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00:00Welcome to World of Trouble with me, Sam Kiley. My guest today is Sir Bill Browder.
00:05Once an American investor, indeed the biggest investor in Russia, he fell foul of the Putin
00:12regime and the consequences of that were many and manifold, but most tragically resulted
00:17in the death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Tell us what Putin did to you and then did to him.
00:25Sure. So I was the largest foreign investor in Russia for the decade between 1995 and 2005. I
00:34had an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund. And what I discovered in the investment world was
00:41that all the companies that I was invested in were being robbed blind by these people known as the
00:47Russian oligarchs. And I started to expose the corruption, researching how they did it, who
00:53got the money, then working with the FT and the Wall Street Journal and other publications to
00:59expose it. And as you can imagine, that didn't make me very popular inside of Russia. And I was
01:08expelled from the country in 2005. I was declared a threat to national security. My office in Moscow
01:15was raided in 2007. And they seized a bunch of documents. And then those documents that they
01:21seized were used in a very complex fraud in which a bunch of government officials and organized
01:27criminals working together stole $230 million of taxes that my firm had paid for the Russian
01:34government. In order to discover this fraud, I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky. He
01:40discovered the fraud. He exposed it. He testified against the officials involved. And then he was
01:47subsequently arrested by the same people he exposed. They put him in pretrial detention.
01:53They tortured him for 358 days. And they ultimately murdered him in Russian police custody on November
02:0016, 2009, at the age of 37. And his murder has led to a 17-year campaign for justice, which
02:09has
02:09resulted in something called the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky, which freezes the assets
02:16and bans the visas of kleptocrats and human rights violators, and also specifically the people who killed
02:23Sergei Magnitsky. The Magnitsky Act now exists in the United States, in the UK, in Canada, EU, Australia,
02:34in total 35 countries. And it's the basis for which many of the sanctions that were put on Ukraine
02:41were put on Ukraine. There was never any debate or argument after the start of the full-scale
02:47invasion. It was almost immediate that all allied countries would freeze the assets of oligarchs and
02:57Russian officials. And so the Magnitsky Act has, of course, grown far beyond the Magnitsky case.
03:03It's been used in this terrible war of aggression. It's also being used against human rights violators
03:11in other countries, in China, and Nicaragua, and Iran, and so on and so forth. And so,
03:17as you can imagine, Putin didn't take too kindly to this Magnitsky Act. And he's been
03:22chasing me around the world with death threats, kidnapping threats, Interpol arrest warrants,
03:29and all sorts of other nastiness. He was amazed and surprised that, you know, one person could
03:35cause him so much trouble. But that is exactly what I've done. Of course, I'm not satisfied with
03:42the Magnitsky Act being the punishment I'd like to see in a non-Putin regime in the future that people
03:50who killed Sergei Magnitsky go to jail for torture and murder, not just having their assets frozen.
03:55But in the meantime, that's at least something to celebrate.
04:01Here in the UK, Bill, we know of Litvinenko and many, many others, the Skripals, that if you fall
04:09foul of Putin's regime, he can bring the full power of the state, sometimes in a very kind of deliberate
04:17and spectacular way with the use of the sort of chemical or biological weapons or chemical weapons
04:23that the Skripals were attacked with, that could only have come from a state, sending signals.
04:28I mean, frankly, how come you're still alive?
04:32Well, that's a good question. I mean, it's, I think that they would like love to have me not
04:39being alive. They've certainly done a lot of things and failed at a lot of things, which
04:45might have resulted in my demise. First and foremost, I didn't take the advice of 99.9%
04:56of my friends and colleagues and advisors, which was to just, after Sergei's murder, to
05:02go to ground, to shut up, to be quiet, to not do anything about it. I just, I did the
05:06opposite. I went hugely public, very actively naming everybody involved, constantly exposing
05:12their crimes. And that put them a little bit on the back foot and on the defensive because
05:17everybody else does just the opposite. Much easier to kill someone that nobody knows about,
05:22that nobody knows what the story is. And so it became a much bigger deal for them than just
05:28quietly slipping some Novichok on my door handle and watching me squirm as I died. But that's the
05:35first thing. The second thing is, is that the ultimate objective for Putin after the passage
05:44of the Magnitsky Act was to try to discredit the Magnitsky Act so it could be repealed. And so in
05:50their perfect world, what they really wanted to do is get me back into Russia in prison so that they
05:58could torture me just like they did Sergei. So after a week or a month of pork torture, I would
06:04go on to
06:04television and recant everything that I said they did in the hopes that they could then, on the back
06:12of that, repeal the Magnitsky Act and then kill me. That would be their perfect scenario. And so they've
06:17been chasing me around the world, trying to get me back to Russia in really very deliberate ways.
