It's not a "spin", that's exactly what happened. The Hague has no bearing on these facts whatsoever. Khodorkovsky at the time owned half the Duma (Russia's Cong

It's not a "spin", that's exactly what happened. The Hague has no bearing on these facts whatsoever. Khodorkovsky at the time owned half the Duma (Russia's Congress) and was basically writing his own laws. Imagine, if you will, Charles Koch or Jeff Bezos deciding unilaterally how to spend the US tax revenues, and what regulations to have. That's what Knodorkovsky was. Ask a Russian who was there at the time about this, they'll confirm. "Regular folks" outside liberal intelligentsia wondered the same thing as Bershidsky - why the fuck aren't more of them in jail. I was wondering the same thing, even though the obvious political motivations and the sheer speed and mercilessness with which this was carried out irked me a bit. Yet the fact remains - the dude deserved every bit of what he got just on the stated charges alone. Every single Russian oligarch evaded a shit ton of taxes illegally - it was not possible for businesses to operate without that back then. The reasons became clear later on - the government understood that oligarchs can serve a useful function in the power hierarchy and so it wasn't interested in eradicating them as a class, which they could do, by the way, with very broad popular support (at least 90%). They have extensive kompromat on every single one of them, without any exceptions. Putin, at the time, wasn't entirely in charge either in spite of nominally being the president - the national security apparatus has just installed him, so I doubt the decision to make an example of Khodorkovsky in particular was entirely his own. But this was a success in the end, and now the oligarchs know their place and do not try to undermine the state like they used to in the 90s. Boris Berezovsky (another odious oligarch who could, in the 90s, do whatever he wanted in the Kremlin) "hanging himself" in London in 2013 might have done something as well to reinforce their non-interference.