Bill Browder | Full Q&A at The Oxford Union

[Music] thank you so much for visiting us here across the pond today um i understand you have a few um comments you'd like to make it as open remarks yeah so um uh great to be here first of all it's um it's not the first time i've been in oxford um i've actually been in this room before but the room was almost totally empty when i came to speak like four four four years ago because um there wasn't that much interest in in putin and russia but now there seems to be a little bit more interest and so it's great to meet you um i uh in in the summer of 2018 i was just about to start writing my book i've written a book which i'm going to be signing for people afterwards called freezing order and i just started writing this book um and i had accumulated all sorts of experiences and traumas and unbelievable discoveries about corruption in russia and i knew i had to get this these words on paper and i uh and so i was really determined not to be distracted so i put my phone face down and got on my computer and started to write and it wasn't going very well and i couldn't get any ideas out of my head and i after about an hour i had less than a page to show for it and i finally um i couldn't i i had to turn over my phone and like look at twitter or something because i just couldn't concentrate anymore so i turned over my phone and there must have been 150 messages and they were all messages because this was the moment that trump was meeting with putin in helsinki and the um during this summit that they were having it was happening on a monday and on the previous friday uh robert mueller who was the special prosecutor looking into russian uh interference in the us election had indicted 12 russian military intelligence officers and so the obvious question that was on the friday on the monday at the press conference after trump had met with putin was whether putin was going to hand over these 12 gru officers and so some reuters journalist asked the question and uh putin had obviously prepared for this moment and he said yes it's possible that we would but um if we do so it has to be reciprocal and i would want um trump to hand over bill browder me so then the obvious question was what did trump think about this and so the next question was to trump and he said i think it's an incredible offer and so for the next four days and i was in america at the time and so for the next four days i sat on the edge of my seat thinking that four heavily darkened darkened out black suvs were going to arrive on my doorstep with a bunch of marshalls to cart me off on a rendition flight back to moscow and it was only after the senate u.s senate had a vote in which they voted 98-0 not to hand me over that that uh trump relented and so when i say i'm happy to be here i really am happy to be here tonight so i i've got a lot to say about um uh about ukraine about putin about trump about anything you want to talk about um so floor is yours brilliant thank you um why don't we start at the beginning a little bit um your relationship with putin in the beginning wasn't as i guess frosty as it is now could you tell us over um how the relationship with your perception of him changed and why so i should point out to everyone here tonight that i've never met vladimir putin i've never had a conversation with him um but i may be one of the most important people in the world in his head at least from the western outside of russia and that part of the world why does putin hate me so much he hates me because i got a piece of legislation passed called the magnitsky act the magnitsky act was named after my lawyer my russian lawyer sergey magnitsky and sergey magnitsky worked for me in russia when i was running this large investment fund called the hermitage fund and sergey magnitsky discovered a massive 230 million dollar government corruption scheme and he he discovered it he exposed it he testified against the corrupt officials involved and those same officials who he testified against arrested him put him in pre-trial detention tortured him for 358 days and killed him on november 16 2009 he was 37 years old and i got the news of his murder the next morning and i made it my life's mission after he was killed to go after his killers to make sure they face justice and the um the at first i thought it was possible to get justice inside of russia sergey had written everything down about how they had tortured him up to the night of his death and it was probably the most well-documented case of human rights abuse that's ever come out of russia but the russian authorities circled the wagons they covered up his murder vladimir putin personally got involved in the cover-up and promoted and gave state honors to some of the people who are most complicit and so i came up with this idea which is that if we can't get justice inside of russia we should get justice outside of russia and how do we get justice outside of russia well in this case the people who killed him did it for money they did it for 230 million dollars and they don't keep that money in russia they keep that money in london in in switzerland in new york in banks and they buy houses and they send their girlfriends to milan on shopping trips and their children to swiss and british boarding schools and so i came up with this idea which is that if we could freeze their assets and ban their visas in the west it's not perfect justice but it's a lot better than total impunity and i was able to convince a republican senator from arizona john mccain and a democrat senator from maryland benjamin cardin to put together a law called the magnitsky act named after sergey magnitsky and it was incredibly well received by the senate it passed senate 92 to four past the house of representatives with 89 percent and became a federal law on december 14 2012. and vladimir putin went out of his mind um with this magnitsky act and the reason he went out of his mind was that he's a human rights violator he's a kleptocrat and he's stolen an enormous amount of money he's i think he's worth well north of 200 billion dollars and he doesn't keep that money in russia he keeps that money in the west and that money is now at risk and so he um in retaliation