Vladimir Milov does not mince words when it comes to Vladimir Putin, the man he once served as a deputy minister of energy.
"I think it's pretty clear that we are simply dealing with a murderer, with a person who thinks that it is OK to kill people. And he's been doing it all his life," Mr Milov told the ABC from Vilnius, where he now lives in exile.
The 50-year-old economist resigned from the Russian ministry in 2002 when Mr Putin vetoed his plans to break up the oil and gas giant Gazprom.
Since then, he has dedicated his life to exposing corruption and bringing democratic reform to Russia, working closely with three of the most prominent Russian opposition politicians, all of whom paid the price for daring to challenge Mr Putin.
Boris Nemtsov was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015. Alexei Navalny suffered a near-fatal poisoning in 2020 and is now serving 11-and-a-half years in prison. Vladimir Kara-Murza survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017 and is now facing up to 25 years in jail on treason charges.
Mr Milov said the Russian president was behind the attacks on all three men.
"That was him. That was Putin. And if you really trace back all his way it was always murders, murders, murders," he said.
"The war in Chechnya, the 1999 apartment bombings. You mentioned three names, but there are multiple others. (Yuri) Shchekochikhin, (Anna) Politkovskaya, (Sergei) Yushenkov. So many people have been killed."
The man on Russia's wanted list thinks Putin could soon be the hunted
Vladimir Milov knows what it's like to be targeted by Mr Putin's regime.
In 2021, he was living with his family in Moscow, working as an economic adviser to Alexei Navalny, when he got a tip-off that it was not safe to head back to his apartment.
"When Navalny returned and we had a major protest rally, I got a lot of messages from my neighbours that there's about 20 policemen waiting for me on my doorstep.
"This is why I decided to leave the country, because otherwise you'd now be filming documentaries about the need to release myself (from prison) as well."
Mr Milov wanted to stay in his home country and, as he describes it, "do as much harm to Putin as possible".
He attempts to do that now from Lithuania where he has become one of the regime's most trenchant critics, writing reports and essays, speaking at conferences and hosting talk programs on the Navalny Live YouTube channel.
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mr Milov was added to the Russian Interior Ministry's most wanted list, and he has a message for those who want to know whether Mr Putin will hang onto the presidency.
"He's definitely not secure," he said.
"After he suffered the first hit with military defeats in Ukraine, with sanctions and unprecedented international isolation, he's tried to maintain the poker face, like things are OK and we are weathering all that storm.
"It will soon be evident to everybody in Russia, in the elites, among the TV propagandists, the broader society that, no, he is not sustaining this situation and we are in deep, deep trouble."
Mr Milov believes the cracks started to appear when Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson in November last year.
"There was this huge outcry on Russian propaganda TV. They blamed everybody like generals, ministers, traitors. They stopped just one millimetre short of mentioning Putin by name. Next time they will," he said.
"We are approaching that period, and I remember how it happened with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Once the authority of the rulers begins to crumble, then it's a process which is like a flood. You can't stop it."
That might be so, but hasn't Mr Putin set up a self-sustaining security state that protects him and his ilk from internal and external threats? Mr Milov says that's true to a degree but in the long run, the system is not sustainable.
Before fleeing Moscow, Mr Milov had been arrested and detained for 30 days for broadcasting live from pro-democracy protests. After his arrest, he heard rumblings that should make Mr Putin nervous.
"When you are in a detention facility, you hear a lot of what policemen are saying. They are deeply unhappy.
"The FSB (Russia's Federal Security Service) took over and is commanding everything and they (the police) are being used for the purpose of political repressions, not fighting crime."
If things get worse, Mr Milov believes the political elites could abandon their president.
"I know most of the people surrounding Putin personally. They are pure opportunists. There is no ideology. There are no ayatollahs or Marxist priests.
"These people have flip-flopped on their political positions throughout their careers. The only thing they really value is a portrait of Benjamin Franklin on a green bank note."
The sanctions are starting to bite
If you look at the economic data coming out of Russia, you'd think that there was a strong case that Western sanctions are not working.
The International Monetary Fund has predicted that Russia's economy will grow in 2023 and recent figures out of Moscow suggest the unemployment rate is below 4 per cent.
"Be patient," Mr Milov insists. He thinks the sanctions are starting to bite.
"The GDP, exchange rate, inflation, unemployment. This stuff is either manipulated or misleading and doesn't present the whole complex picture.
"GDP includes a lot of wartime produce. If you look at the breakdown of industrial output, the biggest item, which has grown three times in the year, was uniforms.
"We see a lot of these uniforms actually rotting on the Ukrainian battlefields, which means that, (as) a wartime produce, it can boost GDP short term but it doesn't have any multiplier.
"Peacetime GDP has a good multiplier in terms of labour, in terms of added value, in terms of investment and taxes and so on. A wartime GDP doesn't."
Mr Milov believes the official unemployment rate masks a wave of joblessness that is crippling the economy.
"The Russian statistics agency has just freshly released statistics for the fourth quarter. It's 4.5 million people on various forms of hidden unemployment. Seventy per cent of them are on unpaid leave," he said.
"What's the difference between unemployment and unpaid leave? It's only on paper because you don't work. You're not getting paid.
"If you sum that up, official unemployment is pretty low, but add this big chunk of hidden unemployment, it's about 10 per cent of the workforce. We only have this level of unemployment in the second half of the 1990s.
Mr Putin's mobilisations have caused another massive problem for the economy. Many young men have left the country, fearing they could soon be sent to the frontline. Some estimates suggest around a million citizens may have fled since the war began.
"It's a huge problem, the deficit of skilled personnel. And this is because many people left Russia because of mobilisation," Mr Milov said.
"Listen to what Elvira Nabiullina the chief of the Central bank says, this is the key problem which is really beginning to bite."
Last week Russia's finance ministry announced a $43 billion budget deficit for the first quarter. Mr Milov said Russia's economic problems are multiplying.
"You will see a very deep budget crisis over this year, plunging oil and gas revenue and growing expenses to finance the war and everything, which is only going to deepen."
From his new home in Lithuania, the economist and TV host is optimistic that Russians working in the media in exile can play an important role in combating pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda.
"We need to work with the Russian population and wake them up from this perpetual, lethargic sleep. We're doing that and we believe it's going to happen."
He said when you combine the Navalny team's broadcasts with TV Rain and other independent outlets, there is a huge potential audience that has either had enough of Mr Putin or could have its opinions changed.
"I'd say there's 30, 40 million Russians to whom we are capable of reaching. There is a strong anti-Putin, anti-war portion of the society," Mr Milov said.
"It's very afraid of these lengthy prison terms that Putin currently scares everybody with. But it will rise up at some point."