06:22And so, for example, as I mentioned before, they've tried to use Interpol eight times using the Interpol
06:29notice system, red notice system, which is the international arrest warrant system issued
06:35through Interpol to have me arrested. And I've been arrested several times, once in Madrid, once in
06:39Geneva. And so then so their whole plan was to get me back to Russia and do all this terrible
06:47stuff to
06:47me. And the arrest warrants never worked. And and they've been chasing me in all sorts of different
06:52ways. They've applied to the British government using what they call mutual legal assistance to have me
06:57extradited back to Russia. They've sued me. They made movies about me. They've done everything
07:03possible. They've hired smear campaigners to try to discredit me in the West. Major, highly financed
07:10campaigns, hoping that if I was discredited, then the West wouldn't protect me and then they would
07:15send me back to Russia for those all this terrible stuff. And what I would say about the Putin regime
07:21is
07:21that they're they're very evil, but they're not that great at exercising their evil. And the reason
07:28they're not so great at it is they have what I would call C students from D universities with no
07:34real
07:35motivation to do what they're supposed to be doing. And so they mess up on almost every one of their
07:40projects. And by the way, it wasn't so different with with Litvinenko. There is a whole trail of polonium
07:47going all over Russia. They made three tries before they killed him because it was such an
07:51incompetent, an incompetent operation. And of course, they never got the scribbles. They ended
07:58up getting Dawn Sturgis, you know, a poor woman living in Salisbury. And so they're not they're not
08:06that good at the stuff that they do. And we can see how bad they are, the stuff they do
08:10with their
08:12execution of their war in Ukraine. It's been a disaster. They are supposedly number two military
08:18in the world. It's not two military in the world. It's actually the number two military in Ukraine
08:24after Ukraine. And so it's it's they're not just they're just not that good at the stuff that that
08:30doesn't mean that that one day you're going to not you could easily read some horrific story about
08:37what happened to me because their intentions are still there and their intentions are still bad and
08:41they still have a lot of resources. But there's this expression. I've got to be lucky every day.
08:49They've only got to be lucky once. And so far, they have once, but they could be. And so it's
08:53a very
08:54real issue. It's a very real fear and something that I have to think about a lot. I mean, this
08:58is a
08:59regime that's not above going after people's family members in order to get to them or indeed to punish
09:05you. They might they could go after your your children and others very close to you. I mean,
09:12how is that something that you square within the family? I mean, does that cause stress and strain
09:18between you? Well, that's very interesting because you mentioned children and I have a 17 year old son
09:24who was inspired by the work that I did. And he got involved in a in a big project to
09:32research how the
09:33Russians were using cryptocurrency to launder money. It's my generation doesn't understand
09:38cryptocurrency. His generation does. And he discovered all sorts of schemes and scams and
09:45bypassing sanctions operations that they have. He wrote a hundred page report. He presented it in
09:53parliament. He convinced 26 members of parliament to write to the foreign secretary to close down some
10:00of the scams. They closed down some of the scams with new sanctions. And then on June 2nd this summer,
10:09he was sanctioned by the Russian government. So he's the youngest person ever sanctioned. So
10:13they do go after people, but my family is going after them as well. So, I mean, it's it's not
10:20a pleasant
10:20thing. I do worry about everybody in my family. I'm sure that everyone worries about their family
10:25members. Well, most people don't have a kind of target on their heads, courtesy of one V Putin.
10:32Yeah, that's true. And, you know, we do what we have to do and we take whatever precautions we can
10:38take. But but I also don't want my children to live in a bunker anywhere like Vladimir Putin,
10:44who's such a paranoid guy sitting down in his bunker. We're not going to live in a bunker.
10:50Have you through this process, did you run into and this I'm slightly got an axe to grind myself
10:58because as journalists in a lot of these places, I'm told, particularly by British foreign office
11:02officials, don't get into trouble. There'll be nothing we can do for you. A kind of reluctance
11:08from the establishment to really get onto the front foot over the issues that you were raising,
11:15not least because London itself historically has enjoyed, shall we say, healthy capital flow from
11:23people of unhealthy ethical backgrounds. Well, I think you're being way too polite.
11:29How would you put it? I think that that that there was a whole class of people who were,
11:38you know, feeding at the trough of dirty Russian money. I think that London was the center of Russian
11:47money laundering and Russian capital flight. And a lot of very important people in the British
11:53establishment, in the House of Lords, former government officials were basically concierges,
12:02financial concierges for the Russian oligarchs and for the Putin regime taking, taking a lot of money.
12:09And what they viewed as a lot of money, what the oligarchs sort of laughed at, you know, this is
12:14like
12:14the kind of change, change, change that's sort of, you know, on the floor of their car flicking at these,
12:21at these greedy little members of the establishment in the UK who were thinking that this was big money
12:30and they were sacrificing the integrity of the United Kingdom. And when I say sacrificing the
12:36integrity of the United Kingdom, what I mean is that you have these individuals who were members of
12:41the establishment that were whispering in the ears of successive prime ministers and foreign secretaries
12:48saying, no, we shouldn't, we shouldn't crack down on these people. It would cause us trouble. We have so
12:54much to lose. Let's not do it. And just, just to remind everybody, um, one of our prime ministers,
13:02Teresa May, she was the home secretary at the time that the, um, Litvinenko widow wanted to have an inquest
13:11into why did her husband die? Who, who killed him? Who's responsible? And she wrote a letter to the court
13:18saying, um, there should not be an open inquest into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko because that
13:25would upset diplomatic and business relations with Russia. So she was saying we shouldn't investigate
13:31a murder using radioactive materials in, in the UK because we wouldn't want to upset business.