for the magnitsky act he banned the adoption of russian orphans by american families and he made it his single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the magnitsky act he went so far as to send a female lawyer named natalia veselnitskaya to trump tower on june 9th 2016. remember that famous trump tower meeting and she was there with one specific mission that if donald trump gets elected she was there meeting with his son if donald trump gets elected would he repeal the magnitsky act and so vladimir putin he knew he probably knew back in 2012 that he was going to do a war in 2022 and that his money would be at risk and he hated the idea that we had any leverage over him and this was the leverage that i created wow sanctions against putin on i mean more specifically russia has existed for quite a while the implementation perhaps lacking why do you think in your opinion um it took actions from you and uh for there to be some response and effects on putin why what took so long and also do you think this is effective having a hard time hearing you for some reason what so why it's not coming out it's like yes so i was saying that um sanctions um against you know the actions of uh uh russian uh um leaders in um the states itself has existed for quite a while implementation perhaps lacking why did it take um you and your um allies to get attention from putin and more importantly why is it so effective well so um the magnitsky act was passed in 2012 and and they they sanctioned the people who killed sergey magnitsky who were the low-level people but they didn't go after the oligarchs and um which is what they really care about they're they all they care about they the oligarchs and i should point out that that vladimir putin is a very rich man but doesn't keep any money in his own name the money is all held in the name of oligarchs so when you see an oligarch worth 20 billion 10 billion of that is putin's and and that's kind of obvious i mean it's not this this is not some big discovery i mean people knew that um or the right people knew that but nobody really wanted to touch vladimir putin they did there was everyone was sort of scared of vladimir putin they didn't want to um provoke him they wanted to tiptoe around him they wanted to appease him uh some of them were scared i should say and some of them i mean here in the uk there were so many people that were feeding at the um the russian trough there was so much dirty money sloshing around this country and particularly in london that nobody wanted to do anything and um and so you know putin this this war that he started is not his first war his first war was actually the the moment he um got started as president he he started a war in chechnya to gain power he killed like 50 000 chechens then there was georgia in 2008 putin invaded georgia and nobody wanted to do anything about it president obama said i urge all sides to uh to restrain themselves he then he then went into crimea no serious sanctions he shot down mh17 no serious sanctions carpet bombed civilians in syria nothing poisoned people in salisbury with ra with uh banned chemical nerve agents we kicked a few diplomats out and then everybody went to the world cup in russia and um i would argue that the reason we're having this crisis this war right now is because putin thought that there would be more of the same which is nothing because we gave him such a strong hint that we had no capacity to do this and um i think that that um you know putin is 95 to blame for the murder and mayhem that's going on in ukraine and we're five to five percent to blame we being the western world our governments because uh we didn't do anything every other time he did something terrible have you been surprised by the responses to the war current with crisis yeah i'm actually amazed i mean normally i'm very very critical of all governments most government policy doesn't is always unsatisfactory to me but this time around i'm actually pretty positively surprised at how the us the uk the eu the eu does almost nothing ever when it comes to good policy um but this time around uh the it took a little longer than it should have probably um a bit too little too late but the fact is that we're supplying massive amounts of armaments to the ukrainians we have done a sanctions program which has exceeded all sanctions programs that have ever been imposed anywhere against anybody in the history of sanctions and we seem to be kind of you know unified and so i would i would say i'm positively surprised and i think putin has backed himself into a terrible corner he never expected this he never expected the ukrainians would fight back the way they have it's such an incredibly brave and effective way and he never expected that there would be any serious economic consequences and and russia is going to go into a great depression because of this because of the sanctions and we haven't even fully done the sanctions every time there's another 100 or 200 innocent people bombed and destroyed there's going to be another set of sanctions and um and putin can't help himself he just keeps on escalating and escalating and so i think that he's going to be really in very bad shape and and by the way he's he he doesn't have an unlimited amount of arms to fight this war like the tank manufacturers they can't make more tanks because they need parts that they can't get anymore because of the sanctions same thing with airplanes most of the planes can't even fly the aeroflot planes can't even fly because they don't have they they require american parts and so um it's really pretty impressive i would say what what the west is doing uh and it's definitely very positive um i think one of the things that uh recent um what's happened with swine watches recent invasion of ukraine is that people recognizing the role that britain's had to play in the past few decades especially london um with russian using as a hub for laundering their money the past few decades now i want to watch what your view is on this or more specifically whether you think the uk is in any way complicit in the corruption endemic in russia and how that's led to putin's sort of like defiance to this point i i would characterize london as the dirty