Vladimir Milov, former energy minister and prominent opposition figure: “Most likely, the sentence is going to be harsh, and I never had any different predictions than that. This is Vladimir Putin’s personal vendetta: he has a personal stake in this. When the Yukos case had only just begun, Putin saw it as a battle for power and Khodorkovsky as a competitor, a real political adversary. And Putin fears him: this is clear from how aggressively he talks about the process.”

Political analyst Dmitri Oreshkin: “It’s too bad for Judge Danilkin. It’s clear that both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were prepared for the fact that they would be convicted. It’s clear that we don’t have independent courts and that there are no chances in the foreseeable future of becoming a state ruled by law. But there are rules to the game, rules called “arbitrariness.” Any sentence more than 8 years would be cruel, so therefore it won’t overlap the term that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev already served. Ten, 12, or 14 years – it’s not even important. What’s important is that it’s going to be imposed not by the courts or the law, but by the government.”

Igor Yakovenko, secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists: “The commentary is just as banal and predictable as the sentence. Everyone I talked to recently nevertheless had hope that Judge Danilkin would suddenly turn out to be a human being, oriented on the law and not on his own job-related considerations; they hoped for a miracle that Medvedev would turn out to be the president and not what he actually is. But there was no miracle – the country, obviously, will keep on sinking for an unknown period of time. The 2000s will keep going, and that’s sad.”

The Telegraph gives a full account of the story:

Judge Victor Danilkin said the former chief executive of oil company Yukos and Platon Lebedev, his business partner, had been found guilty of illegally obtaining some $25 billion (£16.3 billion) in oil revenues from the now defunct company.

“The court has found that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev committed embezzlement acting in collusion with a group of people and using their professional positions,” Mr Danilkin told a courtroom full of media and defendants’ relatives.

Mr Khodorkovsky’s legal team immediately announced it would appeal. His lawyers attacked the judge for bowing to outside pressure. “We have no doubt that the court was pressured and the court did not make an independent decision,” Vadim Klyugvant, a lawyer for Mr Khodorkovsky, said.

Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev appeared unmoved by the verdict. Mr Lebedev was seen reading a book and exchanging notes with his defence team, while Mr Khodorkovsky exchanged glances with his mother.

Police arrested 30 people outside the courtroom where supporters of Mr Khodorkovsky chanted “freedom” and “down with Putin”. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister and former president, dismantled Yukos after Mr Khodorkovsky challenged powerful forces in Russia’s establishment.

The defence has maintained that the charges, which amount to stealing all the oil Yukos produced between 1998 and 2003, are absurd and politically motivated. The verdict seemed not to take account of testimony by key public figures including German Gref, the head of Russia’s biggest state owned bank, who said in court that the oil trading scheme at the heart of the case was legal. The judge, who read the verdict for eight hours before adjourning yesterday, also dismissed a green light from audits of Yukos by PricewaterhouseCoopers as based on incomplete and false information.

International reaction raised enduring concerns about Russia’s judicial system.

The [British] Foreign Office said the conviction could threaten trade relations between Britain and Russia. A Foreign Office spokesperson said the law should be applied in a “non-discriminatory and proportional way” in order to sustain an environment “in which investors can remain confident that they can do business, and that property and other rights are soundly protected”.

Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, said he was “very worried”. “The way the trial has been conducted is extremely dubious and a step backward on the road toward a modernisation of the country … It is in the interest of our Russian partners to take these concerns seriously and to stand up for the rule of law, democracy and human rights.”

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, [s]aid the verdict would have a “negative impact on Russia’s reputation” and raised “serious questions about selective prosecution – and about the rule of law being overshadowed by political considerations”.

Reading the full verdict and sentencing is expected to take several days. Most observers expect Mr Khodorkovsky to be in prison at least until 2017, although if the judge shows leniency he could be out in three years.

Mr Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is reaching the end of an eight-year sentence for tax evasion, which was widely viewed as punishment for funding opposition parties in defiance of Mr Putin.

After the first trial, Yukos was broken up and its assets snapped up at knock-down prices by state-owned oil companies.

Mr Putin has made his views of the former oligarch clear. In a television phone-in on December 16 he compared Mr Khodorkovsky with Bernard Madoff, the convicted US fraudster. Mr Putin also said that “thieves should sit behind bars”, even though the court had not delivered a verdict.

