The Real Reason Putin Invaded Ukraine — Sir Bill Browder

Putin said, "Real simple, 50% for Vladimir Putin." And that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world. And that was the moment that my life changed forever.

I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, guy named Sergey Magnitzki. They chain him to a bed and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergey Magnitzki until he died. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, "How do we get justice outside of Russia? So why not take away their ability to use their money in the West?" And that became known as the Magnitzky Act.

The reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money that he's afraid of his own people. And so the best way to um have your own people not get mad at you is to create somebody else for them to be mad at. It's Machaveli 101. Create a foreign enemy, start a war.

So, Bill Brad, welcome to trigonometry.

>> Great to be here.

>> It's great to have you. You have one of the most fascinating stories uh to tell. Uh having gone from growing up in the United States, being the grandson of a communist, a labor organizer, going to Russia as a capitalist at this point, uh and then getting into very big trouble with the Putin government over some terrible events. and then of course some of the work you've done after that as a as an activist as well. So tell us the story.

>> Well, it's a long story so I guess um we should start at the very beginning.

>> Um you mentioned my grandfather. He his name was Earl Browder and he was a labor union and organizer from Witchah, Kansas. He was so good at organizing the union he was spotted by the communists and they said if you like labor unionism you're going to love communism.

>> Why don't you come and check it out? He went from Witchah to Moscow. Um he did what many other young American men do when they get to Moscow. He met a young Russian girl who became my grandmother. My father was born there. And then five years later he returned to America and became the general secretary of the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice against Roosevelt in 1936 and 1940. Obviously didn't get that many votes. Um he was imprisoned by Roosevelt in 1941, pardoned in 42. At the end of the second world war um when there was no longer any kind of um relationship uh uh or need for a relationship between Russia and the United States um Stalin kicked him out of the Communist Party and and started in fact he started murdering um he my grandfather Earl Browder he had something called Browderism and they started murdering his his um followers in in Eastern Europe. the 1950s start um uh the McCarthy era. He gets persecuted obviously for being a communist. So this is my family legacy.

I was born in 1964. I'm 62 years old. When I was going through my teenage rebellion, I was trying to figure out how do you rebel from a family of communists. And uh uh I grew my hair long and it grew into an afro. You can't tell now, but um that didn't seem to upset my family. I follow the Grateful Dead around the country. Um uh that also didn't upset um uh my family. But when I put on a suit in time, became a capitalist, that really pissed them off, good and proper. Um I became a capitalist. I went to Stanford business school. I graduated business school in 1989, which was a very auspicious year because that was the year that the Berlin wall came down. And as I was trying to figure out what to do post business school, I had this epiphany, which is that if my grandfather was the biggest uh communist in America and the Berlin Wall has just come down, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that's what I set out to do.

And and uh uh I couldn't get quite all the way to Eastern Europe at the time. I moved to London in '89. And I had several jobs, but the job that defined me was a job at Solomon Brothers, which doesn't exist anymore, but it's a very famous American financial institution that was immortalized in Michael Lewis's book, Liars Poker. I got a job at Solomon Brothers as an investment banker on the East European investment banking team and my first assignment was to advise a fishing fleet located in Merman, Russia on their privatization.

So I fly from London to Mermans. I um get picked up at the airport by the head of the fishing fleet. He takes me down to the docks. He shows me one of their vessels which was an enor this enormously long high big uh ship. Um I asked him how much does one of these things cost? And he said $20 million new. How many do you have in your fleet? 100. So $2 billion worth of ships. Um how old is your fleet? I didn't know anything about ships or fleets, but he said seven years old. And so I figured maybe that's a billion dollars worth of ships. And I had been hired or I should say Solomon brothers had been hired by the management of this company to advise them on whether to buy 51% of the fleet which had been offered by the government in the privatization program of Russia. And so I said at what price is the government selling 51%. He said $2.5 million. So, I mean, you don't have to be a, you know, Stanford MBA or a financial wizard to know that that if if there's a billion dollars worth of ships and you can buy 51% for $2.5 million, um, that's got to be a pretty good deal. And so then I said to myself, I'm in the wrong business. I I shouldn't be advising on this stuff. I should be investing in this stuff.

And um and is is this just like some kind of anomaly with the fishing fleet or is this something going on more widespread? So I flew from Romance to Moscow and um sort of poked around Moscow for a week and I realized that this was the whole country. They were basically just giving the whole country away for free in what they called the mass privatization program. Boris Yeltson who was the president at the time said, "I want to go from communism to capitalism. How do we create a country of capitalists? Let's give all the property away for free." And so it didn't work out that way in the end. um 22 oligarchs ended up with 40% of the country. Um but little crumbs were falling off the table in terms of this privatization and off the back of that I left Solomon Brothers. I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund and I started investing in the privatization of Russia and it was really a very uh spectacular time to be an an investor in Russia. Um I I was you know all of 30 31 years old when I started uh this fund and there's this expression uh in the land of the blind the oneeyed man is king and not nobody knew more than me um just because nobody knew more than anybody about anything back then and I started investing and um I was uh my fund was the best performing fund in the world in 1997. Um, I I got I went from zero to a billion dollars of assets under management, which these days doesn't sound like a lot of money because there's trillionaires running around, but back then that was a an enormous amount of money.

>> Back then a billion was real money.

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> And um uh it was just the most glorious time ever. And I thought my billion was going to turn into 10 billion. And um turned out that um uh it was all the success coming so quickly in the hands of a 31-year-old was the biggest sell signal there ever was. Of course, I was 31 years old and I didn't didn't really understand that.

