Sometimes you MUST look a gift horse in the mouth… Commentary by Grigory Pasko, journalist On 8 March at a press conference on the occasion of a meeting with Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel, as is known, Putin did not respond to the question of whether or not the ex-head of YUKOS, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, sentenced to eight years of imprisonment, would be pardoned. Instead, he mumbled something indistinct about how if a certain procedure is followed, when a convict writes a petition on pardon, nothing impedes an elected president from examining this petition.