13:40That's on paper. I've, I've, you can look up the document. It's, it's there. And, and that was just
13:46one of the documents that's in the public domain. She had to put it into court, but all the other
13:51decisions were being made very much, you know, on the hush hush on the down low, um, where the British
13:58government successive British governments, um, wanted nothing to do with upsetting Putin and upsetting
14:05oligarchs. And so I, I could barely get a meeting inside the foreign office for many years. Um,
14:11it's, it was remarkable. I mean, they would not even let me into the building because I was so
14:17radioactive because nobody wanted to mess around with the, the, the gravy train, the feeding at the
14:23trough. Oh yeah. Have things improved? I mean, we now at least do have a version of the Magnitsky
14:30Act in the UK with much more targeted sanctions. Um, or is there still this sort of schism between,
14:38uh, if you like the ethical track and the financial track and the establishment? I mean,
14:44the, the, are you still facing obstruction from people trying to do all kinds of deals, uh, in Russia
14:51or with Russia or around Russia? Not at all. And so the moment that the full-scale invasion started,
14:58all of these individuals realized how completely irresponsible it was to do that. And anybody who
15:07was in power understood that they would lose power very quickly if they were starting to do anything
15:12that was seen to be sympathetic to Putin. And, you know, as you introduced me, my, I have a sir
15:19in
15:19front of my name. I was knighted the same foreign office that wouldn't give me a meeting in 2015 or
15:2516, um, recommended me for a knighthood, um, in 2024. So, um, you know, it's completely a hundred
15:34percent, uh, changed from, from one to the other. Now the British government is probably the most
15:40robust government in the world when it comes to, um, holding Putin to account, standing up on,
15:47on behalf of Ukraine. I mean, it's, it's truly remarkable how much the country has changed,
15:52but it only, um, changed when too late, you know, the full-scale invasion. If we had been tougher,
15:59if other countries had been tougher on Putin, um, after he went in and took Crimea, um, if we had
16:05imposed devastating sanctions, he might not have done the full-scale invasion. He thought he could
16:10get away with it. He thought we were all so weak and cowardly that he could roll in there and
16:14the
16:15Ukrainians wouldn't put up a fight and we wouldn't help the Ukrainians. And that would be the end of the
16:19story. And, um, there's this expression about sanctions, which is that they serve two purposes.
16:25They can either serve as, as a, uh, um, a way of preventing people from, uh, uh, doing bad stuff.
16:33Um, if you use them properly, a deterrent, or they can be used as a punishment. And the problem is
16:41that
16:41we didn't use them as a deterrent. And so now we have to use them as a punishment. But when
16:46you punish
16:46people, you've got to punish them a hundred times harder than, than you have to deter them.
16:50And, um, and so even though the British government is exactly where it should be,
16:55and I should say every prime minister, labor conservative, every prime minister now has
17:00been exactly where they should be when it comes to Ukraine. It's kind of too late, um, in the sense
17:06that there's, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians that didn't have
17:11to be dead. If we had been more robust, if we hadn't been concierges to the Russian oligarchs.
17:18Well, I mean, you know, that I couldn't agree with you more, frankly. I mean, I was in Ukraine in
17:242014, 2015, the Crimea seizure, then the so-called uprising in the Donbass, clearly, obviously driven
17:31entirely out of Moscow. And between then and the very early 2020s, Ukraine was actually forbidden.
17:41The United Kingdom, for example, refused to provide any kind of lethal aid to a country, a democracy that
17:48had been invaded by an autocracy next door. And the trajectory of the change in heart, I have to say,
17:55I mean, you've been very straightforward about the attitude of the foreign office, but, and, and the
18:00British establishment, but they were fiercely against any kind of support for Ukraine until it
18:07became impossible not to. So there's, I mean, it did look surely as a sort of bandwagoning and
18:14completely unprincipled. Well, I mean, you know, the unfortunate thing about the world is that most
18:22people are sheep. They're just running in one direction or the other, depending on, on, um, you know,
18:28there, there, there's not that many leaders. There's not that many hugely charismatic, uh, you know,
18:34moral, uh, you know, Northern stars to look at out there. Um, that's just the nature of human
18:42humanity. That's the nature of society. You know, America celebrates, you know, the, the, um, great
18:47role it played in the second world war. Well, they didn't want to get involved until Pearl Harbor. I mean,
18:51you know, this happens time and time again, nobody, everybody, they don't redesign, uh, a faulty
18:57aircraft until after it's crashed. And that's, that's where we are right now. But the UK is doing
19:03what it should be doing. Um, as far as, as far as Ukraine is concerned, Ukraine is, is doing a
19:08pretty
19:08good job right now, uh, in fighting off the Russians. Wasn't always, but it is now. Um, and with, with
19:14significant help from the UK, but of course you're right. I mean, and, and, and everybody was doing the
19:20same thing. Nobody was supplying weapons until it was too late. But, um, now we are, except for the
19:25Americans, of course, the Trump administration has cut off Ukraine. Um, the Ukrainians are being very,
19:32very clever about developing, uh, drones that break through, uh, Russian air defense. And they've
19:39now done something which, which, um, I don't think anyone could have ever imagined, which is that
19:44Russia is, is sort of indiscriminately attacking civilians in Ukraine through
19:50bombs and drones. And now Ukraine is retaliating by systematically dismantling the oil and gas
19:58industry of Russia by blowing them up. And, um, I think this is extremely effective and I think it
20:05may potentially not, it was not going to lead to the end of the war, but it may lead to
20:09the end of the
20:11indiscriminate violence against Ukrainian civilians. I think that, you know, right, right now, depending on
20:16whose, whose numbers you believe, somewhere between 25 and 40% of Russian oil refining capacity has been
20:24destroyed or at least, uh, impacted. Um, so it doesn't work right now. And, and I imagine that
20:33if the Ukrainians could double that, um, they're really in a sort of perfect position to say to the
20:38Russians, you know, it's real simple, don't hit our civilians with stuff and we won't destroy oil
20:45refineries. And, um, and I think that's a pretty fair, um, situation. And that if, if that were to
20:51happen, then the war then gets narrowed down to the front lines and the front lines we've seen that
20:58the Ukrainians have now created a kill zone. Um, basically there's nobody who can cross the front
21:03line without dying because they use drones so effectively. And if that were the case, then you're,
21:09I don't believe you're ever going to have Putin signing a peace treaty. He can't do that. I don't
21:14think the war is ever going to end officially, but I can imagine that it may grind down to a
21:19sort of low level, potentially even totally quiet front in the same way as North and South Korea did.
