On the eve of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Russia next week, jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky spoke to the Telegraph about issues he hoped would be raised – including corruption, the independence of the judicial system, and the protection of human rights.

Andrew Osborn: How would you advise David Cameron to deal with Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin during his visit? Which issues of concern do you think he should raise in particular and how?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: I have always believed that there are many areas where the UK and Russia can be partners in a way that benefits both nations. Prime Minister David Cameron and President Dmitry Medvedev are representatives of one and the same political generation, the one that came into its own after the Cold War and the era of global confrontation between the superpowers had ended. For this reason alone it is perhaps easier for them to reach agreement, having found points of contact and compromises with respect to the majority of questions during the British Premier’s upcoming visit to Moscow.

As things stand today, it seems to me that Dmitry Medvedev has a sufficiently realistic assessment of the current situation in Russia. Although in terms of economic and political reform little has changed over the 3.5 years he has been in the Kremlin, this does not mean that reform is impossible. More likely it is even inevitable – the question is only whether it will take place with Medvedev’s leadership or without it.

Given Mr Cameron’s visit is dedicated, first and foremost, to the cooperation of the UK and Russia in the field of the economy, as well as to investments, I would hope that the British Prime Minister will directly raise questions of corruption and the judicial system in the RF with President Medvedev. I presume that it will be difficult for anyone to expect British companies to do serious business in Russia whilst entrepreneurs are factually subjected to a bureaucratic racket and international investors are under the threat of a repeat of the fate of YUKOS or Hermitage Capital. I know that the UK’s new Bribery Act – for which I commend Britain and Premier Cameron personally – now makes it illegal for UK companies to engage in the system of bribes and backhanders that exists in Russia. At the same time, foreign investors in Russia cannot count on effective judicial protection of their interest as of yet. And it will be difficult for western leaders to encourage their companies to go into Russia whilst there is a risk that the investors will become victims of the current system of total corruption and judicial arbitrariness.

AO: Do you think Britain has any leverage with Russia when it comes to human rights issues? If so, what could Britain do to apply pressure to Russia to get it to change for the better?

MK: There is no question that such leverage does exist. The most influential people in Russia, those who in large measure determine the image and the fate of the country today, have vast business and personal interests in the UK. This applies also to a series of significant representatives of Vladimir Putin’s team. Now as concerns President Medvedev, he has proclaimed a course towards a “reset” in relations with the West, and in this process Britain plays one of the most important roles. Therefore London can perfectly well raise with Moscow acute and not always convenient questions connected with Russian corruption, ensuring the independence of the judicial system and the protection of human rights.

To my view, the UK could let Russia understand that a country with such scales of corruption, the only G8 country where there are political prisoners, cannot be a full-fledged and all-around partner. That not only the foreign-economic relations of Russia and the West are important, but also real steps by the Russian leadership aimed at transforming my country into a modern European state. That true trust is possible between democracies, but not between a developed democracy, on the one hand, and an authoritarian regime of a half-Soviet, half-Asiatic type – on the other, and that, although Russia is interesting as a source of raw materials under any regime, cooperation in large-scale modernisation is possible only if there exists a commonality of values.

AO: Do you think that Britain and the West in general is guilty of appeasing Russia because of Moscow’s status as the world’s largest exporter of energy?

MK: As mentioned, your government has always been willing to speak out not just on general human rights issues in Russia, but in my case in particular for which I will always be grateful. Equally we all understand diplomatic reality and it would make no sense and would not be helpful for the UK to strike up a confrontational pose against Russia, even though in contrast to other European states, Britain’s’ reliance on Russian energy is relatively not great.

But the importance of Russia as an economic counterparty should surely encourage the UK to be concerned about bringing the values of the two countries closer together. The “Arab Spring” showed that the struggle for freedom and democracy has become the lot of all countries and peoples. That corrupt authoritarian regimes are not eternal, although the leaders of such regimes can be convinced of the opposite for quite a long time. That the demand for democracy, for honest and open government has become global. And the leading countries of the West – of which the UK, indubitably, is one – will retain and strengthen their political and, what is no less important, their moral leadership in the modern world if they will meet this growing, all-pervading demand on the part of many millions of people worldwide. This concerns British-Russian relations as well.

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.

As the Telegraph points out, the group has recently became much more officially deserving of that nefarious title: Nashi activists in Yaroslavl were found to have plagiarized the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to “inspire young Russians to greater patriotic heights.”

The full report:

Activists from the ‘Nashi’ youth group drew up a list of eight commandments meant to inspire young Russians to greater patriotic heights, a Kremlin priority.

Anti-Kremlin activists however spotted that the text was a lightly edited version of an infamous list of commandments that Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, composed to steer National Socialists in the right ideological direction.

The Nashi activists, who were based at a branch of the youth group in the town of Yaroslavl 150 miles east of Moscow, had removed Goebbels’ advice to beware Jews and punch anyone who insulted the motherland. But they otherwise seem to have substituted the word Russia for Germany.

“The enemies of Russia are your enemies,” they wrote mimicking Goebbels’ phrase “Germany’s enemies are your enemies; hate them with all your heart.”

Critics said they were not particularly shocked by the content of the new commandments but disturbed by what the act of plagiarism said about the activists.

“It is strange that they did not find any other way of expressing themselves other than copying fascists,” wrote Anton Orekh of the Ejednevny Jurnal news portal. “In order to copy it they had to find it. To find it, read it, and really get into it. And understand that to say it better than Goebbels is just not possible.”

Ruslan Maslov, the activist who penned the commandments, said he could not understand what was so bad about their content. Another activist, Artyom Kozlov, said the scandal was an attempt to blacken the group’s name. He said that not everything about Nazi Germany was bad.

“The roads in Nazi Germany were well built,” he told gazeta.ru. “But that does not mean they should be destroyed. The good things should be preserved.”

Nashi, which means ‘One of Us,’ enjoys support from the Kremlin. It has courted controversy in the past, however, by mounting an aggressive campaign of harassment against the former British ambassador to Russia and, more recently, by displaying the heads of its ‘enemies’ hewn from papier-mache on spikes donning Nazi caps.

“The Commandments of Honour”

1. Your fatherland is Russia. Love it above all others and in deed more than word.

2. The enemies of Russia are your enemies.

3. Every compatriot, even the lowliest, is part of Russia. Love him like you love yourself!

4. Demand only duties of yourself. Then Russia will regain justice.

5. Be proud of Russia! You must honour the fatherland for which millions gave their lives.

6. Remember, if someone takes away your rights, you have the right to say “NO!”

7. Uphold what you must without shame where Great Russia is concerned!

8. Believe in the future. Then you will become the victor!