Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
PARIS—There is no doubt Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to liquidate Vladimir Milov.
Milov has been a Russian-on-the-run since 2002. He is today unmistakably the most menacing desperado on Putin’s Most Wanted Fugitive list. Yet the mild-mannered graduate of Moscow State Mining University is neither a defenestrated lawyer nor an academic outcast for railing against the war in Ukraine. The 50-year-old former Deputy Minister of Energy is Putin’s most fearsome nightmare precisely because he speaks in tongues.
Milov’s language is built on BTUs, BOPs and FPSOs, the strange-sounding and complex acronyms used in the oil and gas industry, the business whose profits underwrite Putin’s Ukrainian bloodshed.