21:28Um, and I, that's kind of my prediction about how this thing finally resolves. It's not going to be
21:33with Putin, um, uh, signing a peace treaty. It's not going to be with Ukrainians giving up territory
21:39that the Russians haven't conquered. It's going to be having the front lines eventually frozen.
21:45And it's not going to be because Donald Trump does anything or forces Ukraine to do anything
21:50because he can't force Ukraine to do anything. And it's not going to be because Vladimir Putin is
21:54convinced of anything. It's going to be just because at the end of the day, um, it's a stalemate. And
22:00that's, that's sort of how I would envisage this thing playing itself out. Well, let me put you to a
22:05slightly different scenario, uh, which is my theory, um, which is, I think that actually the Ukrainians
22:12can win this. I think that the, uh, systematic attacks on the oil infrastructure are also indicative of,
22:20excuse me, that they're also attacking, uh, the medium and long range logistics platforms,
22:27the curse bridge, uh, the Ukrainians have dominated, completely dominated the black sea
22:32for more than three years. Now they actually have won the battle for the black sea without a Navy
22:38that they could, or could they not simply collapse the Russian army into a route? And what would that
22:45mean for Putin? That would be great if it were true. And, and I think part of the problem we
22:51have
22:51is that, um, we want, we, you know, we're all so rooting for Ukraine that we, we, we, we chalk
22:58up
22:58every victory they have. And we kind of ignore the capabilities that Russia has. And what Russia has
23:04is a very large population, much, much bigger than Ukraine, much larger financial resources,
23:12uh, than Ukraine, a much deeper, um, sort of reservoir of, of, of ammunition than Ukraine
23:20has. And as a result of that, um, I think that, that, and as a result of Putin's character,
23:27I think you, you have to assume that he will even, let's say that, that, that all the soldiers
23:34in Crimea, um, uh, you know, surrender, uh, which is, you know, sort of a, uh, uh, possibility
23:42if, if all of their supply lines completely get cut and they can't get more weapons and so on.
23:48It doesn't mean that, that the Ukrainians can go into Crimea and retake it. It means,
23:52because they don't have the, uh, the, the physical resources to do. They don't have enough soldiers
23:57to do that. What they're really good is at defending. They're not very good at, uh, attacking.
24:01And the reason they're not good at attacking is that when you attack, you know, you, you incur
24:06much greater casualties than when you defend. And so, uh, I don't, I don't, I, as much as I'd like
24:11to think it's the case, I think that Putin is such a brutal man. He's got so much, he's willing
24:16to
24:16throw at it. He's got absolutely no capacity for empathy or, or guilt or, or anything. He, he, he takes
24:25no responsibility for the loss of life of so many people that, um, he'll just carry on. And so, um,
24:35I mean, I, I hope I'm wrong, but I, I know him from my own struggle pretty well. And I
24:43know that he
24:43never does what would be the rational thing to do. His, his entire modus operandi is to escalate no matter
24:53one. And if you humiliate him, he'll escalate even more. And of course we saw that, you know,
24:58the oil refineries were getting blown up and then all of a sudden they're launching a massive
25:03missile and drone attack just directly into residential neighborhoods in Kiev, no military
25:08objectives whatsoever, just killing and terrorizing regular innocent civilians. That's, that's his,
25:15that's Putin. That's how Putin operates. And, and I think that's how he's going to continue to
25:19operate. And so I think in my own estimation that the, um, the best case scenario is holding,
25:27stopping Putin where he is, not expecting him to negotiate and just making it, you know, forcing a
25:36peace deal, which isn't a deal, but just one where it's just so punishing to him that, you know,
25:43you kind of bite by de facto things just calm down. I, I, I hope I'm wrong. I hope you're
25:48right.
25:48I hope that, that Ukraine can win. It's, it's certainly glorious what they've achieved,
25:53but, but don't underestimate the resources and brutality of Vladimir Putin.
26:00If accepting that he has deep resources and almost unlimited brutality, and we've seen that
26:05in a pin and butcher in the Ukrainian case, we've seen it in Georgia, we've seen it in Syria with
26:11the
26:11barrel bombing of hospitals and so on time. And again, we've seen this behavior from Putin
26:17Putin and his regime. What is his appeal therefore to Donald Trump?
26:25Well, I mean, I think Donald Trump has made himself pretty transparent in this whole thing.
26:29Donald Trump is a, um, uh, a person who's running, he's got sort of two things going on at the
26:36same
26:36time. He's the head of state of the United States and he's a, uh, a profit maximizing businessman
26:41who is, according to various reports has doubled his wealth while he sat in the white house.
26:49How has he doubled as well through different business deals through the UAE, um, through Saudi
26:55Arabia, um, through cryptocurrencies through Kazakhstan. And so it wouldn't be a leap to say that,
27:05um, you know, in these secret meetings that he's had with Putin, there weren't being, there weren't
27:10various lucrative offers being made to him and the people around him to do more business in exchange
27:17for not supporting Ukraine, or perhaps in exchange for helping Putin get Ukraine. That seems to be
27:25what's going on. There's no, um, there, there's no better theory out there right now, um, as to
27:32what's happening. It's not like this, this is some kind of scandalous theory I've come up with.
