Alexander Lebedev seems, in his way, to have become tired of being a billionaire. It's time, he argues, to stop being a businessman; to sell his remaining holdings in Russian industry. The stakes in Aeroflot, Gazprom, the Red Wings business airline are all to go and maybe even his bank, leaving only the potato farming and his UK newspapers – the Independents and the London Evening Standard – all of which he classes as social enterprises, not the kind of tedious activity that generates returns on investment. Mind you, it's a safe bet that the potatoes will end up making more than the newspapers.

Catch up with the oligarch – he visited the Guardian last week – and it is impossible not to be gradually seduced. The conversation at times may be an associative jumble of ideas, in which it is hard to separate jokes from reality, but overall his speaking is plain enough and the essential thinking is not in doubt. As he sees it, with $3.6bn of assets and no debt, there is little point in getting richer (in his opinion to try to aim for $20bn would be not far short of deranged). Instead it is time to liquidate, even if the cash realised might only be $2bn. And it is cash that, potatoes aside, he wants to spend on media.

Lebedev is fed up with being misunderstood. The former KGB agent thinks it is too easy to characterise him as a stooge; that he is either a frontman for the Putin regime or a cipher for his business interests. Such thinking on our part is not surprising either. Fleet Street is at once not used to Russians, and well used to owners ready to use their newspapers to advance other ends. Selling out, Lebedev believes, would make his intentions clear: he wants to support journalism, and in particular investigative journalism, aiming to set up a foundation with a budget that will be spent beyond his existing newspapers. Owning three titles in London and Novaya Gazeta in Russia is clearly not enough.

Who knows, there may be other factors too. His offer to join Putin's party hasn't been accepted. Lebedev chucked in all sorts of pre-conditions that may have left the prime minister unamused. And, while there is still some sort of competition between Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, there may be a window to sell, and reduce his Russian assets. It is not certain what could happen after the next election in 2012 It may just be harder to cash out.

The candour, too, is astonishing. Not since Sumner Redstone, the Viacom mogul, cut Paramount's ties to Tom Cruise in a Wall Street Journal interview has a proprietor been quite so frank. To say the Independent is "boring" implies that the title is somehow nothing to do with him, and to suggest that its editor, Simon Kelner, may move on to run the planned foundation is hardly conducive to a stable newsroom. His desire to merge the Independent with the Guardian (and take a minority shareholding) is not a joke – although saying so amuses him. It is also a practical solution to the Indy's entrenched number four position.

It is two years since the Russian burst on to the London scene, and on the evidence so far there is nothing to dislike. Lebedev may have bought struggling titles, but he has shown plenty of imagination, rescuing the Standard and rolling the dice with the not quite so successful i. There is little sign of interference either – Lebedev may say "you can't tell an English journalist what to do", but plenty of owners have tried and succeeded. Only the tack into charity, or however you describe the foundation, is a little dispiriting. It implies that journalism, or at least quality journalism, can only survive through subsidy – when (as the Standard experiment of going free shows) commercial ingenuity can also provide a path to profit.