Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Friday.
Putin surprised Russians and cheered the business community by announcing on Thursday that he would release a man he has long reviled because Khodorkovsky’s mother was ill. The move is widely seen as a gesture to critics of his human rights record before Russia hosts the Winter Olympics at Sochi in February.
Khodorkovsky’s lawyers said it was not clear when he would leave a prison camp near the Finnish border, 300 km (200 miles) south of the Arctic Circle. Prison authorities did not confirm a report by Interfax news agency which quoted a source in the security services as saying he had already been freed.
A decree signed by Putin and distributed by the Kremlin took immediate effect. Its wording described the decision to pardon the 50-year-old Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, as having been “guided by the principles of humanity”.
Putin had said at the end of a four-hour annual news conference on Thursday that Khodorkovsky asked for clemency. His lawyers said they were checking with their client, who has spent the last few years working in Penal Colony No. 7 at Segezha, an area once part of the Gulag system of labor camps.
The surprise announcement underlined Putin’s confidence that he has reasserted his authority and is in full control of Russia after seeing off street protests.
He said two members of the Pussy Riot protest group would also be freed, under an amnesty passed by parliament this week, but it was the about-turn on Khodorkovsky, who was due for release next August, that drew attention.
Khodorkovsky has been in jail since he was arrested in 2003 in what supporters say was part of a Kremlin campaign to punish him for political challenges to Putin, gain control of his oil assets and warn other tycoons to toe the line.
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