27:37It's not a scandalous theory that you've come up with. Is it reinforced by the idea that he's also
27:42kind of, there's a sort of man crush in his behavior towards Putin. I mean, there is a sort of
27:49sense that he's meeting his hero. Well, I, I, I wouldn't attribute too much sentimentality to
27:57Donald Trump. He's a very practical guy. Um, he, um, he likes money. It's as simple as that,
28:04you know, the Qataris gave him a gold plated 747. And then later on the Qataris were able to build
28:12an air force training base inside the United States, a sovereign Qatari air force base in the
28:19United States. The Emiratis gave him, him and Steve Whitcoff, uh, $500 million for a shares of
28:28a company that had just been started called world Liberty financial. And then all of a sudden the
28:33United States lifted restrictions on the sale of advanced microchips, the United Arab Emirates.
28:39Trump likes people, um, uh, with money that they're ready to share with him. And so why,
28:44why would it be any different with, with Russia? I don't think that, you know, he, he's got any
28:49particular, um, love or hate or anything with anybody in the world. I think he just looks for
28:54what's in his narrow financial and personal interest. In, in terms of your work now, um,
29:04sort of where is your focus and are you, you clearly making headway, uh, perhaps, well,
29:10as a result of Ukraine, the full scale invasion of Ukraine in terms of targeted sanctions against
29:16Russian, uh, Russian, uh, Russians involved with the war, but are you detecting a kind of cleaning
29:23up of the act elsewhere within the British system? Uh, I, I think that that's too much of it. That's
29:32too big a stretch. So the British system, Britain is, is, uh, set up to be sort of the international
29:41crossroads of the world. Um, the lawyers, you know, all sorts of people from bad countries all fight
29:49with each other in British courts about who's stealing from who. Um, Britain is a place that
29:55if you come from a, uh, non rule of law, non property, right country, you can buy a big house
30:01for your family and they'll be safe there. And as a result, there's a lot of dodgy people from a
30:07lot
30:07of places still circulating in London. It just so happens that the Russians are not welcome, but
30:12you know, if you're Kazakh or Azerbaijanian, um, you know, no questions asked the, um, the dictator
30:21of Azerbaijan, according to, um, many investigative journalists owns a huge swathe of properties in
30:30central London. Um, his, he's on a salary of like, you know, 150 grand a year. Um, they have something
30:37called the unexplained wealth order, which is a law that, which says that if somebody has unexplained
30:42wealth, then the, then the law enforcement agencies can grab that. Have they used it against the
30:48dictator Aliyev of, of Azerbaijan? No, the, uh, Azerbaijanian dictator continues to, um, enjoy his
30:56property in central London. And so I think that, uh, Britain has a long way to go before it becomes
31:01a
31:01clean, um, transparent, non corrupt place. Um, but I'm glad to see that the Russians are no longer
31:11welcomed with open arms. I mean, the picture you paint, I, you know, I'm just thinking about,
31:18because we were talking there about Trump being kind of mesmerized by money and motivated by money
31:23and on both sides of the Atlantic with a slightly different approach, you have the identical problem,
31:30which is this, this fetishization, uh, of great wealth. To what extent are you, are you planning or
31:40can you sort of undermine that and inject matters of principle? And of course, bearing in mind that you
31:49were a very, very wealthy man and in your early part of your career were very successful, was very
31:55successful at pursuing great wealth, um, you know, using wrinkles in the, the, the Russian economy at
32:04the time. Well, um, so there, there's, it's a totally different story being a politician and using
32:12your political power to achieve wealth. That's called corruption. In some cases, it would be
32:22treasonous depending on what powers and what decisions you make as a politician. Um, being
32:29somebody, uh, being a capitalist, there's something wrong with that. In fact, if we don't have
32:32capitalists, then we're going to end up having communism and communism is the worst thing ever
32:37where everybody lives a terrible, low standard of living. And so I'm a, uh, an absolute, um, uh,
32:46capitalist. I come from a family of communists. My grandfather was the general secretary of the
32:50American communist party, but I realized that that was a failed, um, political experiment. So
32:56capitalism is fine. Pursuing wealth is fine. It's pursuing wealth outside the rules, which is not
33:02fine. It's, it's defrauding people is not fine. Stealing, killing people is not fine for money.
33:07And it's certainly not fine for government officials to act outside the national interest
33:12for money. Two very different things. And, and, um, and for what it's worth in the UK,
33:17the government, I don't see with the exception of, of, uh, one particular person, I'm not going to name
33:23on this podcast, but I don't see, um, a lot of politicians, you know, taking bribes in the UK,
33:30um, and doing terrible things. I think the UK is relatively clean as far as that's concerned.
33:34It doesn't mean that the policies are not, are not sort of warped the way we've discussed them.
33:39Um, but it's a totally different thing when you have a head of state, um, who basically enriches
33:46himself or herself at the expense of the people in that country. And that's a very, very bad thing.
33:52And you wonder why Africa is so terrible. Africa is a total, uh, uh, resource rich region of the
34:01world with the poorest people ever in the world. Why is it, why is that happening? Because it's
34:06just corrupt from top to bottom. There's nothing that's not corrupt. Corruption leads to a lower
34:10standard of living. So you can't have corruption and you can't have communism, but if you can have
34:15well-regulated rule of law capitalism, that usually is what leads to the best outcomes for most people.