Um the Russian government in August of 1998 um devalued their currency and defaulted on their bonds and my portfolio went from a billion to 100 million. I lost n 9 900 million of my clients money. I was ashamed. I was humiliated. Um and I was determined to try to get from the hundred million back up to a billion and and then some. And in theory, it shouldn't have been all that hard a an exercise. Uh in theory, uh I owned oil companies. The oil companies sold their oil in dollars. They paid for their costs in rubles. The ruble has just gone down by 75%. And so if your revenues are staying the same or growing and your costs are going down by 75% that means your profits should be exploding in theory. The reality was that all these companies were majority owned by these people known as the Russian oligarchs. And the Russian oligarchs um said to themselves, well, before before all this crash, they thought they could get money from Wall Street. They had all these bankers with fancy suits showing up in Moscow um saying if you behave yourself, we can get you some money from Wall Street. And um uh after the default and devaluation, they called up their bankers said, you know, we could really use some of that money right now. And um uh the guys who picked up the phone said Vladimir who and put the phone down because uh uh they didn't want to be and nobody wanted to have any any association with Russia after that. It was like toxic waste being connected to Russia. And so the oligarchs said, "Well, wait a second. There's no incentive to behave." Um and in Russia there's never been any disincentive against misbehavior. They said to themselves, why don't we just steal everything that's um you know not nailed down and even stuff that is nailed down. And so the oligarchs embarged on an origgy of stealing which has been unprecedented in the history of business. They were doing asset stripping, transfer pricing, embezzlements, dilution. They were doing it on an industrial scale. And I was sitting there with my last 10 cents on the dollar hoping that I was somehow going to get from, you know, 10 cents up to a dollar or 100 million back up to a billion and they were going to try to steal the last 10 cents on the dollar that I had.

And so, not as a an investment strategy, but as a matter of desperation or survival, I said, I need to try to stop the stealing that's going on in these companies. Well, uh, how do you stop stealing in Russian companies? There was no class taught on that Stanford Business School. And it's not as if there's any institutions in Russia that are going to be there to help out some foreign minority shareholder um, that's unhappy about the stealing. You can't go to the police and say, "I've just discovered stealing at Gasprom." Um, what are they going to do? um nor could uh I go to the courts. The jud all the judges were bribed. The parliament was on the payroll. The government the regulator there was nothing except for one thing which is that um I had a really good team of Russian uh people analysts working for me who were really smart who could research how the stealing was going on. and I would go to all the same um bars and restaurants as the foreign correspondents. And so what we decided to do was to research who was doing the stealing, how they were stealing, where the money was going. And and these guys were they were so brazen they weren't even covering it up. Um and in Russia there's no no such thing as data protection. Every piece of data is is available for a price. And so we would gather all the information, put it together, and then share it with these journalists that I was um hanging out at the bars with, and they were loving me because I was saving them a lot of time and effort. And we would publish all the scams that were going on.

And uh you you could use you might say, "Well, um why did you expect anything good to happen?" And the answer is we didn't know what was going to happen. But when we first started doing this, this was the moment that Vladimir Putin had just come to power. And Vladimir Putin back then, he might have been the same person, but he wasn't. He was faced with a whole different set of constraints back then. And the oligarchs were more powerful than him. And he wanted to take away the power from the oligarchs. Mhm.

>> And so there's an expression uh in the world that your enemy's enemy is your friend. And I've never met Vladimir Putin. I haven't met him then and I haven't met him since then. But I was busy exposing the oligarchs who were stealing money from me. And he was hating the oligarchs because they were stealing power from him. And so um what did he do? He stepped into the fights. So we exposed the corruption of the management of Gasprom and the stateowned 51%. They fired the management of Gasprom and the share price rose spectacularly. Um we went after Sparebank, we went after Sergo, Napagas. These are all big Russian companies and he would step in on a regular basis and do stuff and every time he would step in the share price would go up. And so I was feeling pretty good about him. I thought this is great. Um, you know, I was making money, making Russia a better place. This Putin guy was like helping out. How, you know, what could be better than that? Um, problem was that he wasn't helping out because he wanted to make Russia a better place. He wanted to clean up Russian companies. He was helping out because he didn't like these oligarchs. And one day, he decided that he was going to win his war with the oligarchs. How was he going to do that? He was going to arrest the richest oligarch in the country, a man named Mikuel Hordikovski. He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos. He arrests him off his private jet in Siberia. They bring him back to Moscow. They put him in a cage in a courtroom. In Russia, there's a 99.7% conviction rate in criminal cases. And so, they just keep you in the cage because that's where you're going to be afterwards. They allow the television cameras to come into the courtroom to film the richest man in Russia sitting in a cage. They eventually sentence him to 10 years in prison. And the other oligarchs in Russia are just going out of their minds. One by one by one after Horikovsky was sentenced. They go to Putin and say, you know, Vladimir, what do we have to do to so that doesn't happen to us?

Putin said, "Real simple, 50%." Not for the Russian government, not for the presidential administration of Russia, 50% for Vladimir Putin. And that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world. And that was the moment that my life changed forever. And that was the moment that things really started turning bad for me.

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>> Well, we we'll get to that part. I've heard you say before about the 50% and I I just I'm curious how we know that that's what happened between him and I remember seeing him dressing down various oligarchs in a public meeting, but how do we know that he personally is taking that money from them like that kind of deal?

>> Because they told me people told me that that was the deal. And you know I could I one could say well how do how you know maybe they were not correct or exaggerating but I think we've now seen enough anecdotal information to support what I was told that it becomes pretty I mean so for example um there's Putin's house on the Black Sea. I'm sure you know about that or may well I don't know if your reader or listeners know about that but Lexi Noni made a great video that's been watched by 25 million people about Putin's um it's a billion dollar house on the Black Sea.

>> Nice place.

>> Not really. I mean it it's it's it's really a crude place. They've got stripper poles and a bowling alley. I mean it's I'm not sure that any of us would like actually want to like live there. But um uh uh billion dollars for that. He's got an 800 or maybe $900 million super yacht.

>> And and where does he get this stuff from? All all the all the money trails lead back to the oligarchs. M

>> um when his daughter got married um the son got a a dowy um which was the gift of like 30% of a major multi-billion dollar prochemical firm

>> when he cheated on his daughter and they got divorced the the son-in-law gave it back to the oligarch. I mean it's you know there's a million of these stories.

>> See that is a testament to the power of the male libido. Like you marry Putin's daughter and then cheat on her.

>> That is not a wellthought through move, is it?

>> You know, I mean, I guess he he just couldn't control himself.

>> Either that or he just backed himself.