russian money capital of the world um so london is to russia as hong kong is to china why do the russians russian gangsters oligarchs kleptocrats why do they love london so much they love london because it's like the exact opposite of of russia you know they can steal money in russia they can commit terrible crimes in russia and then they can come to london and it's relatively safe and we have property rights and rule of law with a huge bonus which is that nobody is ever going to ask from any law enforcement agency any uncomfortable questions ever and i say that very emphatically there has not been a single economic crime case against russian it's in the last 22 years and that's why they love it and it's and and you know what happened as a result of them loving it a whole industry of of enablers spawned there's the i mean the russians have bought up most of the nice houses in the good neighborhoods but the other nice houses have been brought up by the lawyers and pr agents and private bankers who cater to these russians and and all of these lawyers and pr people and private bankers and lobbyists and private investigators and and divorce lawyers and all these different types of people all are well connected and so whenever anybody wanted to get tough on russia and i've been i've been to parliament probably 50 times in the last 10 years trying to urge the british government to get tough on russia there is always this undercurrent of of quiet influence being exerted by all these people who are making so much money and and um it's really um and of course we've now done the right thing you know boris johnson is doing the right thing with no question but um the system is still there this this system of enablers is still there uh and i can imagine that given the opportunity they would switch their their enabling machine back on in a heartbeat if they were given the chance just to push on on the enablers of course um british lawyers and other professional uh professionals continue to represent russia and other oligarchs with questionable providence and actions do you think there's some form of scope that perhaps we could widen um some form of faction to either ban that and prevent that in some way yeah i think there is i mean in the meantime i mean it's really interesting so i've been sued so the the there was a police officer one of the people involved in sergey magnitsky's arrest and who was who was um uh complicit in all sorts of the financial fraud that sergey discovered his name is major pavel karpov and i made a youtube movie about him um it was very hard to get the media to write about him because everyone was afraid of libel so i made a a youtube movie about him and um uh he he's he's on an official salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year and he came to london and hired uh oles wangs which is like one of the top law firms um and the head of their reputation management department uh geraldine proudler and paid her 600 pounds an hour and then had andrew caldecott qc the best liable qc in the country representing him for a thousand pounds an hour and sued me for libel and um he lost he ended up running away when he had to pay my legal bill um and and these lawyers geraldine proudler and there and i've got a friend named catherine belton um some of you may be familiar with her book it's putin's people she wrote the most definitive book and and uh if you want to read two great books about russia read my book and read her book um and i mean it's all about how putin is a crook and she was sued simultaneously by four oligarchs roman abramovich michael friedman peter alvin rosneft and then one other uh and um and and and the lawyers are all you know the lawyers have all gotten rich out of this type of stuff and and and nobody wants to do anything here and so what did i do um there were hearings in congress um about this whole problem uh about a month ago and i came up with this idea which is um you know maybe we can't sanction them and they're british citizens they live here but they don't have to be able to travel to america uh travel is a is a privilege it's not a right and um i presented this to the to the um congressional committee and um uh the chairman of the or the co-chairman of the committee wrote to the secretary of state with the names of all the lawyers uh involved in catherine's case and my case and various other cases and say and said we should ban their visas to america now i don't know if their visas will actually be banned but i can tell you that they had a bad bad morning the next morning waking up to read that in the newspaper um do you think that forcing oligarch oligarchs back perhaps changes anything i think i mean in the recent interview you had with a guru matthew you mentioned how perhaps the commentator squad with um putin being the central oligarch was definitely worse than what was before just forcing them back to move us forward in russia's case forcing them back to russia you mean well forcing them back to where they were before so well i i think they're doing anything to punish the so first of all we want to punish putin um how do you punish putin the first thing they did was they put putin on the sanctions list it was beautiful i remember the day they did it i was very happy um symbolically it's it's beautiful but but uh practically it doesn't mean anything because putin doesn't hold anything in his own names and so if you want to go after putin and get his money you have to go after the oligarchs and not only you have to go after the oligarchs you've got to go after the whole constellation of people around the oligarchs their children their their mistresses their wives their ex-wives and their trustees nominees custodians etc and and in my opinion the the purpose of of doing all this so there's there's a big question that everyone asks um uh are sanctions for deterrence or are they for punishment and um and and it all depends on when you use them how so if we had used the sanctions before putin had invaded ukraine so he could have seen we were serious on just maybe five percent of the cases it would have been for deterrence but once he made his decision to go into ukraine putin is a guy who never backs down he never changes