A US-based Russian businessman has stated that he will give $1 million to anyone who kills Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Alex Konanykhin, who has a long and turbulent history with the Russian government, and who has lived in the US since the 1990s, put the bounty online following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In the LinkedIn post, he said:
"I promise to pay $1,000,000 to the officer(s) who, complying with their constitutional duty, arrest(s) Putin as a war criminal under Russian and international laws.. Putin is not the Russian president as he came to power as the result of a special operation of blowing up apartment buildings in Russia, then violated the Constitution by eliminating free elections and murdering his opponents."
"As an ethnic Russian and a Russian citizen, I see it as my moral duty to facilitate the denazification of Russia. I will continue my assistance to Ukraine in its heroic efforts to withstand the onslaught of Putin's Orda ['hoard' or 'gang' in Russian]."
The statement was made alongside a wanted poster demanding Putin 'Dead or Alive'. While there is understandable anger against Putin the calling for the death of another head of state is still illegal and it is unclear whether anyone could actually be rewarded financially for carrying out such an assassination.
Konanykhin is said to have studied at the Moscow Physics and Technical Institute but soon dropped out and went into business during the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 1992, his companies were valued at over $300 million, and he built strong ties with the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin.
However, Konanykhin, was in 1996 accused by Russian authorities of stealing $8 million from the Russian Exchange Bank in Moscow. It was then that the businessman fled abroad, ending up in New York and eventually being granted asylum.
Since 2011, he has run 'TransparentBusiness', which assists companies in organising their remote workforce and has appeared on the business TV show 'Unicorn Hunters' which matches up investors with entrepreneurs.
[Based on reporting by: Jerusalem Post]
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