>> Yeah. I I don't think that's a smart move. Um, so

>> So he's still alive, though, as far as I'm aware. So really Yeah. But he's the son he's the son of one of Putin's best friends. You know, they they're not they're not killing each other. I mean, you would think. I mean, I I um Anyways,

>> it's a dispute within the family sort of thing. Uhhuh. Um, we're joking around, of course, but I I was just very curious to hear that. So, you had oligarchs who personally told you this is what Putin said to us.

>> U, and why did this begin to interfere with your business and what you were doing?

>> Because I was busy carrying on with my naming and shaming campaigns. So I I it wasn't So you you'd think it's pretty ridiculous for some guy from Chicago to be outing the oligarchs and doing all this kind of stuff and and the answer is it was was ridiculous. I had kind of shaved off the risk sensors in my

>> in my brain um because you couldn't go out there with like a full set of riskreward and and take that and do that. And um and so I I was just plowing forward even after Horikovsky was imprisoned exposing more malfeasants, but I wasn't exposing the enemies of Putin anymore. I was exposing his 50% interest,

>> but I wasn't thinking about that.

>> And I was going to ask you about that because I remember growing up in Russia in the 1990s and objectively it was a wild and crazy time. Yeah.

>> What did you think when you arrived in Russia in the early '9s? And just you must have, you know, with your American background, I visit America all the time. The mindsets are so different.

>> You must have found it a a huge shock but also probably a thrill, right?

>> Well, I mean, so first of all, I I I wasn't um in Russia, they they really over generations, they've kind of destroyed initiative, um idealism, uh public concern, philanthropy. They they've just destroyed all of that. But in America, you know, that was all that kind of stuff was in in our, you know, DNA and brought up and pounded into you that and and and probably, you know, can do attitude, optimism, everything could be better in the future than it is today. That that that was my thinking. So, I show up in this country which is completely chaos. And when when communism ended, they didn't have a system. You know, they called it capitalism, but they nobody had created anything really. It was just total chaos. But but I showed up there and I said to myself, my bet is that it's going to go from chaos or um to something less chaotic, horrible to bad. I called it the Nigeria to Brazil trade.

>> And so I showed up there and I thought, you know, I wanted to be part of this process of and and by the way, you're going to make a lot of money if it goes from horrible to bad. That was my thinking. And um and it and it started to go from horrible to bad. And Putin's first few years, he wasn't this monstrous guy that he is right now. And he was like, you know, he was kind of like uh a nameless, faceless um technocrat. That's how we kind that's how we thought of him in those those first few years. And you know, he was like reforming the tax system and you know doing all sorts of stuff that you could honestly say were economic reforms. And so the the thought was that we were going to be in this transition. And so it was kind of cool to be there when when it was all total chaos and and in watching the little green sprouts of like, you know, civil society start to form. And so I thought, you know, this is this is great and and I wanted to be part of it and I and I wanted to profit off of it as well.

>> So Bill, going back to the story, Putin is going around asking for 50% here, 50% there. How did that change and how was your life completely different after those events?

>> Well, um, so I was now going after him. I mean, his interests and and I became very inconvenient. You know, here I was, um, I'm I wasn't talking to him. I wasn't, you know, that they were, um, I wasn't giving him 50% of anything. I was not part of that thing. I was just running my fund, getting mad about different companies doing bad stuff, try exposing them, working with the journalists and um and they had to figure out what to do with me. And um you know that there um if I'd been Russian,

>> they would have killed me. But because I was foreigner and not just a foreigner, I was the largest foreign investor in the country at this point. I was managing four and a half billion dollars at the top of the market. And so I think and and and by the way I'd be killed this minute if I was anywhere near Russia or anywhere within their grasp. So it's not like Putin um I mean he's ch I mean he's he's become more brazen back then he was a bit scared. He was still sort of feeling his way around the world. So they didn't want to kill me. But one day I was flying back. I was I've been living there for 10 years. I was flying from London. I was here in London for the weekend. And I was flying back uh to Moscow and I was at Sherivo airport at the VIP lounge and I was sitting there waiting for my passport to be processed and four heavily armed border guards burst into the lounge, grab me and then take me down to the detention center of the airport. And I stayed there overnight not sure whether I was being and there was two things that could have happened. They could have sent me to Siberia like Horikovski or they could could have deported me. I didn't know what was going to happen that night when I was sitting in that airport detention cell. And I had a lot of um hard questions for myself about uh life choices and how I'd gotten here and maybe I should have been a little bit more careful and all this kind of stuff. And and the next morning I I wasn't sure what was going to happen. And uh and then finally they come for me and and they put me back onto a airflot flight and deport me. Um, and then when I land in London, um, I get a letter from the Foreign Ministry saying I've been expelled because I'm a threat to national security. So, good news. I'm not dead. I'm not in a Russian prison. I'm just deported. But when the Russians go after you, they don't do it. So, that's, you know, it doesn't happen. That was a mild sanction. When they would go after you, they they usually do some really nasty stuff.

>> And I I said to myself, this is not the end of the story. This is the beginning of something really bad. And um and so what did I do? I um I had a bunch of people working for me in Moscow. And uh and there so I say to myself, they could these people could could be victimized. We need to get them out. And I evacuated my team and their family members. Once I got everyone out, I said, "Well, we have a lot of money over there. Um, these guys are probably going to uh go after the money. We should get get our money out." And and we quickly and quietly sold every last share we held in Russia. Got all of our money out. So, I kind of dusted off my hands. I said, "Ph, people safe, money safe, you know, um, time to move on to other stuff." set up a new investment fund investing in other places. Started investing in other places. I'm at a board meeting in Paris. Um June 4th, 2007, I get a frantic call from the only last the last remaining person I have in in Russia, which who was a secretary sitting in our empty office. And she says, "There's 25 police officers, you know, breaking down the door. What should I do?" I said, "I don't know. Let me call up my lawyer. I've got an American lawyer in Moscow." I say there's 25 police officers breaking down my door. And he said, 'We got 25 police officers in our office looking for your documents. 50 police officers doing simultaneous raid in my office and my law firm's office looking for our official documents for our investment holding companies, all the stamp, seals, and certificates. They find them at the law firm's office. um they take those documents away and the next thing we know we no longer own our investment holding companies. They had been fraudulently reregistered into the ma into the name of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out of jail early presumably to put his name on these documents. So I'm sitting there thinking, okay, so the police have raided my office, seized the documents, used the documents to steal my empty the companies were empty now because remember we got everything out to steal these empty investment holding companies. I'm not worried about the money. Money is already safe. It's offshore. But if the police are doing all this stuff, working with killers, I'm going to be walking through Frankfurt airport one day and someone's going to, you know, arrest me on a Russian interpole warrant.