34:22Well-regulated rule of law capitalism is not a phrase that probably made you very popular
34:28in many boardrooms in the West around the world, at least prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
34:36Well, it's interesting because when I went to Russia, I ran an investment fund and my investment
34:42fund was to, I said, look, I said to my clients, look how cheap everything is in Russia. Look how
34:46inexpensive, undervalued these oil companies are. And the reason that they're undervalued
34:51is because they don't have a properly regulated rule of law country. If we can build a rule of law
34:57country, if we, if, if these companies could start behaving themselves, um, then everything would be,
35:03we would all make a lot more money and Russia would be a better place. And so I was actually,
35:08I had the largest investment fund in the country because in most investors, when they heard my pitch,
35:13they said, well, that makes a lot of sense. We'd like to invest here in this country. We'd like it
35:17to be a better place. If you can contribute it to, to it being a better place and make us
35:20a lot of
35:21money, that would be a wonderful thing. Now, of course they all abandoned me when I fell out,
35:26um, with the regime and they started attacking me. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near me, but,
35:30but it was a, it was a popular, um, and attractive pitch, um, at the, at the moment that I
35:36was doing it,
35:36at the moment when it was working.
35:38At the moment when it was making money.
35:40Well, at the moment when it was making money. Now people don't want to,
35:43so generally people don't want to lose money by, by doing well-regulated rule of law stuff. Um,
35:49but, uh, if it's making money, then, then it can, it can potentially make an enormous amount of money.
35:55If Russia would run like a regular country is, if it was like a fair rule of law place with,
36:00you know, everything normal, it was the, the value of the country would be a hundred times
36:05greater than it is today. Now, this country has been completely dominated by one man and one man
36:13who now, along with your son, considers you public enemies, number one and two as individuals around
36:20the world, perhaps. Um, so, you know, tip of the hat to you for that, uh, distinction to you both,
36:28but tell me how you see Putin, what is his end game and why, for example, did he invade Ukraine?
36:38Certainly on the full scale invasion of February, 2022. Why did he do that?
36:44Well, I, I, my, my analysis tends to be different than a, uh, Kremlinologist. So you,
36:52I think you've had Fiona Hill on your show. She's a Kremlinologist,
36:56a very smart lady knows everything about everything when it comes to that. In my analysis,
37:02you need to be a criminologist, not a Kremlinologist to understand Putin. Basically Putin and every
37:11single person who serves in the Russian government does it for money. So there's not a single person
37:18that ever goes into public service to serve the public of Russia. It's one big kleptocracy,
37:25criminal machine. The guys who become traffic policemen, stop you and extract bribes. The
37:32person who does the land planning won't let you get a planning approval unless you give them a
37:39bribe. The person, the fire inspectors won't check off your fire inspection unless you give them a
37:44bribe. And it works its way up to the system, right up to Vladimir Putin. The higher you are,
37:48the more money you make. And where do the people make the money from? They make the money from
37:53theft, extortion, and just outright stealing from the state. And over a long period of time,
38:01Putin and about a thousand people around him have stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian state.
38:08That's the trillion dollars. A thousand billion dollars has been stolen by Putin and the thousand
38:17people around him from the Russian state. And the reason why people live a bad life in Russia
38:24is because that money should have been spent on schools and hospitals and roads and public services.
38:30Instead, it was spent on private jets and yachts and villas in the south of France.
38:35And that's a formula that works until it doesn't work anymore. And what I could see happening was
38:45that over time, Putin realized that he stole too much money. That someday, for reasons that he
38:52wouldn't be able to predict, something would happen and people get really angry really quick
38:57and they would organize very quickly, virally, and march on the Kremlin. And Putin can kill
39:05Alexei Navalny, the leader of the opposition, Boris Nemtsov, the previous leader of the opposition.
39:10He can target people and kill them or imprison people or deport people on a one-off basis.
39:18But if a million people march on Red Square, he's finished. And he understands that. And so he's not
39:27good at a lot of stuff, but what he is really good at is staying ahead of the curve when
39:32it comes to
39:33losing power. And by the way, he understands that if he ever, if the million people march on Red Square,
39:39it's not going to be an elegant exit. It would be a violent, bloody situation for him personally.
39:46So what if you do if you're a very small man, he's a tiny little man, who's a, he's a
39:51very cowardly
39:52little man. You're scared to death of your own people. You're very greedy, but you're scared.
39:58And you don't know when they're going to come for you because you've stolen too much money.
40:02Well, it comes straight out of Machiavelli 101. You create a foreign enemy and you start a war.
40:09And I believe that the war in Ukraine has nothing to do with NATO enlargement, which is one of the
40:16arguments that all the political scientists make. I don't believe a word that Putin says about the,
40:22his imperial ambitions of restoring the greatness of Russia. If you thought Russia was going to be so
40:26great, why did he steal so much money from everybody and let them all die at such a young age?
