MUNICH, Germany — For anyone looking for insight on how to deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the Kremlin as negotiations over Ukraine intensify, Franz J. Sedelmayer has some advice.
Russia’s tactics “are always the same — drag things out so long that everyone gives up,” Mr. Sedelmayer, a German security consultant and entrepreneur, said over a meal of Bavarian liver soup and pork in Munich, his hometown, where Western leaders ended a security conference Sunday divided over how to stall Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“You cannot give in,” he added. “Russia only respects the language of strength. Nothing else works.”
Mr. Sedelmayer, 51, speaks from experience. He has known Mr. Putin, 62, since the Russian president was an obscure municipal bureaucrat in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, when the Kremlin seized the newly renovated offices there of a security company headed by Mr. Sedelmayer.
Today, Mr. Sedelmayer is the rarest of victors against strong-arm Kremlin tactics, having recently wrested millions of dollars in compensation after a 20-year legal fight that he said was replete with trumped-up charges of tax evasion, veiled threats and repeated warnings to back off.
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Many other businesses, creditors and investors have been down this road, including Western banks that tried to recover the billions they lost after Russia defaulted on a big chunk of its debt in 1998, and the shareholders of Yukos, a private oil company taken over by the state in 2004.
Some have managed to get court or arbitration rulings in their favor, but none have had much luck forcing Russia to obey these judgments.
Despite his travails, Mr. Sedelmayer said he still had a soft spot for the Vladimir V. Putin he thought he knew back in the early 1990s — a conscientious and clean bureaucrat who, unlike many of his colleagues, did not ask for bribes.
“Perhaps it was his K.G.B. training or his character, but he could be very likable,” Mr. Sedelmayer said. “But he was always like a mirror. He would basically reflect what you wanted to see.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2015, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Beating Russia at Its Own Long Game. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
