Russian climate envoy and personal advisor to President Vladimir Putin, Anatoly Chubais, has resigned and left the country on Wednesday.
Known as the architect of Russia’s 1990s privatization, Chubais gave Putin his first Kremlin job in the mid-1990s.
He is also one of the few 1990s-era economic reformers who’d remained in Putin’s government and had maintained close ties with Western officials.
Last week, Chubais hinted at a darkened outlook, saying in a post on Facebook on the anniversary of the death of Yegor Gaidar that the fellow economic reformer “understood the strategic risks better than I did and I was wrong.”
In his 2006 book, “Death of Empire,” Gaidar warned of the temptations of imperial nostalgia for the Soviet Union he saw growing under Putin. “It’s not difficult to convince society that a state that collapsed so suddenly can be just as quickly rebuilt,” he wrote. “That’s an illusion, a dangerous one.”
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