>> And I say to myself, we got to figure out how to how to stop whatever is happening here. And so I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, guy named Sergey Magnitzky. He worked for an American law firm. He was one of these people that could just literally run circles around everybody else with the law. He just knew exactly what he was doing. And I say to him, I want you to figure this out. Figure out who's doing what, what are they doing, why are they doing it, how are they doing it. We need to stop it. And so he goes out, he researches everything. And he's super smart guy. And he figures it out. He said he said, "This is the most cynical thing I've ever seen." So when we were when I was expelled and after I sold everything, we had a billion dollars of profits on the securities that we sold. And off that billion dollars of profits, I paid $230 million of capital gains tax to the Russian government. What Sergey had figured out was that this group of crooks that stole our companies with the police documents, they stole our companies. And then they went to the tax authorities and they said there was a mistake made in the previous year's tax filings. These companies didn't earn a billion dollars. They earned zero. They came up with a complicated way of explaining it. Therefore, um the $230 million that was paid in taxes in the previous year was paid in error, and we'd like that money back. They applied for this illegal $230 million tax refund on the 23rd of December, 2007, and was approved and paid out the next day, Christmas Eve. It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia paid out in one day on a fraud. I mean, if I had genuinely overpaid um $10,000 of taxes in 2007, I'd still be waiting for the tax refund today.

>> Mhm.

>> But an illegal $230 million tax refund was refunded in one day on a fraud

>> on Christmas Eve. on Christmas Eve, they actually celebrate Christmas whatever 13 days later. But um uh anyways,

>> no one's working at this time anyway is the point, right? So, so people at the very highest level of government have clearly been involved in making this happen.

>> So Sergey and I looked at this and we said to ourselves, obviously this is a rogue operation, an inside job, corruption at the highest level. And we als but we also said to ourselves that this couldn't have been authorized by Putin because he's a patriot and a nationalist, right? He's all talking about how the greater good of Russia, this must be something, you know, he must be getting because, and by the way, this wasn't our money. This was the Russian government's money that was being stolen. So Sergey and I were convinced um wrongly, but we were convinced that that this this was a a rogue operation and we if we brought it to the attention at the highest levels in the Russian government, then the good guys would get the bad guys. So we wrote criminal complaints to the head of the all the different law enforcement agencies. Um I went on television, radio, newspapers explaining the whole scam and putting it out there. Sergey went to the Russian State Investigative Committee, which is their version of the FBI, testified against the police officers who are involved in the fraud, and then we sat back and waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Turns out in Putin's Russia, there are no good guys. 5 weeks after Sergey testified against the police officers, the same police officers came to his home on the 24th of November 2008 and arrested Sergey. They put him in pre-trial detention and they started to really like put the screws to him. Um they put him in a cell in cells uh with 14 inmates and eight beds. Kept the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and no window panes um December in Moscow. So he nearly froze to death. They move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night. Um they had to put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. And they figured this is a guy who um wears a blue suit and a red tie. He works in a fancy American law firm, buys Starbucks in the morning on his way into work. You know, they figure they put the screws to him, you know, he'll he'll do whatever they they want want him to do. And they wanted him to withdraw his testimony. They wanted him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million and he then and they wanted him to say that he did so on my instructions. So, you know, here here's this guy that doesn't look so powerful, but he had a a will of steel. And for him, the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more awful than than uh whatever they were subjecting him to. And he he just refused. And so the um the the um pressure and the torture and the pain and the and the unpleasantness just got worse and worse and worse over a long period of time and he started getting pains in his stomach. Um he started losing weight. He lost 20 kilos. Um he went to the prison infirmary and they diagnosed him as having pancreatitis and gallstones and they said he needed to have an operation. And this was the operation was scheduled for the 1st of August 2009. Um about about a week before the operation the um the same people who were torturing him before came to him and said listen you know uh if you sign this false confession everything will be good. He refused again. Uh and in retaliation they moved him from the prison that had a hospital where he was scheduled to have an operation to a maximum security prison called Bhurka which is considered to be one of the most awful prisons in Russia. And at Bhutka there were no medical facilities for his operation and they refused him all subsequent medical treatment. Um he went into a terrible downward spiral. He was in constant agonizing pain. He and his lawyers wrote desperate requests to every different branch of the criminal justice system, begging for medical attention. Every one of their requests was either ignored or denied in writing. On November 16th, 2009, um he went into critical condition. On that night, the Bhutka authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore. So, they put him in an ambulance and sent him across town to a different prison um that had a medical wing. They don't put him in the emergency room. They put him in an isolation cell. They chain him to a bed and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergey Magnitzky until he died. This was November 16th, 2009. He was 37 years old. uh he left a wife and two children. I got the news the next morning and it was the most horrifying, traumatizing, life-changing news I could have ever gotten. I I assumed that the worst case scenario for him was like a long prison sentence on trumped up charges. I couldn't have ever imagined that they would kill him. And when I was finally able to kind of clear my head and think about what what I was going to do with this, I made a um a decision. I made a vow which is that um I was going to put aside my life as a businessman um and I was going to devote all of my time, energy, and resources um going after the people who killed him and make sure they face justice and for that's that's what I've been doing for the last 17 years.