During the December 24 interview, the president made several key policy statements that contradicted Prime Minister Putin, who held his own four-hour televised question-and-answer session called “A Conversation with Vladimir Putin” a week ago.

The first controversial statement came in response to a question by NTV General Director Vladimir Kulistikov. Besides him, the general directors of Channel One and VGTRK, Konstantin Ernst and Oleg Dobrodeev, took part in the interview. “Might I ask you not about ZhKKh, but MBKh?” Kulistikov asked, using in turn the acronyms for housing and public utilities and jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. As the verdict in the second federal case against Khodorkovsky is due to be handed down on December 27, Medvedev was asked to speak on the prospects of the trial “as a lawyer and as a person.”

“As president I can say: neither the president nor any other person in state service has the right to express their position up to the moment the verdict is handed down,” Medvedev responded.

The last “other person” was Putin, who said during his own broadcast that Khodorkovsky was a robber who had been found guilty of fraud and theft by a court and “should sit in prison.” He stressed that this assessment stems from the fact that “Khodorkovsky’s crime was proven in court.” While Putin later specified that the remark was in reference to the first case and not the current one, this was only said to a small audience at the press conference after the broadcast.

Responding to the same question “as a lawyer,” Medvedev said that if anyone had evidence that the actions incriminating Khodorkovsky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev “have been committed by all businessmen,” then “bring it me – or the prosecutor general, more naturally – and we’ll work on it.”

The president declined to have his say on the Khodorkovsky case “as a person.”

Medvedev did express his opinion on a rather resonant issue that Putin had raised a week earlier. Speaking about “various prospective politicians” who, besides the prime minister and himself, he considers to be serious and well-known, Medvedev smiled and said: “I want to make an official announcement: such people exist. I say this without irony,” and here the president smiled even wider, “for example, the leaders of parliamentary factions.”

“And there’s Kasyanov, Nemtsov, Limonov, Kasparov,” Medvedev went on. “These are also public politicians. People have differing attitudes towards them, but they, too, are politicians.”

“But the main resource is a resource of talented people; that’s where our future presidents and prime ministers are,” the president summed up.

During his question and answer session, Putin spoke of the opposition with the utmost harshness. In response to one viewer’s question – “what do Nemtsov, Ryzhkov, Milov, and so on really want?” – Putin said that the opposition figures wanted “money and power.”

“In their time…in the ’90s, they, together with Berezovsky and the people in prison who we remembered today, nabbed not a few billions,” he said. “They were dragged away from the trough, they broke the bank, and now they want to come back to refill their pockets.” On December 23, the named oppositionists filed suit against Putin for defamation.

Medvedev had responded to a question about the opposition in his year-end interview in December 2009, with a less-than-complimentary view: “You know, the so-called extrasystemic opposition, it is extrasystemic because it does not see itself inside the political system,” he said at the time. “They, too, probably, reflect somebody’s preferences; it’s true that I sometimes have a hard time saying whose. But that’s already a question of inner value; I wouldn’t want to offend anybody.”

While Medvedev’s position today differs from both Putin’s and his own last year, the difference is primarily in political style, and there’s no talk of a split between the two leaders, says political analyst Dmitri Oreshkin.

In his own interview, Medvedev spoke “correctly” with the heads of the television channels, while Putin spoke to the people as a populist, Oreshkin explains. “Medvedev, in principal, has a different style; he is a different type of person; indeed, there were no salty questions, no catchphrases or cheap populism. That’s how it it’s been with them from the very beginning. Putin said that state corporations should be managed by civil servants, and Medvedev proposed employing independent managers. As a result, there are both.”

Meanwhile, the oppositionists themselves do not believe that the president’s new position will protect them from persecution. “If he had told the three television directors that the so-called ‘blacklists’ need to be liquidated and that these, as they called us, ‘public politicians’ need to be shown – then it would have been a positive signal,” said former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

“Maybe he mixed something up or someone gave him the wrong list,” responded Eduard Limonov, leader of the National Bolshevik and Other Russia parties and a leader of the opposition’s primary protest campaign, Strategy 31. “I don’t see him as a prospective politician, he’s got no talent.”

