Wall Street Journal - January 31, 2008
Alan Cullison, alan.cullison@wsj.com

Mr. Khodorkovsky's move ups the ante in an effort to draw attention to the plight of the colleague, who says prosecutors are trying to force him to make a phony confession by threatening to let him die in prison. Prison officials say he is receiving adequate treatment.

Last week, Russia's Supreme Court turned down a plea from the defendant, Vasily Alexanian, to be transferred to a special civilian clinic for AIDS patients in Moscow. His lawyers say Russia has ignored orders from the European Court of Human Rights to move him out of an isolation unit where he is suffering from cancer and tuberculosis.

The secretary-general of the Council of Europe said he was "very concerned" about the case last week. Russia's top human-rights ombudsman has also weighed in and told a Moscow radio station yesterday that he appealed to prosecutors and prison officials about the case but hasn't received an answer.

Russian officials deny Mr. Alexanian is being mistreated and insist the prosecutions of him and Mr. Khodorkovsky are purely a legal matter.

Mr. Alexanian's travails come as prosecutors prepare a fresh round of criminal charges against Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is now serving an eight-year prison sentence for a fraud and tax-evasion case that critics called Kremlin revenge for his political ambitions. The new case against Mr. Khodorkovsky accuses him of running his now-defunct oil company, OAO Yukos, as a massive criminal enterprise. He faces an additional 22-year sentence for money laundering and embezzlement if convicted.

Mr. Alexanian, a graduate of Harvard Law School, served as head of Yukos's legal department starting in 1996 and later fought government efforts to bankrupt Yukos. When other top Yukos officers fled the country to avoid arrest, Mr. Alexanian stayed and briefly served as Yukos's vice president before he was arrested.

Yesterday, he appeared in court in Moscow for his embezzlement and money-laundering trial, where he said that he was being forced to attend hearings. "This is quite simply murder," he told reporters from a defendant's cage. "If they could shoot people these days, it would be done that way."

Mr. Khodorkovsky, in a letter posted on his supporters' Web site, said Mr. Alexanian's plight also put him under pressure to make false confessions and accusations against his former colleagues. Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is awaiting trial in the Siberian city of Chita, said he stopped taking food and water on Tuesday.

"I was put before an impossible moral choice: Confess to the crimes I never committed to save his life but break lives of others listed as my 'accomplices,' or defend my rights...and become the cause of possible death of my lawyer Alexanian," Mr. Khodorkovsky wrote in a letter to Russia's chief prosecutor.

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