>> It's such a powerful story, Bill, because it's obviously about many things, but it's also about the nature of heroism. And we think about heroes looking a particular way or sounding a particular way, but Sergey was a hero in the truest sense of the word. He really was. He really was. And the thing about it is that he he he was like an unexpected hero. I mean, in the sense that he he wasn't, you know, he was a tax lawyer, you know, he he he was not a human rights lawyer. He was not a a political activist. He's not a Lexi Ni or, you know, or journalist. He was just a tax lawyer working for rich guys, helping them with their taxes, but when he got thrown into this horrible situation. He he was he did exactly the the the what I mean I I wish he hadn't been a hero. I I wish he had he had been a flawed individual and would have he could have testified against me for anything and it would have been fine. um he'd still be alive, but he was truly he he had principles and when he was faced with this kind of duress, he he he did the most heroic thing. And and you know, the one thing I've learned a lot over the last 20 years is that the sometimes the people you expect to be heroic aren't and sometimes the people you you had no idea are heroes turn out to be. and Sergey turned out to be an amazing hero

>> because that is, you know, I don't think we can actually comprehend in the West that's like to experience what that's like to have the weight of a government come down on you and the knowledge that there is literally nothing that you can do.

>> Yeah. And whatever path that you take, however you attempt to address it fairly by legal means, you know, it's not going to go anywhere.

>> Well, this is the interesting thing about Sergey was that up until the very end, he was an idealist. He actually believed that that that if he filed he he filed a complaint or he he made a legal uh um you know, application um that that some somewhere in the system that the law would protect him. He you know I I asked him before before all before he was arrested I asked him to leave and he said he said you know Bill this is not 1937 um this is not Stalin's Russia the law will protect me and he believed it and and he believed it so much in in in a true lawyer's lawyer way in his 358 days in detention he filed 450 complaints documenting all this mistreatment and abuse and and all this terrible stuff um because He's he believed in until the end probably until the last until they were beating him that that somehow somehow it was going to come out all right that that's you know so he was a hero and and an idealist and I guess a a naive idealist and um if he had been more cynical like everybody else in Russia he would have written he would have signed what they wanted him to sign and then he'd still be alive

>> but also the part of the story the the subsequent part of the story shows that you know he you say he was a naive idealist but with your help he did enact some change.

>> He did he changed the world his his sacrifice. So for me the idea that that that he would die and there it would be a meaningless death. I just I just couldn't I just couldn't live with that. I could not live with this thought that that it was that it' be be a meaningless death. And so I I I made it my life's work to make sure that there was some meaning to this tragedy. And and the way the so the way that that we got some meaning for this tragedy is that um I wanted to first of all I wanted to get justice. I mean and I I wanted I I wanted to make sure that the people that did this to him just couldn't laugh it off and enjoy their money. and and we first I mean I guess me naively at first I thought we thought like maybe we can get justice in Russia it had become very very um well known this whole story it was not it didn't get you know swept under the carpet I I made sure of that and uh and because Sergey had written all these complaints we had all this documentary evidence of what had happened to him not not on the last night of his life that we got later but all this you all these complaints and so I gave them to the newspapers the there was a Russian opposition newspaper called Nova Gaz Zeta, they published one of his letters with a long letter in its entirety on the front page and like eight pages in for everyone to read. And so it became a national uh cause cra. And I I thought at first that that we'd be able to get some kind of um uh justice inside of Russia. I And a lot of people were talking about it and a lot of people were upset about it and um but the authorities completely circled the wagons. Completely and absolutely circled the wagons. And so um and and they and they and Putin got involved. Putin personally got involved. He got involved and he he personally exonerated every every single official who played any role top to bottom in this whole thing. Everybody. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, "How do we get justice outside of Russia?"

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>> And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, "How do we get justice outside of Russia?" And and the answer is that these people killed Sergey because they stole $230 million. And the $230 million that they stole, they don't keep in Russia because as easily as they stole it, it could be stolen from them. So what do they do with the money? They take it outside the country. And and by the way, it's not like a mystery that that's what the Russians do. We see them everywhere. All over London and the south of France and Korchaval and and Sardinia. I mean, they're everywhere with their money and and um you know, Russia is a poor country, but but you know, if you see Russians in Europe, you think it's a rich country because uh because they're all spending all this stolen money. And so I came up with this idea which is that that um uh you know if if they killed Sergey for this money and they're traveling with this money and doing all this kind of stuff, why not take away their ability to travel to the West and why not take away their ability to use their money in the West? And I took this idea to Washington and I shared it with a Democratic senator named Benjamin Carden and a Republican senator John McCain. And I told him the same story that I've just shared with your you and your audience today. And I said,"Can we freeze their assets and ban their travel?" And these two senators said, "Yes." And that became known as the Magnitzky Act. And um and it really took off. It it it really took off in Washington. And um uh by the time it came for a vote, uh it passed the Senate 92 to4. It passed the House of Representatives with 89%. and it became a federal law on December 14th, 2012. And Putin went out of his mind. This was probably the first time that anything that anyone pushed back. I mean, you know,

We we we we were living in a world of total appeasement of Putin. Everybody just wanted to appease him. People wanted Russian money. They wanted Russian gas in Germany. And this is the first time that like something happened to him that that wasn't his liking. He he couldn't he couldn't bluster his way out of this.

>> Was he named in the act?

>> He he wasn't named in the act, but it this was like so the act basically said Russia is such a corrupt country full of such nasty human rights abuse and dirty business among corrupt officials and they have such impunity that we have to punish them because they they can't control themselves. They're such a bunch of dirty barbarians that we that they that that they can't control their own country, so we need to impose. And so, I mean, it was really the ultimate ultimate insult to Putin that and the ultimate recognition of what's going on in Russia. And um and so as as officials started get getting sanctioned, he got so mad. He got so mad that he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families in retaliation. And the orphans that are being adopted are the sick ones that are being brought back to uh to the west for for uh you know medical I mean they they're adopted they they get medical treatment they are they end up um you know get having normal lives in Russia they die in in the orphanages. So he's he's basically sentencing his own orphans to death as a political gesture. Um uh he made repealing the Magnitzky Act his single largest foreign policy priority. And then he started going after me. Death threats, kidnapping threats, Interpol red notices. I've been on the Interpole red notice list eight times.

>> What does that mean, Bill?

>> Interpol International Police Organization.

>> But the red notice.

