2008 Russian financial crisis. He has criticized the Russian government attacks on private sector in summer of 2008 that contributed to financial crisis. 2010 Smolensk air disaster In 2010 Illarionov criticised the official Russian investigation about the Smolensk air disaster and called the official version "naive". He was invited into an investigative commission created by Polish parliament. Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 On 4 February 2014, before the Russian intervention in Crimea, Illarionov predicted that Vladimir Putin was going to implement a military operation to effectively establish political control over Ukraine. In a 10 October 2013 interview with Serhiy Leshchenko, Illarionov revealed many of Putin's viewpoints during the early 2000s and that Putin desired to have Kuchma use force to put down the Orange Revolution but Kuchma refused, that Putin has an imperialist vision with respect to Ukraine, and that, similar to other tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Putin is a tyrant and will leave as Russia's leader only in death. In late March 2014, following the Revolution of Dignity and the annexation of Crimea by Russia, speaking to Svenska Dagbladet, Illarionov suggested that Vladimir Putin would seek to incorporate Ukraine, Belarus, parts of Georgia and the Baltic states" into Russia. On 9 June, he said that the beginning of the ceasefire and negotiations between the newly elected Ukrainian president Poroshenko and separatists of break-away republics at the East of Ukraine would ultimately result in a Russian attempt of establishing political control over the entirety of Ukraine. Inevitable dissolution of the Russian Federation In November 2018, Andrey Illarionov said in the chat of the Ukrainian portal GlavRed that the dissolution of Russian Federation is inevitable which is a natural process for multinational empires. Later in the same interview, when he was asked to name the thing that terrifies him the most in modern Russia, Illarionov listed political dictatorship, suppression of civil and political rights of citizens, and Kremlin's neo-imperial policies towards other countries, neighbors or not. 2021 US Capitol attack After the events of the 2021 United States Capitol attack in Washington D.C., Illarionov wrote on his LiveJournal blog that the Capitol police did not provide any resistance to demonstrators and quickly fell back into the building. The blog post is named "Reichstag fire" stating it as a trigger for the party in power to limit civil liberties. Following his post, the libertarian Cato Institute fired Illarionov for allegedly