Vladimir Putin has a lot of psychological complexes and a warped, illogical and narrow-minded world view, a former oligarch has revealed.
Dr Boris Mints spoke to the Mirror in a wide ranging interview covering his time inside the Russian government, and eventually leaving to his philanthropy and life since.
Dr Mints, 63, described his time inside the Kremlin where he worked as Head of the Presidential Department for Local Self-Governance and Secretary of the Council for Local Self-Government, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Putin.
However, it was eventually Putin himself who booted Dr Mints from the government.
He used to be embedded in the Russian elite and co-founded the Otkritie Bank, which was once Russia ’s largest privately owned bank, as well as being CEO of REN TV.
In 2017 Forbes estimated Dr Mints’ net worth was just over £1billion but it is no longer so large and following years as a businessman, focuses on philanthropic efforts.
A year later, the US Treasury released the ‘Putin List’, of 210 prominent Russians, which included Dr Mints.
He described the current president as “the worst type of KGB agent” and said that he shadowed individuals within the Kremlin and collected “compromising evidence” on them.
Dr Mints, who lives part-time in a Scottish castle, the Tower of Lethendy, now works with a number of global Jewish faith organisations and slammed some of the recent comments coming from Sergey Lavrov that Hitler had Jewish blood too.
He said Putin has "a lot of psychological complexes".
Dr Mints added: “Lavrov's statement about antisemitism is an example of deeply-rooted antisemitism. Putin's team is acting similarly to Adolf Hitler's team.
“In Putin’s warped, illogical and narrow-minded world view, you can see how the conspiracy theory emerges that portrays Jews, including Zelensky, as antisemites. It’s a typical example of this primitive way of thinking.”
Dr Mints, originally from Rybnica, modern day Moldova, added: “In 1998, the first President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, appointed Vladimir Putin as one of the top officials of his administration.
“During that period, I had a few brief conversations with Mr Putin at various events and at meetings with the heads of the presidential administration, Valentin Yumashev and then Nikolay Bordyuzha.
“While this may be hard to believe now, in that short period, lasting several months, Mr Putin actually positioned himself as a true democrat and a liberal, although this began to change quite rapidly after he took power.
“The last time I personally spoke to Vladimir Putin was on the 2nd of January 2000.
“Two days later, on January the 4th, after he became Acting President of the Russian Federation, Mr Putin discharged me from my post.
“With hindsight, this is perhaps the only thing for which I am grateful to him!”
Talking to the Mirror, the former businessman and philanthropist spoke about how he had left Russia long behind. Dr Mints left the country years ago in the time since has been targeted by the Kremlin through legal action.
In 2017 Otkritie, the bank he ran, collapsed and was bailed out, along with two other private banks, by the Russian central bank for almost $50billion.
Two years after that the Russian Central Bank filed a billion pound lawsuit against him and the High Court case began in late June, 2019.
Dr Mints filed a counter-claim in November 2019, and then only a month later Russia began investigating him and his two sons in a criminal case.
They even went as far as to ask Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant.
Interpol refused Russia's strange request and this is something Dr Mints has always strongly denied and previously described as “utterly baseless” and “suspiciously timed”.
A year later, through a High Court decision, Dr Mints had hundreds of millions in assets reportedly blocked.
Talking to the Mirror, Dr Mints spoke about how Russia weaponised England’s own court systems to its advantage and he called on the UK to take a serious look at how it let itself be exploited.
He said: “I am not sure that the UK Government or law officials in the High Court or international tribunals fully appreciate the extent of it.
“As people who have always lived in a democratic country, with a free press, private property and human rights, an independent justice system, and with checks and balances on the actions of politicians and government officials, they are not always prepared for what the Russian state and state-owned companies throw at them.”
Dr Mints said witnesses could “brazenly lie” to Russia’s benefit and that the Kremlin and Moscow used the “grey area” in English courts to their advantage.
They would attack their opponents through legal action and tie them down in years long battles inside the courts to drain their resources and money.
This tactic recently came into focus once more in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said he would be introducing new laws to prevent this.
"We've seen oligarchs and technocrats and those with links to Putin, coming into this country and suing under our libel laws those who are shining a light, whether it's authors or NGOs, ... on corruption and abuse, and that is an abuse of our system," Raab told the BBC.
"I'm going to be putting forward proposals to deal with that and to prevent that. It cannot be right that kleptocrats and those with links to Putin can silence those shining a light on those excesses and use our courts to do so."
Dr Mints also described Russia’s typical playbook for how it went about pursuing and attacking their opponents, laying out a game plan that mirrored what happened to him.
He said: “They will fabricate a criminal case against them and their business interests. Then place them on the international wanted list by contacting Interpol, in order to create extreme distress for them and their family members.
“They are also capable of organising a public campaign in the press. While legal proceedings are ongoing, you will see newspaper publications about their ‘foul deeds’.
“If one tries to dispute false allegations about themselves, the question that naturally follows would be – ‘Why didn’t you go to court?’.
“But what is the point in going to court if there are no just courts in Russia? A person cannot win a lawsuit against a government agency.”
He added that he hoped the UK’s courts would “recognise the fabrications that pour out of the mouths of Russian officials for the systemic lies that they are.”
Dr Mints was also CEO of REN TV, founded on 1 January 1997 by Irena Lesnevskaya and her son, Dmitry Lesnevsky.
It was a network of 406 independent and the media landscape Dr Mints described working on from 2001 to 2003 seems almost unrecognisable in modern day Russia.
At the time, he worked with the likes of Olga Romanova, now head of the human rights organisation Russia Behind Bars.
“At that time, no one interfered with our broadcasting agenda or tried to supervise its contents.
“It makes me sad to see what the Russian media landscape has now become.”
He added that independent media had been “destroyed” under Putin.
During Dr Mints’ time within the Kremlin, he worked closely with Anatoly Chubais.
Chubais gave Putin his first job in the Kremlin and recently fled Russia in protest against the invasion of Ukraine.
Nothing has been heard from Chubais since he went into self-imposed exile but Dr Mints revealed that his old friend was safe and well, but wouldn’t reveal his location.
He fondly recalled their time working together "for several years" within the Russian government and said "I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t have wished to work with him in the 1990s".