>> Yeah. So international police organization. It's like if if someone is a fugitive from the let's say someone like burns the house your house down in Britain. Everyone knows it. um if they flee to another country, Britain can put them on the Interpole notice, red notice system, and then France will pick them up and return them to um so this is what Russia did to me. They said, um uh you're a criminal. Um uh we want you arrested. We want you we want you sent to Russia so that they could do the same thing to me that they did to Sergey Magnitzki. They applied to the British government uh a dozen times to have me extradited. uh you uh they were making movies about me. There were uh smear campaigns, there was lawsuits. I mean, there were there was probably 200 people working in the uh Russian government trying to ruin my life um because they were so angry with me about the Magnitzky Act. And they thought they thought that that with all this intensity and all this danger and all this threats that I would back down. Um, and they thought that all these threats to America with the adoptions that these senators would back down. But it had just the opposite effect. The senators decided to make a global Magnitzky act. So to sanction anybody who does this stuff anywhere and name it Magnitzky, which was the ultimate insult to Putin. Um, and I started going to other countries and I started getting Magnitzky acts in other countries. And we got the Magnitzky Act in Canada in 2017, in the uh here in the UK uh in 2018, in the European Union in 2020, Australia 2021, uh various other uh Iceland, Norway, Mont Montenegro, Kosovo, 35 countries now have Magnitzky acts. and and coming back to Sergey's, you know, how he's changed the world is that um now if if you're a victim of human rights abuse anywhere in the world, um uh you can go to the US or to UK or to Canada and get those people sanctioned and it scares the hell out of people, bad guys, if they're if they can't travel, if they can't spend their money, if their money is not safe, if their money is going to be frozen. um it scares them really profoundly. And so I I think I don't know for sure, but I think that there are probably people who are asked to do terrible things that don't do terrible things because they don't want their money frozen. They don't want to be become they don't want to become international paras. I think that Sergey's death saves lives. Um and it certainly gives victims some something to um some some measure of justice.

Bill, and while Sergey was in pre-trial detention, I imagine you were doing everything in your power to try and help him get him released. Did you ever have contact through intermediaries with the Russian government or other people who you thought, well, if I, you know, if I concede on something, if I pay them a bribe, I don't know, the Russian way at the time would have been something like that. Did you ever have any attempts like that?

We had a million people approaching us with a million different proposals and but you didn't know who who was real and who was not and and what became very clear very quickly was that um you know there there's all these entreprene sort of criminal justice entrepreneurs they weren't part of the system they were all if you do this you do that and none of it sounded incredible and and everything that we were seeing was that there was like no chance of anything happening and and of course we would have done any you know I would have done anything to get him out if there was anything that we could have done to get him out. I I we I mean it was just uh uh you know just I mean and and by the way I didn't I didn't know he was going to get killed. I I was just feeling terrible because he was in in prison and he was in prison because of me.

>> Of course. No, I totally understand. I guess what I'm getting at is did you ever have a message through the grapevine from the people who were actually doing this to him saying do this and then we'll we'll leave him alone.

>> No, we we never we never got a credible message. And the reason is because they wanted to blame us for stealing the $230 million.

>> So the the whole the whole scam was was to steal the $230 million. Um, arrest Sergey and blame me for stealing the $230 million. That that was their scam. And they they needed the end part to so that they could wrap it up in a nice little bow and um keep their money.

>> That makes sense. And do you think that in you know I don't want to call it a mistake obviously but do you think that the the fact you mentioned Sergey was naive and and you both thought this was corruption that was below the level of Vladimir Putin he thought it's not 1937 people I'm not going to get put in a goolag I'm not going to get killed etc. Do you think effectively that misunderstanding let's call it of Vladimir Putin and his regime is what we have seen since from pretty much every government around the world when it came to understanding his intentions in relation to foreign policy to Ukraine to Georgia etc. Do you think I mean I remember I used to before I did this I used to work as a translator and in the 2000s Russian oligarchs were suing each other in British courts. There was hundreds of thousands and millions and millions of pounds sloshing around for British lawyers, British tax advisor all kind and the city of London was a wash with Russian money and because of that people and the government seemed very reluctant. And if you remember people of both parties, you know, Boris Johnson playing tennis with the wife of some oligarch, Peter Mandelson on Ole Derapasca's yacht. There was just absolutely no willingness to recognize the Russian regime for what it was.

>> You're you're you couldn't be more right. It was it was absolutely the this country was bought and paid for by Russian oligarchs and and this country would do nothing. I mean, it it was I could I could barely get a meeting in the foreign and commonwealth office um to to complain about this or to fight for this or that um during most of this time because everybody was just so enjoying feeding at the trough and and same thing in Germany with the Russian gas and France. Nobody wanted to do anything. Nobody wanted to have any any um anything uh against against Russia. And coming back to the naive that we we experienced, it's it's going on today. There there are people that believe that Putin um is ready to negotiate the end of this war. They think it's, you know, let's give diplomacy a chance. It's kind of like um thinking that they're going to let Sergey out of prison. There's no diplomacy. Putin has no they don't do diplomacy in Russia. It's all win-lose, you know, zero sum. um uh there's the uh you know the the uh dictator and the dictate that that's how it works and and there's no no there's no compromise no one ever compromises in Russia and so when I when I hear about all these ideas that um oh let's you know right now the European Union they're fighting among themselves who should negotiate with Putin nobody should negotiate with Putin because he he he the only the only way that Putin is going to stop is if he's stopped that that it's not not that it's not it's not going to be by agreement that um that this happens. And by the way, the reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money that he's afraid of his own people. And so the best way to um uh um have your own people not get mad at you is to create somebody else for them to be mad at. It's Machaveli 101. Create a foreign enemy, start a war.

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Why do you think his leadership has changed as much as it has? Because when he first came in, as you mentioned, he was a kind of faceless technocrat. Then he cracked down on the oligarchs and and you know, there will be a lot of people who who hate her regime who nonetheless will objectively say you couldn't have a country run by what was called seven bankers.

>> I was I was one of them. I I I was cheering when he took down Hordikovski. I thought one down, 21 to go. and and then and then he paid Roman Abramovich $13 billion for his his oil company and made him the governor of Chukotka region which is like some you know state of Russia. So on one hand you take down one oligarch another one you give them $1 13 billion. How is that taking down the oligarchs? So uh it's it's uh so

>> but what I was going to ask you Bill sorry just to to I hear you about oligarchs and in fact we know that now an oligarch in Russia has become a governmentappointed position effectively right.