his mind he never compromises he never shows weakness and so there's no more deterrent effect on this for the sanctions and so now they're for punishment but more importantly than punishment the purpose of sanctions is so that ultimately putin won't have enough money to pay for this war to kill ukrainians and so the purpose of sanctions in my mind are to dry up his savings which are the central bank reserves which have been sanctioned and to dry up his uh his offshore savings which are the oligarch money and then we have to dry up his income and his income is the money he gets from oil and selling oil and gas and that's a huge amount of money every day germany austria italy all these european countries send him a billion dollars and every day his war costs him a billion dollars and so we've got his savings all sorted out but the income is it's a total wash he could carry on into perpetuity killing ukrainians i mean assuming that he had the technology to build the weapons and so on but um and so that's the sanction we haven't done um and it doesn't really matter how much of his savings we've sanctioned if we if we've frozen if we don't deal with that um and we you've probably all heard that the um europe the eu has agreed in principle subject to hungary's veto to stop buying russian oil and that sounds really good the problem is that of that billion dollars a day only 200 million is oil and 800 million is natural gas and so we still have this natural gas problem to deal with well you mentioned the ways in which we can stop um or at least um quench putin's um intensity in this war in ukraine i wonder whether there were any other outs that you suggest i think you mentioned briefly that you know he's got both of his hands in the criminal ward and the criminal ward not carrying much for trying to save face in the face of the west i wonder whether you what your thoughts on giving putin a sort of like sun tzu style gordon bridge peace option is that possible sensible and what other options do you think exist and what could it look like well in my opinion the reason that we're having this war is not because putin doesn't like nato it's not because putin wants to rebuild the russian empire uh it's not because ukraine is flirting with democracy and independence the reason that this war is happening is because putin has stolen between putin and the thousand people around him he has stolen a trillion dollars from the russian state in the last 22 years which is money that should have been spent on hospitals and roads and education and all the other things that the government is supposed to spend money on instead it's gone to private jets and yachts and swiss bank accounts and as a result after 22 years all it takes is somebody you know lighting some flame and the whole thing could go up in a second and putin could lose his power and this is not hypothetical or speculative this exact same thing happened to nazarbayev who was the dictator of kazakhstan in january he had been around for longer than putin per capita he had stolen more money than putin and one week within one week after raising gas prices in kazakhstan there was violent uprisings in every city in kazakhstan and he's gone and all of his family and everybody is now under arrest and their assets are being seized and so on so forth putin saw the same thing potentially happening to him and so why did he go why is he doing this war he's doing this war because that's what a dictator does when they're afraid of losing power you create a foreign enemy and if you create a foreign enemy then people then don't look at their anger at you they look at the foreign enemy and that's what they're doing in russia right now and so when we come to this question of you know off-ramps or negotiation or what could we give him we can't give him anything because he needs the war he needs to be at war and um of course it's very painful to be at war but he's lost a lot of troops he's lost a lot of money um but the one but this war has been a big success for him if you look at his approval ratings they've skyrocketed they've gone through the roof and people in russia genuinely are are rallying around the flag and and so there's nothing we can offer putin that's going to make him back down from his perspective he's achieved his objective by being at the being in war and from his perspective the only thing he needs to do is win the war and so coming back to how does this thing end which is really the ultimate question for you is the way this war ends is if ukraine defeats russia militarily if they if if ukraine can push russian troops out putin the russian people will no longer allow putin to be in power and that's the end otherwise if putin is in power there's always going to be a war wow i wonder then if we have in a putin sense reach the state of no backing down and no return um the threat of nuclear action is hovering above us and i think in recent russian state media they have been actively discussing nuclear attacks in your view do you think this is just rhetoric or something that we should seriously be concerned of well this is putin um you know thumping his chest being uh threatened being a threatening person but and and so there's several questions does he have the capacity to use nuclear weapons if it served his interests he would do it in a heartbeat he has no morals he has no ethics he has no compassion he has no uh um he's he's effectively a psychopath he would do anything um but you have to ask yourself another question which is what kind of situation could he use nuclear weapons in and it would be helpful to him so let's say that he wants to shoot a nuclear weapon at us we've been preparing for this for like 80 years if he's going to shoot a nuclear weapon at us we're going to shoot a nuclear weapon at him he understands that that's the whole point of mutually assured destruction we're not going to let him shoot a nuclear weapon at us without responding he knows that i mean that's not there's there's no way he'd ever shoot a nuclear weapon at us without us doing it back and therefore how does that solve his problem it doesn't solve this problem it just means we all die so what other kind of nuclear attack could he do he could do a