40:31Because they couldn't get medical attention. I don't believe that there was any beef between
40:37the Ukrainians and the Russians. The Ukrainians are not Nazis and fascists. That was all, that was all
40:45manufactured propaganda by Putin in 2014 to create a foreign enemy and start a war. And if you have a
40:53war, then your people can't be mad at you because everyone has to be mad at the foreign enemy. And
40:58that's
40:58what he's achieved with this war. And that's the reason why this war is not going to end, why there's
41:03no peace deal to be had. Because he's convinced everybody there's a foreign enemy. If there's no
41:10foreign enemy, then he's the enemy because everyone has lived a bad life under his rule. And so there's
41:16not going to be a peace deal because he can't do a peace deal. If he does a peace deal,
41:20he'll lose
41:20power. If he loses power, then he'll get strung up from a lamppost. And so unfortunately, the only way
41:28that this thing ends is either the Russians win, in which case, we're then going to be fighting with
41:33them because he needs another war with the West, or the Ukrainians win. And if they win, then Putin
41:38will end up being removed by his own people.
41:42Isn't that pretty much the optimum outcome? I mean, what I what I detected in terms of analysis over the
41:48last four or five years on Ukraine, particularly from Europeans is that they have swung from assuming that
41:55Ukrainians were going to lose pretty much overnight to being impressed at their kind of stalwart defenses, to
42:02insisting that ultimately, they were going to have to sue for peace. Now there is a sense that the Ukrainians
42:08could win. And that's causing nervousness, because as you suggest, if that were to happen
42:14in in a dreamland scenario, then the Russian Federation itself risks flying apart, doesn't
42:21it? I mean, the Russian Federation is an empire ruled by white men from Moscow.
42:26I don't think the Russian Federation is going to fall apart. I think that's Putin's
42:30scare tactic with the West. He's saying if it wasn't for me, it'll be a lot worse. There'd be some
42:35terrible guy. Everything would fall apart. It would be a you know, can you imagine 32 different
42:41nuclear powered sub states? It's nonsense. That's his that's his scare tactic. First of all, I don't
42:48think that Ukraine can win this war. I think that the best case scenario is a stalemate where Ukraine
42:55shows Russia that if you do anything more, we're going to hit you hard. We're going to punish you in
42:59ways that are going to really make you feel the pain. But that doesn't mean that they win the war.
43:03It just means that Putin doesn't isn't able to cause the damage that he used to do.
43:08You remember, as you as you wrote in The Independent recently, a sort of North South
43:12Korea situation of a sort of permanent armistice without a peace deal.
43:17And by the way, you know, what happens 20 years from then is that Ukraine is the South Korea of
43:23the
43:23booming, democratic, vibrant economy. And Russia is the North Korea isolated from everybody.
43:31You know, on the satellite, you can barely see the lights. And it's it's a much, much,
43:35much worse situation. That's how I would imagine this thing playing itself out. And I can imagine
43:40that. And by the way, the Europeans, you know, the Ukrainians for a while were begging to be part of
43:45NATO. I think in a few years time, the European in a new NATO, which doesn't include the United States,
43:52are going to be begging Ukraine to be part of their defensive situation. And I can imagine there will be
43:58some type of deal in which Ukraine says, if you help us with our reconstruction financially,
44:04we will help you with your defense militarily, because they've now become the most preeminent
44:09fighting force in our part of the world.
44:14Yeah, it's striking, isn't it? How Trump's efforts to go after the Iranian regime of all things,
44:22alongside Netanyahu and the Israeli right resulted, among other things, in an increase in Ukrainian
44:33military prestige and standing of all places in the Gulf. I mean, we saw this sort of understanding
44:39that kind of, oh, God, who knows about this stuff? Oh, let's get the Ukrainians in a massive change
44:46from the attitudes that prevailed a few years ago. That's true. But I also understand that the United
44:52States spoke to its Gulf allies and told them in no uncertain terms, you can't buy any drone technology
44:59from the Ukrainians. I mean, Trump really is on Putin's side. And I have this from reliable sources
45:06that he didn't want Ukraine to get any benefit from this. He's on Putin's side. And so, of course,
45:13their prestige has increased. And we in Europe are absolutely going to take advantage of Ukrainian
45:20technology, joint ventures with Ukrainian companies, purchases from Ukrainian companies,
45:25and also investments in Ukrainian capacity, because it serves our interests and their interests
45:31perfectly. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, the Americans forbid that from happening,
45:39which is truly a remarkable story. Well, give me more examples. I mean, you say that we've all seen
45:46it in terms of the rhetoric. We've seen it in terms of the fact that the United States has cut
45:51about
45:52$120 billion worth of funding, not the $300 billion that Trump claims, which is a fiction, of course.
45:58They're still providing an intelligence feed to Ukraine. And you suggested there a bit of sort of
46:05insider knowledge in terms of the attitudes that Putin is, sorry, that Trump is firmly on Putin's
46:12side. Can you give more examples? Well, I mean, you don't have to have inside knowledge. You could
46:18just have, so there's outside knowledge, which is U.S. has stopped funding Ukraine. U.S. is voting with
46:26North Korea, Iran, and other rogue regimes against any resolution supporting Ukraine at the United
46:32Nations. There was the shameful, unbelievable, terrible Oval Office meeting in which they publicly
46:40tried to humiliate Zelensky. There was the minerals, the shameful minerals deal, where Trump reclassified
46:49military aid as a loan to be paid back against Ukrainian rare earth minerals, which, I mean,
46:58it's that was the most unbelievable thing. And then, of course, there was the Anchorage understanding
47:04or whatever you want to call it, where in some private meeting, Trump promised Putin that Ukraine
47:10would he would lean on Ukraine to force them to give up all the territory that Russia has been fighting
47:16since 2014 unsuccessfully to get in the Donbass. There's no inside knowledge you need. I mean, the inside
47:23knowledge that I shared is just a particular anecdote about how Trump didn't want Ukraine to get any
47:28money from the Gulf states because he's on Putin's side. But everything tells you he is. And I mean,
47:36there's there's no I don't think there's any more, you know, there's a mystery anymore to this whole
47:40thing. Even the biggest Trump apologists can't really find a way of explaining what's going on here.