>> It always it always was. Yeah. I Well, no. In the 90s, there was a period when they were

>> self when when Putin came in, that was the moment that that they became there. No, there's no such thing as independently wealthy oligarchs. They're all dependently wealthy and they're the and and by the way, people say, "How come they're not rising up right now because the business is so bad?" And so on. These guys are are the most cowardly beta cuck people ever when it comes to Putin. You should see them in his presence. They they're just like these little, you know, they're all, you know, they're all pounding their chests when they're by themselves, but then the moment they're in Putin's presence, they're all just scared to death of him. Coward cowardly people.

>> And so, uh, why do you think his leadership evolved? Because my understanding is the reason that he was, I mean, objectively successful as Russian president for a long time and popular, uh, is that the price of oil went up massively from like $9 a barrel to over 100 at one point. And so Russia, which generates almost all of its revenues by exporting oil and gas, uh was very rich all of a sudden and he could spend money on, you know, doing up Moscow, making it nice and all sorts of other things, public services, etc. Why would a leader of a country that's flourishing in this way go and start a war that would get the country sanctioned, all of his people sanctioned, cause all sorts of economic turbulence, etc.

>> Because he stole too much money. So he's he's been a crook since the since the since before he started. He was in the mayor's office in St. Petersburg, you know, taking skimming. He he he's been and and by the way, nobody in Russia goes into public service to serve the public. If you're a traffic cop, you stop cars and extract bribes. If you're a, you know, a planning re a regional planning person, you you want to get a planning permission for a for a building, you extract a bribe. And it just the bribes get bigger and bigger as the as the as the And so Putin stole an absolute enormous amount of money, like more money than you can imagine. And and by the way, it wasn't just him. Um all the people around him stole a lot of money. My my guess, my estimate um is that over the course of 22 years up until the start of the war that a thousand individuals Putin and and a thousand or 999 individuals had stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian government, a trillion dollars. And by the way, that is the estimate of capital flight from Russia. And so that's money that should have been spent on on on schools and hospitals and roads and public services. Instead, it was spent on private jets and yachts and houses in the south of France. And you could probably do this on a smaller scale over a shorter period of time and get away with it, but they just stole too much money. I mean, there's 141 million Russians living in destitute poverty and a thousand people living in the most lavish life you can ever imagine. And and I believe that Putin saw that that all it would take was someone lighting a match somewhere and the whole thing could come, you know, that there there could be a million people storming the Kremlin. And he and nobody knows what that match would be. You know, like in in Tunisia, a um a fruit seller set himself on fire and that led to the Tunisian government falling and that led to the Egyptian and Syria and so on so forth. Nobody knows how these things work, but what Putin knew was that he didn't want to be sitting in the Kremlin just waiting for the day that people came for him. And and he's a very careful he's he's a very smart guy in terms of understanding all this. And and so he said, "I'm not going to wait for people to get mad at me." Um and so let let's manufacture an enemy. And and the Ukrainians by by almost any definition before all this stuff happened weren't enemies. There was not there was no beef between them. It was completely manufactured. They started calling the Ukrainians Nazis and fascists. It has some historical um resonance because of the Second World War and people still think about that in Russia. And they call them Nazis and fascists. They said that they were doing all these terrible things that they weren't doing. They made up this whole thing um in order to have an enemy. And then they went and took Crimea. And by the way, Crimea was a bloodless um uh capture. There was a bunch of soldiers already there. Almost nobody died. And his approval ratings went through the roof and he was sitting there very pretty and and um but he needed to keep that up there and he needed to keep this enemy going. And so then they went into eastern Ukraine. In my estimation, why did they launch a full-scale invasion in February of 2022? This this was right after COVID. Um, a lot of leaders in different countries were losing their place because of COVID. People were pretty angry at all. Everyone was angry at their governments and Putin understood the value of war. They already had a selfproclaimed enemy, which is the Ukrainians. they based on this thing and and and at this point it was all about saving his own ass, saving his own skin, not wanting to have the Russian people turn on him after co and I that's why he went in and I and I think that you know it used to be profit maximization when him and all these guys were stealing a trillion dollars and then they stole too much money and then it was purely about um survival. And by the way, if Putin ever loses power, what happens to him? He goes to jail. all his money gets taken away and one day he'll be hanging from the um from the rafters.

>> Well, this is what I don't actually understand about the rationale with doing this because once he started this war, the possibility that he's going to enjoy his billions outside of Russia goes to zero. He will not be able to do that objectively. But also he he knows of course that you know he might be able to do a deal like Yelton did but it's hard to imagine. Uh and so what I guess what I'm saying is he's ended any possibility of him surviving comfortably outside of Russia and inside of Russia which I guess now that I'm saying out loud means he will not leave power ever.

>> There you go. He can't leave power. And and so that so he he he can never give up. M

>> and by the way, if he ends this war, he he loses power. He he'll he he won't be in power anymore. And I think that's the most important recognition that anyone can make, which is that all this talk about negotiation isn't going to go anywhere because he needs the war to stay in power. He needs power, needs to be in power to stay alive. And and that's what he's going to do. And and even if it's going to cost another five million Russian young men, it's going to cost another half a trillion dollars of resources, he will burn through everything in order to stay in power.

But but Bill, he can't do this indefinitely. There has to be an end at some point, surely.

>> Well, I mean, look at North Korea. You know, North Korea's been going on for a very long time. I mean, he can he can really really take Russia down a terrible dark road. He's already has, but it can get a lot darker. Um, because he does he doesn't care about anything other than himself. He has no sense of responsibility, no sense of empathy, no sense of national interest whatsoever. It's purely about himself. And and that's I think that's the big misunderstanding in the west is that that we have a a guy who I mean almost nobody else is like that. I mean Hitler was like that, Stalin was like that, you know, um uh you know Paul Pot was like that. But we don't it's kind of hard for us to imagine in our own heads someone being like that in the modern day.

>> And I think that's part of the problem, isn't it? in that we look at Putin through a western lens and we think, oh, you know, he's a leader of a country. He must think like us. He must in that because he thinks like us, therefore, we must be able to get around a table with him, have a negotiation, and give him what he wants because it's kind of what we would want.

