Wanted oligarchs plan to unite liberals and extremists against Putin

Boris Berezovsky calls upon all anti-Putin groups to unite - from pro-Western liberals to fascist-minded National Bolsheviks - the top priority of the exiled oligarchs.

The only issue of the paper "Moskovskiye Novosti Without Kiselyov" has recently published an interview with Boris Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch of the Yeltsin's epoch. He is wanted by the Russian police for massive financial fraud schemes; he currently resides in UK as a political refugee. Mr. Berezovsky declared that he had achieved a top-priority agreement with two other famous absconders, media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky and Yukos's Leonid Nevzlin, both residing now in Israel, to fund the unification of all anti-Putin political groups. The proclaimed goal of this unification is to "overthrow Putin's unconstitutional regime." According to Berezovsky, the anti-Putin coalition should include not only "those who call themselves democrats" (that is right-wing liberals), but also "other political forces, which believe in other political constructions." The intransigent opposition to the existing regime is the only condition for would-be recipients of the oligarchs' money. Aside from democrats, Berezovsky sympathizes with the National Bolshevik Party. The politics of this sectarian group, chaired by the notorious writer Edward Limonov, is regarded by many observers as proto-fascist.

It is quite ironic that such ambitious unification plans were published on the pages of the paper, which had appeared as a result of the scandalous split in the editorial board of a Yukos mouthpiece, the Moscow daily "Moskovskiye novosti." The conflict (two opposing groups are remaining loyal to the bosses, Mrs. Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin) over MN's editorial policy has already led to the sack of the majority of the paper's journalists. The figure in the scandal's focus is Yevgeny Kiselyov, MN's editor-in-chief and the former director of Gusinsky's NTV and Berezovsky's TV6 television networks respectively.