutors over three and a half years of war.

A team of journalists tracked the officers doing it and identified over 60 by name: [🧵1/12]

The investigation, "Обнулители" (The Nullifiers) published in Verstka (@verstka_media), by Ivan Zhadaev, Olesya Gerasimenko, Rina Richter, and Ivan Smurov documents how Russian officers execute their own troops through beatings, forced assaults, and drone strikes on the wounded:

[2/12]verstka.media/im-pohuj-kogo-…

It just won Best Investigation at the 2025 "Journalism as a Profession" awards, an annual prize for the best independent Russian-language journalism. Let me tell you about the winners across all nine categories — each of them is a small window into what Russia has become on 5th year of this war.

[3/12]

Read 12 tweets

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