nuclear attack on a more contained basis in ukraine he could blow up a ukrainian city to kill a million people or half 500 000 people uh which would be a dramatic thing and he could then threaten another city and then say i want the whole country but how does that help him all he does is destroy he kills a bunch of people the whole world even china and india and everyone else then surrounds him uh and also he's got a nuclear fallout coming towards moscow and so i'm not just saying that it's an impossibility he absolutely would do it if he could but it's not clear to me what what it would accomplish for him um shifting this a little bit to you given how dangerous putin is being shown to be and even we're gonna see we saw exactly the lens still go to you've been quite vocal and uh brave and courageous in your um polemics about him i wonder what drives you and what keeps you going in the in the face of the existential threat to your own life sergey magnitsky sergey magnitsky was my lawyer he worked for me uh he uncovered a corruption scheme on my behalf uh and he was tortured terribly and then killed at the age of 37 and he he wouldn't have been killed he would have been tortured if he hadn't worked for me and i wear that burden on my shoulders every day and i feel the fury of what they did to him every day and that drives me every day 12 years later to go after the people and continue to go after them because i'm not going to let them get away with it and that's the driving force and if if there wasn't you know i wouldn't be doing this if there wasn't if i didn't have a very personal and very uh profound reason to do it but i i am doing it and i am ready to take risks doing it because um uh sergey was in a far riskier situation and did the right thing and i owe it to him that's amazing um i'm very keen to open the floor to questions um if you'd like to make a question please raise up your hand and i'll identify you also um there's an incredible offer at hand um the person with the most amazing question chosen by bill himself gets a signed copy of his book freezing order which you can grab in the blaster room later so yes i'd like to pick the first question i recognize the member with the green top first of all thank you so much for your advocacy um the magnitsky act is an invaluable tool um there's been a lot of prognostication by professional prognosticators on the news over the past few weeks about whether it's the oligarchs who control putin or putin who controlled the oligarchs which way around do you think it is um putin totally absolutely completely controls the oligarchs the oligarchs are only rich at the permission and pleasure of vladimir putin at any point and he's shown this to be true he can take away their money take away their freedom or take away their lives and it's really interesting you know these oligarchs behave like the most arrogant aggressive alpha male on steroids people you could ever see if you encounter them one-on-one and they're really unpleasant people um but it's really interesting i i go to the world economic forum in davos every year and one one year putin was there and of course all the oligarchs are there and to watch them in his presence they shrink to into like sniveling little school children in his presence so scared um and so anybody who thinks that the oligarchs are going to get angry with their newly created impoverishment and they're going to rise up it's just not going to happen putin is so alert to to disloyalty and betrayal and anyone who's disloyal and betrays him will die very quickly and they all understand that so sadly that's not what that that's not how this thing is going to end okay i recognize the member with the blue top good evening sir thank you very much for being here um i read your book enemy of the russian state it's one of my favorite books um i hope my question is not too personal for you but i'm gonna try um it seems quite exceptional to me that you as an american ventured out to russia to pursue the business activities that you did and then at some point also decided to take on the russian state which is quite courageous this made me wonder about your drivers in life you of course mentioned the murder on surgery which i think is an important one but i was wondering if there's also some like perhaps significant events or things in your upbringing that have shaped your character to make you do the things that you are doing nowadays thank you good question very good question um well so what brought me to russia uh and and i guess you probably know this because you read my book my first book um uh are you dutch yes yeah my my the very first foreign translation of my second book is dutch it just came out last week and i'm actually going to amsterdam to present it on friday so um well you're welcome to have a drink yeah um but anyway in any case so so what drove me to russia was that my grandfather was the head of the american communist party um in the 1930s and 1940s and i was born in 1964 and when i was going through my teenage rebellion in the 1970s i thought what's the best way of rebelling from this family of communists and i put on my suit and tie and became a capitalist and so that and and then i went to stanford business school and graduated business school uh in 1989 which was the year of the berlin wall came down and i had this epiphany when i was looking for my post-business school job which is that my grandfather was the biggest communist in america and the berlin wall has just come down i'm going to become the biggest capitalist in eastern europe and so that's what set me out to do that but i also had this really weird feeling of sense of justice which came from when i was um 10 years old and this is uh the second chapter of my new book um it's called the flute i and i played the flute when i was a kid very badly but i had this beautiful sterling silver flute that my uncle gave me as a gift i was the last flute in the orchestra um and one day when i was i lived in i grew up in chicago on the south side and one day i was walking to school and it was i lived in a rough neighborhood and i was walking to school and and three much larger older kids came up to me so i was carrying something that looked