An exiled Russian oligarch says blocking all Putin's bankers and sanctioning all oligarchs is the 'only thing' that will stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine

• Mikhail Khodorkovsky told CNN the West needs to cut off all international cash flows to Russia.
• Blocking bankers and sanctioning oligarchs is "the only thing that will stop the war," he said.

An exiled Russian oligarch who was once the country's richest person says the West needs to block all of President Vladimir Putin's bankers and that sanctions need to be extended to every oligarch to deter Russia from continuing to invade Ukraine.

"That's the only thing that will stop the war," Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former CEO of the Russian oil giant Yukos and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin, told CNN.

Western countries and trade blocs have placed heavy financial sanctions on Russia after Putin sent troops to attack Ukraine. The measures include banning transactions with Russia's central bank, cutting off some Russian banks' access to the SWIFT international payments system, blocking the trade of luxury goods, and freezing assets of Putin, other Kremlin leaders, and individual oligarchs.

The sanctions are intended to hobble Russia's economy and cut off funding to its military and have so far sent the ruble to a record low and contributed to soaring inflation. But some critics say the sanctions haven't gone far enough because they haven't persuaded Putin to call off the invasion.

"The blow to the financial system has been enormous," Khodorkovsky told CNN. "But at the moment, only 70% of the cash flows have been blocked."

"I've never advocated sanctions against Russia as a whole, but the financial flows need to stop," Khodorkovsky said.

He said that to halt the invasion, the West needed to block what he said was the remaining 30% of cash flows to Russia, including increasing the number of frozen Russian bank accounts and blocking Putin's bankers.

"If we want to stop the war, then all the banking, all the bank accounts of Russia, must be frozen," he said, adding that "there must be no exceptions."

Khodorkovsky said that Russian oligarchs were "just Putin's footmen" and "cannot influence him."

"However, he can use them as a tool of influence to influence the West," he said. "Therefore it is absolutely important to stop all of these purse holders of Putin's until the war ends. They all must be blocked. And that's the only thing that will stop the war."

He said that the sanctions would cause problems globally but that these were "incomparable" to the situation in Ukraine.

Khodorkovsky said in a previous interview with CNN that the invasion could bring about Putin's fall from power. He repeated his prediction in his latest conversation with the broadcaster.

"If the West continues to support Ukraine, his own defeat is inevitable," Khodorkovsky said. "Since the start of the war, his stay, his term in power, has been reduced significantly."

Khodorkovsky was CEO of Yukos, then Russia's largest oil company, between 1997 and 2004. He was briefly Russia's richest person in 2003, when Forbes put his net worth at $15 billion.

In 2001, Khodorkovsky founded Open Russia, an anti-Kremlin political organization focusing on democracy and human rights that was shut down by Russian authorities in 2006. The second iteration of the group closed in 2021, which it said was because of the risk of criminal prosecution.

Khodorkovsky was arrested and charged with fraud and tax evasion in 2003 and was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2005. The European court of human rights rejected Khodorkovsky's claim that his arrest was politically motivated but ruled that his rights had been violated.

In 2013, Khodorkovsky was pardoned by Putin and released from prison a year early. He was exiled from Russia and now lives in London.