United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov argues that the president’s opposing view from Vladimir Putin on oppositionists indicates obvious disputes within the president and prime minister’s so-called tandem.

“The question of whether they [the disputes] are tactical or strategic remains open for now, because, regardless of all the significance of Medvedev’s statement, he still isn’t prepared to break away from Putin and ‘putinism,'” Kasparov asserted.

“If we recall Chubais’ recent statement that Medvedev will become president in 2012,” Kasparov continued, “one can presume that this part of the Russian elite would like to save something like ‘putinism’ with a human face; that is to say, return to 2002, when all non-democratic excesses and the corruption of Russian bureaucracy were not thrown in your face so obviously.”

Kasparov warns that only time will tell the true value of the president’s words. “For now, such statements by Medvedev have not turned into real actions, so we’ll wait for 2011,” he concluded.

Medvedev’s interview also touched on issues that he had brought up on his presidential blog on the eve of his yearly parliamentary address – the development of democracy, political parties, and stagnation. “Nobody cancels rallies and pickets,” he said in reference to efforts by police to break up a violent rally outside the Kremlin earlier this month. “But you need to obtain permission.”

The president linked political development to the responsibilities political parties should be taking – including United Russia, the party lead by Vladimir Putin that has a virtual political monopoly over the country. “United Russia should not just sit on the throne,” said Medvedev. “It should exude intelligence and strength. And corrupt [party members] should be pushed back and punished. Do not revel in your accomplishments. You cannot develop through stability alone; there needs to be drive, the intention to overcome yourself. Whoever thinks that everything with us is fine should stay behind in Courchevel.”

Responding to a question of whether it was difficult to find candidates for governor – a post directly appointed by the president in Russia since 2005 – Medvedev asked regional leaders not to linger in their posts for more than three terms. “Any governor must understand that they have two, at most three terms in order to change the lives of the people in their region,” he said. “You need to give way to the young and think more about what people think about you. If a governor has a so-called anti-rating, then he shouldn’t be reappointed.”

The interviewers were silent. “And there’s a pause,” joked the president. “Oh no,” the directors said, and relaxed, changing the questioning to Medvedev’s recent visit to the disputed Kuril Islands. “They’re tense,” the president joked, referring to the Japanese.

Then Medvedev himself decided to ask a question. “I’ll take this opportunity,” he said, and remarked that Russian television has been repeatedly criticized for “filtering information and not telling the truth.”

“While we have wonderful television, our news ticker is wretched,” Medvedev chided the directors.

Kulistikov was the first to respond. “I have always been free while working for the mass media,” he assured the president. Medvedev stared back with a look of disbelief. “There are editorial politics, and they can be discussed, but it is not a question of freedom,” Kulistikov added. According to Ernst, freedom on television is limited by the subjectivity of the people who make it. “But I understand the nature of the claim,” he stipulated.

“The level of freedom always corresponds to the times,” Dobrodeev said for his part. “Right now it is one of the highest levels of freedom in the entire history of television.”

This reasoning did not entirely satisfy the president. “In my view, you’re all right, and that’s your authorial position,” Medvedev said with a smile. “What shouldn’t exist, in my view, is the gap between the lists of important events that happen in life and the lists of events shown in the news. There may be varying assessments here.”

“The channels themselves should assign priorities – what’s more important, what’s less important. But the daily agenda, the list of news events should not have a dramatic break from the internet and other mass media. And in my view, that’s how it looks today,” Medvedev reprimanded the broadcasters. They frowned.

Medvedev did not mention Putin at any point during the broadcast. The president, who Russian citizens have overwhelmingly seen as a conduit for Putin’s policies since the very beginning of his time in office, is trending towards independence. However, this doesn’t indicate that everything has changed in a fundamental way, says Deputy Director Aleksei Grazhdankin of the Levada Analytical Center. When asked in November whether or not Medvedev promotes policies that are actually his own, Russian citizens responded in the following manner: 18% feel he follows Putin’s policies exactly, 53% say he is basically continuing Putin’s policies, 18% say he is gradually changing course, and 4% feel that the president is forwarding an entirely different set of policies. Figures from the same survey taken a year earlier show that opinions have changed slightly, if at all: the distribution of responses fell at 21%, 55%, 14%, and 3% respectively.