like it was valuable started grabbing at my flute and took my took my flute and stole it and i was very upset and and and um the neighborhood lived in they had these little police phones like i picked up the police phone the police came and got me they took me home and they um asked me to give a statement i gave a statement of what these kids looked like and and my uh um uh my mother then after after they left my mother said you'll never hear from them again but three weeks later the police called me said we think we found the culprits can you come to the police station and and identify them and my mother said you can't go i don't want you getting involved and i insisted i have to go i have to have justice so i went to the police station and they had one way glass and you know i could see them they couldn't see me and there's a bunch of other kids there and i could pick the three out of the lineup i picked them out then the police said we want you to testify and my mother said absolutely under no circumstances can you testify and i said i i absolutely under every circumstance i'm going to testify and i have to have justice i'm going to and and so i went to court the cook county juvenile court and i testified against these three kids and we convicted them and that and i became so obsessed with um law enforcement that i joined the chicago junior police patrol and and in my book you can even see a picture of my my membership card and and that's what sort of has i mean i never became a police officer but but i've always had this um this sort of you know um feeling of indignation about um crime and injustice and that's kind of what's driven me all throughout my life amazing i recognize the member with the brown jacket could you wait for the microphone i've read catherine belton's book and one of the themes that she goes on in the book is that a lot of this is an fsb group of people around putin and that their corruption has a a political end do you do you believe that as opposed to just kleptocracy and then the other question i have is whether the corruption in in russia is trickling down and creating a problem for the society so um i believe every word of katherine belton she she is she's somebody i've known for 25 years and and the research that she did to create that book is truly unbelievable and it was supposed to be a two-year project i think it took her like eight and a half years to write it and she literally went bankrupt um because they gave her they bet the advance had run out long before she ever finished it um and what and what she has written about and what she has described is that russia is a police state the police or the fsb which is used to be the kgb the federal security service and and it's also a criminal organization and that they're the ones who make the money and by the way if you want to make money in russia you don't start a hedge fund or or a technology company you go to government and ideally you go to government you go to the branch of government that has the power to arrest people and those people make the most money the most popular course in russia is the interior ministry academy um so imagine that and here here we are at oxford you know this is the most popular course in in the uk the most popular course in russia is the police academy um i don't think anything's trickling down to anybody i think a thousand people in russia can control almost all the money there is and then of course you know each of them have their own little constellations but you know it's 140 million people are living very bad lives in russia and it's there's no benefit to anybody of the system yes but the reason for my question is that often or at least what what one's seen across the world is that when you have corruption at the top basically nobody believes in anything anymore and then the corruption just trickles down everything becomes corrupt the schools become corrupt the hospitals become corrupt the whole system just crumbles from the inside you're wondering whether this is happening in russia yeah of course of course of course everybody assumes it is happening and if you're not corrupt they think you're a fool you know i was going on and on about corporate governance and anti-corruption matters and and and the russians thought i was just a fool like a really you know idiotic man like what kind of stupid person would do that i mean i mean they would look at me with just such disdain because you know like i was some kind of hillbilly or something like that you know like how could i be so unsophisticated because of course that's how it works and and and even in the villages where like people are like you know going to their outhouse because they can't afford a toilet they still just assume that if you're the mayor you get to steal all the money that's just how it works and if and if they ever get to become the mayor they'll steal all the money and then just that's that's just the system thank you i recognize the member at the front bench there with a white top thank you um so the western cultural imagination has adopted a somewhat myopic view as of corruption as a russian a russian concept when in fact isn't isn't corruption manifest in many parts of the developing world and wouldn't it be better for our politicians to create legislation that imposes penalties on anyone who has perpetrated corruption and moved their funds overseas such as chinese diplomats and people from all over the world definitely and and the so the magnitsky act was passed in 2012 and it was just a piece of legislation for russia and putin went out of his mind as i mentioned and john mccain and senator cardin said well hell if um if putin's so upset about this i'm sure the dictator in china and iran wouldn't be too happy about this either let's make a global magnitsky act and in 2016 the united states passed the global magnitsky act and they're now 34 countries that have global magnitsky acts and chinese officials who are involved in the concentration camps in xinjiang are on the list the generals in myanmar who are responsible for the rohingya genocide are on the list nicaraguan security officials who shot down peaceful student demonstrators are on the list the gupta brothers who stole all