'Putin is a dead man walking' | Bill Browder

well the way that this war should end is that we should give the ukrainians what they need to forcefully expel Russian troops from their Sovereign territory and that includes Crimea if that and then after that once Russia has defeated in Ukraine we should provide uh NATO membership uh to Ukraine and we should provide them with enough financial resources to rebuild hello and welcome to Frontline for times radio with Me Kate Chapo and today we are talking to the financier and political activist Bill Browder he is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. when he was denied entry to the country for exposing corruption he's currently campaigning to impose sanctions against corrupt individuals linked to the Putin regime and to free political activists imprisoned by it Bill Brader welcome to Frontline thank you so much for your time how precarious is President Putin's position at the moment uh in my opinion he's he's truly on the ropes um this is the most significant threat to his power that's occurred in the last 23 years the fact that um there was an armed Rebellion uh that really moved all the way through provincial Russia and made it within two hours of Moscow before it was uh diffused I wouldn't say defeated and um and that the fact that the leader of this armed Rebellion evgeny pregosian um has not borne any significant consequences normally if somebody attempts to take out the king they better succeed um because they'll get taken out and and nothing has happened they didn't take him to to Red Square put him in a guillotine and chop his head off um they they didn't do anything to him and um and so as I watched this situation unfold I think that that there is a huge in the armor of Vladimir Putin and um unless he does something very radical uh he's a Dead Man Walking and why do you think you've got any precautions so far has not been sanctioned well it's it's a mystery really I mean and it's it's it's worse than him not even be sanctioned so during the at the moment when he was uh had his Convoy of 8 000 soldiers um uh going through different Russian cities the um Russian Security Services raided his offices in St Petersburg where he ran his operations and in that office rate they they found a large uh amounts of cash uh allegedly 111 million dollars worth of cash in different currencies that cash was at that time uh taken by the police and as I understand it that cash has now been returned to him so not only has has he not nothing has happened to him but even the cash that they had uh grabbed they gave it back to him and so there's something very fishy going on and so why is that well um it's there's a number of things on the surface that we know um and a lot of things underneath the surface that we don't know but but what we do know on the surface is that you have any pregosian is one of the few um competent military men in Russia and he was using his in military competence to run operations in Africa and there's 17 different Wagner mercenary operations in Africa where that's effectively how Russia runs its foreign policy in Africa so if he were to be um uh killed or or in some way taken out of circulation then the entire Russian foreign policy in Africa and other places Syria for example um would probably either collapse perhaps or end up being put in in very precarious place and you believe that President Putin will now be embarking upon a purge a massive Purge which you see both as terrible and optimistic at the same time why is that well so so first of all the the only natural reaction to a strong man being humiliated is for the strong man to express his strength in a very visible way so other people don't then try to challenge him and so um either Putin embarks on a Almighty Purge where he reasserts his authority and scares everybody into submission um or um he ends up finding himself in a position where either pagosian or somebody else has another run at him and this time more successfully and so I um I've seen it in other places for example in in Turkey when when uh when there was an attempted coup against President Aragon uh erdogan arrested everybody and anybody who he had any uh distrust of and there was there's like 50 000 people still to this day um in in Turkish prisons because of that and so that's the kind of action I would expect of Putin interestingly we're we're now you know almost two weeks after this this whole event and we don't see that Purge starting which makes me believe that that Putin really is in in the most precarious position right now now a large part of your work is getting the magnitsky Act passed in as many countries as possible named after your late lawyer friend who was killed in custody in Russia the idea to sanction to seize assets of and ban the travel of corrupt individuals linked to the Putin regime how effective is it proving well so the magnitsky Act was the very first piece of legislation first tool that was put in place um to punish Putin and punish his regime it was put in place in 2012 and the magnitsky ACT freezes the assets and bans the Visas of people who are human rights violators and kleptocrats in Russia and um because Putin and his regime are so money focused because they're they're their whole raison detras to do terrible crimes in their own Country Financial crimes and physical crimes connected to those financial crimes and then keep that money in the west um this was a major major blow to Putin he values money more than human life and uh his whole business model is to steal as much as possible and so that this was the um the the first tool it put in place he reacted violently to the passage of the magnets he went on a rampage he he um banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families in retaliation he made it his single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the magnitsky ACT he even sent a lawyer a female lawyer named it named Natalia vesselnitskaya from a Kremlin lawyer to meet with Donald Trump Jr Jared Kushner and Paul manafort at Trump Tower on June 9 2016 at Trump was nominated before he was elected to beg for the repeal of the magnitsky ACT if he was elected that hasn't happened and what the magnitsky ACT has done is created a template which is now being used um in all actions against Putin in his regime and so all of the uh sanctions and the many thousands of people sanctioned um in the UK and the EU and various other countries all emanated from this magnitsky act that was the the basic template for for uh causing trouble for the Putin regime and and Putin would like to have everybody think that these sanctions aren't hurting him um but I can tell you they are profoundly uh Putin keeps most of his money in other people's names that money is Frozen in many cases and Putin's degrees of freedom his Financial Freedom have been strongly curtailed because of the sanctions that emanated from the magnitsky act and so I would argue that this is not um the only thing that needs to be done in order to stop putting from his murderous war in Ukraine but it's a it's a very important part of the whole package of actions that the West takes to try to uh basically curtail him so so in that light um you wouldn't say that sanctions alone would go far enough to starve his war effort effectively enough to end the