The exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, one of President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics and a self-styled magnet for Kremlin condemnation, claimed on Monday to be facing charges of calling for the violent overthrow of the Russian government.
Berezovsky, who lives in London, was to begin standing trial in Moscow in absentia on Monday on charges of embezzling funds in the 1990s from Aeroflot, the state airline.
That case was adjourned until next week.
But Berezovsky's lawyer, Andrei Borovkov, said new charges had been filed by the FSB, the principal successor to the KGB. Coup charges remained under investigation, Borovkov said. He said it was not clear when the new charges would be made public.
The authorities refused to confirm the charges.
But Borovkov said the charges were related to statements attributed to Berezovsky in interviews this year, including remarks published in April in the Guardian.
In that interview, Berezovsky, who has been granted political asylum by the UK, was quoted as declaring Putin's government unconstitutional and calling for a revolution to undo it.
"We need to use force to change this regime," Berezovsky was quoted as saying.
"It isn't possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure," he said.
The report of the remarks ignited a brief furor and tested anew the strained relations between Russia and the UK. The Kremlin demanded Berezovsky's extradition. The British government said it was monitoring his statements.
Russia's prosecutor general's office immediately said it had opened a criminal inquiry.
In a statement distributed Monday, Berezovsky insisted that he had never called for a violent coup, but strongly restated his opposition to Putin, and he said that the government should be brought down.
The claim on Monday that charges had been filed thrust Berezovsky's name back into the center of the reported subplots that link together many of the darkest and most contentious events of Putin's seven-year presidency.
Berezovsky, once a Kremlin insider himself, has been accused by Putin's Kremlin and its allies of spiriting funds from Russian companies during the privatization of the 1990s.
He is also accused of underwriting Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, of advising and financing the pro-Western Orange Revolution in Ukraine and of being an agent of MI6, the British intelligence agency.
In his statement on Monday, Berezovsky brushed aside many of the accusations.
"The Kremlin propaganda machine might like to decide exactly what kind of villain they wish to paint me," he said.
He also suggested that he believed that because elections in Russia were routinely rigged, as they are through much of the former Soviet world, they were not a realistic vehicle for change.
"Freedom of expression is not respected, the media is not free from government control, political opponents are under threat and elections are neither free nor fair," he said. "Under those circumstances, elections are not a viable means of ensuring democratic change in Russia. Therefore, I do support using other methods to push for a change back toward democracy."
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