Russian-Israeli oligarch Leonid Nevzlin is saying goodbye to his Russian passport in response to Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.
In a blistering Facebook post Tuesday, Nevzlin condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine as “genocide” and tore into Russia for devolving into a “fascist state” under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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“Everything that Putin touches dies,” he wrote in the post. “I am a citizen of Israel, and if I think about a second citizenship, I would be proud to have a Ukrainian passport. I can’t afford to be a citizen of a country that kills children of other countries and tortures their children who don’t agree with it. I do not want to be an accomplice of a criminal regime and an accomplice in a crime against humanity at least simply possessing the status of a citizen of this state.”
Nevzlin is in a self-imposed exile in Israel after the Russian government began investigating his oil company, Yukos. The co-owner of his company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was jailed on charges of embezzlement, money laundering, and fraud, the Washington Post reported. Yukos has since gone bankrupt, and Israel has refused to comply with Russian requests to extradite him. Israel has also granted him citizenship.
Nevzlin insists that he was subject to political persecution from Putin and denies the legal allegations against him. He held on to his passport for the past two decades as a compromise because of his “cultural roots” in Russia but now says he can no longer make that compromise.
“All these years, like many, I’ve been compromising keeping this passport. I was one of the first to be hit by Putin. He threw my friends in jail, and killed some of them. Stole a business, deprived a home in Moscow. I spent almost 20 years outside Russia, but it is exactly what allowed me to see the process of rotting and decomposing in it better than the rest inside,” he said.
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In his Facebook post, Nevzlin claimed that he saw “joy and hope” in many Russian citizens when communism ended in Russia during the 1990s and lamented how politics unfolded in Russia since.
“Thank goodness some of them didn’t make it to this day. The day when the Motherland, whose fresh passports they kissed, became a fascist state,” he said. “Perhaps the time will come when I want to become a citizen of Russia again.”