47:46How deep do you think that that pro-Putin energy goes in the Trump administration?
47:53Well, Trump controls his entire administration, all the people who work for him directly in the
47:59government of the United States. It doesn't translate at all into the Congress. So if you go to the
48:06Republican side of the aisle and you ask them, who's who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?
48:11They will tell you Putin's the bad guy. Ukraine is the good guy. We should support Ukraine.
48:15Ukraine. And this comes from the most conservative Republican to the most liberal Democrat. Everybody
48:20in Congress still on Ukraine's side. But you have this strange situation with the with Trump
48:25personally. And he controls, of course, everybody who works for him with 100 percent iron fist.
48:32Do you think that that's going to have permanent long term consequences for the United States? I mean,
48:37you suggested just earlier on that there may be a NATO without the US. There are always concerns now.
48:44I mean, it's not long into his second administration that he may pull the United States out of that
48:50alliance altogether. Well, he's he's made intimations to that effect. And so as Peter
48:56Pete's Hegseth, the secretary of defense or secretary of war, as he now calls himself,
49:02they've made intimations of of doing that. And so, well, the answer is to your broad question is,
49:10is the has he ruined all relations with the West, with the rest of the West? The answer is is
49:18absolutely
49:18not. This is a one man situation. If he's gone, I could easily imagine things normalizing. I can
49:28imagine that the next president, whether it's a Republican or Democrat, assuming there is a next
49:32president and they allow a peaceful transition of power, the next president will bark on a world
49:39reset to repair relations with all countries, you know, to make to promise predictable trade links to
49:47shore up military alliances that were frayed. And I think everyone would welcome that with open arms
49:52in the West. And now people will all, you know, continue to develop weapon systems that are not
49:58dependent on the United States and they'll continue to develop artificial intelligence that doesn't
50:04rely on U.S. computers and and so on and so forth. And satellites don't reply, don't don't rely on
50:10U.S.
50:11satellites because nobody wants to be dependent on a fickle ally. But I think for the most part,
50:17Americans, American people are are good people. The American public has a good approach to Ukraine
50:26in Russia, has a good approach to most of these issues. It's just one man. And and for reasons
50:33that are very much questionable why why he's doing this. Do you do you think that there could be a
50:40situation in which there isn't a peaceful transition of power? Do you think the midterms
50:45could be a significant physical flashpoint, for example? Well, look at what happened in in January 6th,
50:542020. They he tried to using tools, prevent a peaceful transition of power didn't work.
51:01He's a lot more powerful now. Why would he do it? Why would he be so amenable to a peaceful
51:07transition
51:07of power in 2028 if he wasn't in 2020? And what will happen just with the midterms if the Democrats
51:16win
51:16both houses of Congress? There'll be investigations. There'll be subpoenas. Every single one of these
51:22questionable business deals that he's done will be looked into in great detail. It'll be a nightmare
51:28for him. So what will his incentives be to prevent that from happening? Will he get away with it? Who
51:34knows? But that's what he will want for sure. And so what is your prediction for the midterms? Is
51:40there going to be violence? I don't really have a prediction for the midterms. I don't know.
51:45My general sense is that the institutions in the United States have functioned. The courts continue
51:53to rule against bad decisions of the administration. The media continues to report on the corruption of
52:00the U.S. Trump administration. The people continue to stand up. Look at what happened in Minnesota. They
52:07ran those guys out. And so I don't think that the institutions are all going to collapse. But I
52:16think it's going to be a fight. I think that the people who believe in clean, non-kleptocracy
52:24democracy are going to have a big fight on their hands. And this is not a partisan thing. It's not
52:28Democrats versus Republicans. It's the people of America versus kleptocracy.
52:33Could you ever have imagined... I mean, what you're describing Trump's agenda to be
52:39sounds like Putin. Could you ever have imagined that you'd be describing the American president
52:46in those sort of terms only five or six years ago? It was unimaginable. I could have... America was
52:53the North Star. It was the country that everybody looked to, to stand up to corruption, to stand up
53:01to dictators, authoritarians, to fight for democracy, to fight for the little guy. And all that's been
53:08thrown out the window.
53:11I always like to conclude these World of Trouble podcasts with a... As an American, you probably
53:18never heard of Ian Dury. But when I was an undergraduate, he was very much our musical hero.
53:24And he has a song called Reasons to be Cheerful. Can you give us some? Any?
53:30Yeah, of course. I think that the Ukrainians are showing that you don't need to be a superpower
53:34to fight against a superpower. The people of America, the institutions, the judges are ruling
53:39against all bad decisions. Every day, I see things happening that gives me reason to be optimistic.
53:45And in a certain way, the worse it gets in America, the more likely it is that this terrible fever
53:51will
53:51break. Because at the end of the day, most people don't... Why would it be in anyone's interest to have
53:57a
53:57small group of people doing all this stuff at the expense of everybody else? It's not.
54:03Bill Browder, thank you so much for your time and your insights. And I really hope you'll come back
54:09and join us again, perhaps when there's either a frozen front line in Ukraine, or once he's collapsed,
54:16the government has collapsed altogether. In the Kremlin, that is.
54:21Let's hope so.
54:23Bill Browder, thank you. Thank you so much.
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