sorts of money in south africa are on the list dan gertler an israeli diamond dealer who completely gutted out um the um democratic republic of congo is on the list so yeah i it's absolutely but having said that just to come back to your an initial point russia is better at they're better at corruption than anybody else i had a friend who was for about a year was the prime minister of georgia he was like a very short thing he was a former investment banker became prime minister of georgia during when sakachevi first came to power and felt lost his job in some power struggle and he he joined the cato institute in washington and the cato institute um asked him to go and and um uh and lecture about corruption and good governance in different african countries and so he went on a big tour of africa and i i met up with him at the end of his african tour and i said what's it like you know those places must be really corrupt too and he said he said i've nothing absolutely nothing compared to post the post-soviet world the amount of the the level of stealing that they do in africa is just minuscule compared to and he was talking about georgia and russia and azerbaijan and kazakhstan it's not just russia but just off the charts what happens in in in the former soviet union thank you uh i recognize the member just right there i can't i can't see you yep him right there yeah thank you um quick question do you mind russia after putin what do you think that will happen after putin in russia because uh so far my impression is that uh corruption is so pervasive that even with a different leader or not talk about the leadership but with a different government you will have probably the same outcome at least for russians probably not a war but you will have this kind of conflicts and and friction with the west thank you well it's a very this kind of an optimistic question life after putin i think the most likely scenario is that putin stays in power for his entire natural life which probably is a long time you know some people say he's sick i don't believe that but maybe he is but more likely than not he's he's he's going to live for you know 10 or 15 years more he's 69 years old he could be a dictator until his mid 80s and so you know you'll all be middle-aged people by the time putin is gone uh what what what is life like after putin it all depends on how putin ends up not being there if he if he dies a natural death in his sleep then it'll be some other kgb crook who takes over that's what they did in uzbekistan and it was really interesting uzbekistan which is another country even more oppressive than russia there was a guy named karimov who was their dictator and one day he like died in his sleep at the age of 87 or something like that and uh and then it was like in the vatican you know they they went into some building all the powerful people and you know the white smoke came out of the chimney and they emerged and the head of the kgb was then the new uh dictator of uzbekistan and everyone is all very excited because he was a reformer because he wasn't boiling his political opponents and and bats of acid that made him a reformer if if for some reason putin loses this war uh and he drives and the ukrainians drive his troops out of crimea and places like that um he could be replaced in a popular uprising and if there's a popular uprising alexi navalny is the obvious next leader of russia he has put himself perfectly in position to do that and it's possible that alexi navalny could run a country that's democratic and and honest and successful it does russia doesn't have to be a dirty uh corrupt country um it's pos there there are plenty of russians um in spite of whatever the previous culture is they would be glad to have an honest country and and there's an ex famous russian expression that the fish rots from the head and um if the if the person is running the country is a good leader i mean look at look at zelinski i mean you know ukraine never had this sense of of patriotism like it does now a good leader can can do amazing things and and i don't think we should write russia off uh it all depends on who that leader is thank you uh i recognize the member with the gray and purple top thank you so much um i'm wondering what you think of the danger of post-putin whenever you whenever that is of a leader who is not only just as corrupt but possibly even just as militaristic which maybe not many people are thinking about and i wondered what your what your thoughts on that are well this is one of the um one of the things that putin likes to point out he says you know if it wasn't me it'd be somebody even worse than me how can you get any worse than than putin i mean i just don't see it i mean putin is truly the i mean he's he's in the same league as adolf hitler uh stalin he he he's truly the most horrific evil violent malign influence on the world and so um so i i would say very um clearly that i don't think you can get worse than putin i think that whoever replaces him even if they're not alexey navalny they they're not going to be the kind of monster that he is he's a special kind of monster thank you um the member with a blue top at the front row yeah thank you so much for being here i wanted to ask you um if this war drags on and the ukrainians keep fighting as fiercely as they are but also um putin because of his oil and gas sales and because of the might if his army is able to sort of keep fighting them do you think there's a risk that the russian people i mean you mentioned that his approval ratings have skyrocketed but i think i'm right in saying that the number of casualties that russia has suffered in ukraine exceed 10 years in afghanistan up to now and afghanistan you know was one of the reasons why russians became so upset with the soviet union do you think there's a there's a scenario in which russian mothers seeing the body bags that are coming back and the never-ending war could turn against putin within the war context well i um i mean i think part of the reason that that all the bodies from afghanistan caused so much trouble was they came back in dribs and drabs over a long period of time and people really got started had opportunity to get upset about them i mean as