>> And and and and he's he's created a narrative about things that he's upset with. So he says, "I'm upset with NATO." NATO people joining NAT Eastern European countries joining NATO. Um, I'm upset with these um Nazis and fascists in Ukraine. Um, I'm, you know, I I have a vision of a of a grander of a bigger part of the map that I want for my and he's created these these narratives. And so people, so we in the West say, well, maybe if we give him this or do that or give him a little more more of Ukraine, then then he'll calm down. But it has nothing to do with what he wants. All he wants is just to save his own skin. And to save his own skin, he needs to be in power. And to be in power, he needs this war. And so it's we're we're it's all this complete sort of we're almost negotiating with ourselves based on this fake stuff he puts out there and and he has reason to put it out there. Why does he put out this NATO stuff and this Nazi stuff? He puts it out for public consumption because the Russian people need something to to hang their hat on. They can't just say um we're having a war for no reason. We need a reason for the war. Um but it's not the re that's not the reason why he's at war. It's just a reason for public consumption.

So, how should the West deal with this situation?

>> What we should do is just let the Ukrainians finish him off. They're they're actually I mean, if we gave them the resources that they need and we we've we've sort of dripfed resources to them. We've given them, you know, enough so that they could not lose, but not so much that they could win. Um, if we gave them the resources to win,

>> um, and by the way, they'd be doing us a great service getting rid of this guy who's threatening us right now. you know, that some some Russian sponsored guys tried to burn down the prime minister's house. I mean, that was just came out in court. It's not like we're we're sort of sitting here all immune from this thing. So, h how could we how could we deal with this? There there's got to be there either one side is going to win and the other side lose or or vice versa. So, either Ukraine is going to win and Russia is going to lose or the other way around. And and what we could do is give the Ukrainians, you know, the stuff so they shoot down this the the missiles coming into Ukraine. Give them give them the 220 billion euros sitting in in that belongs to Russia sitting in in Brussels so they can buy weapons. Um give them to cut off all Russian oil exports so that Russia has no more money. You know, we could help them a lot. we could help them win this war, but we're all just sort of, you know, wanting this negotiation, not wanting to push things too far and and and while we're busy doing that, the Ukrainians are getting on with it as best they can and doing a pretty good job even without what we're doing.

>> I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. I have family in Ukraine. You know, people watching the show will be familiar. I don't want to repeat myself, but I'm also analyzing the logic of what you're saying. And I I don't know that that works for me because if if we give the Ukrainians what they need to win, whatever that means, surely Putin in the desperate straits that he is in will only continue to escalate as much as he can all the way up to using what? Tactical nuclear weapons or like where do we go?

Well, so so that that is the exact reason that that that sort of logic flow that you've just laid out is the exact reason why Biden gave the Ukrainians all the weapons they wanted, but he but he said you can't use them hitting targets in Russia, which is the worst thing in the world. I mean, it's actually, you know, even though Trump has cut off um Ukraine fully um for reasons of his own making. Um that means that that he that the Americans can't tell Ukraine not to hit Russia. And anyone who's been watching the news, you know that the images of these oil refineries in Moscow and St. Petersburg blowing up. It was quite quite extraordinary. Um, so so that that was the logic. Nucle it's all going to lead to nuclear holocaust. We don't want to go there. Let's let's not even consider this. But let's just think about what happens if he uses a nuclear weapon.

>> Um, does it does he win the war? So if let's say he he hits Kiev with a nuclear attack, what hap what's what happens the next day? Did the Ukrainians give up? Are they completely discombobulated and they can't I don't think so. It's a it's a highly dispersed country. It's a very big country. Um the Russians are the main problem they're having is they can't get across the front line. Are all the guys operating the drones all dead? No, they're they're all over the place. They're not dead. And so all he's done is then all of a sudden the Chinese are saying, "Well, we can't give you any more money." And the and the rest I mean to the extent that the global south is supporting Putin, they they all step away. And so Putin becomes, you know, an absolute fully defined war criminal having committed atro atrocities against civilians and he hasn't won the war. And so he understands that probably the the launch of a nuclear weapon is the end of Putin. I mean, that that's probably the the logic that I mean, he would have already done it if if he thought that that was going to help him. I mean, five years into this war, longer than World War uh one, um I I I don't think so. And so, um, I the the answer is that that, um, uh, the way this this could all find itself over is that if the Ukrainians, um, continue at this pace and continue making life so difficult for the Russians, then I imagine it being like the Korean War. I mean, so my my my prediction is is a Korean War type of thing where the Korean War by is still going on. Nobody ever ended it. you have a front line, you have a demilitarized zone. Um, and they they're not they're not lobbing stuff at each other anymore. I imagine that that at some point it's going to be some become so painful for Putin, all these oil refinery attacks and all the attacks on his economy that he's not going to then attack Ukrainian civilians anymore because that's going to be the quidd proquo. And then you have a front line and that's that and then it eventually just sort of calms down. Nobody declares nobody negotiates anything. Nobody declares peace and it eventually just becomes reinforced on both sides. And that's where that's how this war ends. I think that's the the ultimate ending for for this whole thing.

>> I was going to say normally we finish by asking all I guess what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be and you should feel free to answer that. But in addition to that, one of the things I always wanted to ask you was what is it that you know about the Russian mindset and Vladimir Putin's mindset that most people don't understand?

Well, I think the the main thing I know about his mindset is that he is a um total sociopath. I mean, that that we can't negotiate with a sociopath. That that that everybody looks looks at him and says he looks kind of like us. You know, we're all sort of, you know, he's a Christian, he's a uh Caucasian, you know, he's a a European, they they say, you know, we must be able to talk to him. And there is no talking to him. you know, it's it's he has there there's not there's no similarity between him and us in any possible way. And as as quickly as we can dispose of that of that um notion that that he's like us, I think the easier it'll be for us to um uh come up with the policies we need to contain him.

>> So, Bill Browder, thank you so much for coming on the show.

>> And of course, the story that you told us and Sergey's story is told very beautifully and in much more detail in your book Red Notice. Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show.

>> Thank you.