MOSCOW, Dec 27: An outspoken aide to President Vladimir Putin resigned on Tuesday, saying he did not want to work for a state that had ended democracy and basic freedom. Andrei Illarionov, who was stripped of many of his duties a year ago after he called the assault on oil company YUKOS ‘the scam of the year’, was one of the few independent voices in an increasingly monolithic Kremlin establishment.

In potentially embarrassing remarks for President Putin as Russia prepares to take over the presidency of the G8 club of free-market democracies on Sunday, he told reporters: “It is one thing to work in a country that is partly free. It is another thing when the political system has changed, and the country has stopped being free and democratic”.

“I did not sign a contract with such a state, and therefore it is absolutely impossible to remain in this post.”

Mr Illarionov was best known in the west for his fierce opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which he compared to an ‘economic Auschwitz’.

But he is also a respected economist who, until last January, headed Russia’s team at the G8 group of industrialized nations.

INCREASINGLY AT ODDS: But his liberal views were increasingly at odds with the Kremlin’s move to centralize all aspects of Russian life through bringing companies back under state control, while squeezing critics out of parliament and the media.