you say and you're right um i think 20 000 people have died 20 000 troops have died in from russian troops have died in ukraine versus 10 000 over 10 years in afghanistan but i mean they've they're dead and we do we see an uprising right now no that we don't and um i do think that that it creates a very brittle brit brittle situation having all these sanctions having all this trouble and it's highly combustible um but he's also running a total police state nobody has any alternative information it's he shut down all social media he shut down all independent media he shut down the internet effectively he puts people in jail who who call the war a war it's got to be called a special operation otherwise you go to jail for 15 years it's a very scary place i mean and and you know look north korea is still functioning you know the way that kim jong-un wants it to function there's no reason why putin can't run a very tight dictatorship and carry on doing all sorts of terrible things with all sorts of people dying and not having any um not feeling any pressure from the people i mean it's i think that's that's the more likely scenario um the member with the red top thanks very much for being here um i had a question about the sort of army of consultants and pr folks and bankers and you name it that sort of service russian oligarchs but also folks from the gulf authoritarian leaders there how can we kind of roll back that army of people that are doing that work closer to home um it's something that's very near and dear to my heart um uh well we we we have interestingly the you the uk the us and the eu have now banned those people banned consultants pr firms and other people like that from uh doing business with russia but they have not done it with saudi arabia or azerbaijan or you know lots of other terrible places um it's um i i i after i wrote my book my book is really all about these enablers and and i was contacted by somebody at harvard law school who wants to start a campaign on campus which is um for people to like not allow firms that do business with dictatorships to recruit on campus and and i think that's just great and um you know these people uh i mean what's interesting about these people that you're talking about is is like they're they go to the same their kids go to the same school that my kids go to we're all standing at the school gate their wives or husbands of their women go to the human rights watch dinner gala and you know donate five thousand dollars and they're busy advising the government of saudi arabia you know it's it's it's it's remarkable how accepted this whole thing is and so part of the way you stop it is just by making it so that anyone who does that kind of work is like being a mafia lawyer and and you know if you're a mafia lawyer you shouldn't be accepted in polite society people should shun you people law school graduates shouldn't go to want to go to work for you and and and so on and so forth um you know we don't need government policy for that we can we can um create our own sort of social mores where we we we're it's just you know someone who does that you know they walk into a party and everyone just sort of turns the other way thank you i haven't got time for one last question i recognize the member with i think an orange trap around their neck thank you so putin and russian government they use the narrative to counter the western narrative and they say when u.s and nato allies they bomb countries like afghanistan or iraq or somalia and the list goes on so that that is not um considered as such an evil thing but when russia does it in ukraine that becomes a new world what what would you say and and what what is the is this something that is discussed in in us especially in the political circles well there there's a word for what you've just described is called what about ism you know whenever the um uh you know when whenever we start talking about russian corruption they say what about slavery in the u.s what about the nicaragua what about this you know what i mean yeah it's a terrible thing what's what what's going with you know the saudis are doing in yemen um it's a terrible thing with what the us did in afghanistan mostly terrible about leaving the country to the taliban but that doesn't justify um a naked invasion of a country redrawing the borders killing innocent civilians you know you want to talk about that we can talk about that but but um you know what what's going on i mean and there's been there's been many many wars over history but there's not that many wars that are taking place live on our television screens when with social media this is the most social media covered war there ever is ever has been where we can see it all and it's horrifying and when when you can see what's going on that that that creates a whole other uh set of reactions and and uh you know i'd be very glad to criticize bad policy wherever bad policy is is uh executed but this is a very bad thing going on right now and and needs the full criticism of everybody everybody out there and it's very upsetting to me that the um uh south africa brazil mexico india china indonesia all these countries are sitting on their hands saying you know it's okay that really upsets me particularly south africa in south africa you know we all like stopped doing business with companies that were supporting apartheid and you know the pressure from the west got south africa to abandon apartheid and then the south african government is siding with putin that just infuriates me but anyways a big a lot longer conversation yeah that concludes the question element of today from the audience just one last one as a question we're asking all our esteemed guests and speakers is that in two sentences what advice would you give to our members of our society in the wider university um in terms of school going about life and now what next steps they want to take don't do business with crooks you'll get crooked all right thank you it's been a true pleasure bill thank you for visiting us today help you can all join me in thanking bill for coming today [Music] you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Id: 8OCsZxCFHjA

Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022