Adapted from an article by Gazeta.ru. Translation by theotherrussia.org.

In response to a question concerning disputed regional elections that took place throughout Russia in October, the president stated that the elections were indeed “not sterile.” Medvedev had previously admitted that the elections were flawed, with numerous cases of blatant fraud having been documented after Putin’s leading United Russia party was given overwhelming wins.

At the same time, Medvedev said that he was hindered from admitting that the problems were of any real seriousness by the low number of court complaints contesting the results. “Altogether throughout Russia on the whole there are 450 to 460. In Moscow, where there were also many claims, there are altogether a few more than twenty demands in the courts,” he said.

Communist Party (KPRF) deputy Vadim Solovyov refuted Medvedev’s information. “I don’t know where the president got these figures. I believe he has been misinformed. The KPRF itself filed 47 suits in the courts, and that’s only the beginning,” he told Gazeta.ru. Those who wish to contest the elections have a year to file suit.

Konstantin Ernst, manager of Russia’s Channel One, asked the president if he was acquainted with the phrase “basmanny justice,” a term used mostly by the political opposition to describe a corrupt judicial system. “Yes, I’ve heard this term,” said the president. “I’m not sure that it’s exact and correct.”

He added, however, that if a judicial system exists in Russia that allows “unjust decisions,” then “it is evil, and we must fight it.”

“Such decisions or sentences should be annulled, and if they are taken under the influence of this or that circumstance – whether it’s money, political pressure, or other factures – those who make such sentences and decisions should be subjected to responsibility,” Medvedev asserted.

Ernst later posed a question about political opposition groups that have repeatedly tried and failed to gain official recognition by the Kremlin, referred to here as the “extrasystemic” opposition. “What place in the political life of Russia do you see for representatives of the extrasystemic opposition, for such people as [former Prime Minister Mikhail] Kasyanov and [oppositionist leader Garry] Kasparov?” Ernst asked.

“You know, the so-called extrasystemic opposition, it is extrasystemic because it does not see itself inside the political system. They chose such a place for themselves. It’s their right,” the president responded. “I treat them with respect, if by doing so our legislature is not violated – electoral [legislation], legislation about social unions, about rallies and so on.”

“They too, probably, reflect somebody’s preferences; it’s true that I sometimes have a hard time saying whose. But that’s already a question of inner value; I wouldn’t want to offend anybody,” Medvedev added.

Kasyanov was scathing in his response. Speaking to Gazeta.ru, he asserted that “Medvedev and Putin are to blame for the fact that today in Russia no electoral institution exists from which they and all the rest of the citizens could learn what number of people share the value of a democratic state and wish to live in a free, civilized country.”

Concerning Medvedev’s thesis that he and Kasparov “chose themselves” to exist outside of the political system, Kasyanov stressed that “there is no place for free people in the political system intentionally created by Putin and Medvedev.” Likewise, Solovyov added that the radicalization of the opposition in Russia is a consequence of the actions of authorities.

The concluding questions addressed various aspects of Medvedev’s personal life, including his late bedtime (2:00 am) and his son’s taste in music.

“You know, like many young people – he is now 14 – he’s a fan of so-called alternative rock,” Medvedev said. “I know little about it, but I know some of the groups and even sometimes listen to them, including this group Linkin Park.”

A source in the Kremlin told Gazeta.ru that while the interviewers had previously discussed with the president what topics would come up during the program, the exact questions had not been specified.

However, political analyst Dmitri Oreshkin asserted that “nothing is accidental in these things.” In his opinion, Medvedev’s responses indicated that he was preparing to run for a second term as president – a competition that Prime Minister Putin has publicly stated that he is considering entering as well. If a direct competition between the acting president and current prime minister comes to be, Oreshkin said, then Medvedev needs to be able to have confidence in the integrity of the electoral, judicial, and law enforcement systems – which is why, said Oreshkin, all of those topics were raised during the interview.

Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky said that overall, the program is a sign of the Kremlin’s continued policy of spreading bogus signals to the public. By speaking in the spirit of a “conservative modernizer,” Belkovsky said, Medvedev is allowed “to talk plenty, but not do anything.”