war well sanctions could starve his war effort so what what have we done so far in the sanctions world the West has has frozen 350 billion dollars of Russian Central Bank Reserves originally when Putin started the war he had 650 billion dollars in his in reserves effectively his War chest and more than half of that has been taken out of commission by the sanctions the sanctions have also Frozen the assets of about 45 of the top 118 oligarchs these are people who hold Putin's money for him and um that money is no longer available to Putin for various nefarious purposes the sanctions have also made it impossible for the Russian government and Russian companies and Russian Banks to borrow money on the international Capital markets which means that whatever money that they don't have access to in their own accounts they can't replenish it with borrowing um but the one place where the sanctions have not hit which is the elephant in the room is that Russia exports between half a billion and a billion dollars a day of oil and gas and that that export flow continues and the money flow from those exports goes continues back into Russia and we haven't had the stomach to basically do a full embargo a global embargo on this Russian sale of oil and if we did that that would starve Putin of the ability to further conduct this war it's it's both practical possible and it should be done um the way it's possible people say well the Indians or the Chinese are buying the soil how do you prevent them from doing it well the oil has to go on boats it has to go on oil tankers and those boats um uh can be for example we could we could pass a law the West could pass a law to say that any uh oil tanker that moves any drop of Russian oil can no longer dock in any port in the EU in the United States and Canada and Japan we could also say that any ship owner would no longer have access to insurance for their ships if they were moving Russian oil and um and we could also say to the Indians and Chinese that that um any any entity that's involved in the uh refining of of that oil um would be put on the U.S sanctions list or the EU sanctions list and if we did all those things that would um prevent the Russian government from continuing to sell their oil however the reason we don't is that we're all we're in a world of of inflation um inflation and cost of living crisis uh and that's nobody wants to exacerbate that by cutting off Russian oil and having the oil price rise and so that's that's the the real elephant in the room if if we were to stop the flow of oil from the from Russia to the West um the money would run out and Putin wouldn't be able to conduct his war and and we're in this strange situation where on one hand we don't want to you know jam up the price of oil for inflation purposes um and on the other hand then we're having to dig into our own Pockets to um give money to Ukraine um to fight off the Russians so we're giving money to Russia through the sale of oil to kill ukrainians and then we're giving money to Ukraine um to fight back um the easy solution is to not have Russia have any more money makes total sense when you explain it like that now a large part of your work is trying to free political prisoners in Russia and we in particular have been following the incarceration of the American journalist Evan geskovich you are campaigning for uh the journalist I'm sorry you were campaigning for Vladimir karamoza a Russian British national to be freed tell me a bit more about your colleague and what you know about his condition so Vladimir caramurza is a um uh Russian British journalist and opposition activist um he was born in Russia he came to the UK in his teenage years he uh studied at Cambridge University and got his degree in history and political science from Cambridge he went back to Russia as a journalist and then eventually what he saw under the Putin regime was this unbelievable criminality and he became a political opposition activist as part of his opposition work he joined me in the campaign to get magniski acts passed across the world and he explained to many parliaments and governments how important it was that the West didn't enable Putin and didn't didn't allow him to commit these terrible crimes in Russia and keep their money safely in our banks in the West and his testimony was extremely powerful very valuable and was responsible for the magnitsky ACT being passed in the United States and 34 countries 34 additional countries after that Vladimir Putin hates the magnitsky act because it targets everything he cares about which is money and in retaliation Vladimir Putin tried to have Vladimir killed he was poisoned in the summer of 2015 with an unknown nerve agent which caused him to go into a coma multiple organ failure and the doctors gave him a five percent chance of survival he miraculously survived he then returned to Russia he went through a year of Rehabilitation but then he returned to Russia to continue his campaign against the Putin regime and he was poisoned with the same poison um by in 2017 thankfully the same doctors that treated him in 2015 were able to save his life a second time and then when the war started when Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022 about a month later he went back to Russia against the advice of me and all of his friends to protest the war he went on to MSNBC and CNN openly calling the war a war which is illegal in Russia um subject people who do that get sentenced to eight years in prison he then went further and called Putin a war criminal and a mass murder and he was subsequently arrested the next I think the same day as the CNN interview um and they then charged him with a number of crimes including high treason and he was found guilty um incense to 25 years in prison interestingly one of the judges there was a panel of three judges one of the judges who found him guilty and sentenced him to to uh 25 years in prison was a judge who he campaigned to be put on the magnitsky list for being involved in the murder of Sergey magnitsky my lawyer and so he he's responsible for this judge being sanctioned and then the judge retaliates by sentencing him to 25 years in prison he still suffers from the um the horrible after effects of of this poison um that he was subjected to back in 2015 and 2017 and so now in prison he's lost about 25 kilos he looks like a uh his skeletal um he's lost the sensation in both of his feet he has peripheral nerve damage from the poison it's called polyneuropathy he's starting to lose this the sensation in the left side of his body and left untreated which is how he is being it is being left untreated they're not giving him any medical attention it could lead to total paralysis and death and so I don't believe that that there's any chance that he'll survive a 25-year sentence I don't even think he'll survive a five-year sentence and so I'm spending a lot of my time energy and resources um campaigning to get him out of prison and one of the things which uh which I'm trying to do is get the British government um to actually wake up and and uh help him and you mentioned at the beginning of your question um the case of Evan gershowitz Evan gershowitz is a Wall Street Journal reporter who is arrested and taken hostage and uh deserving of of all the world's attention um but strangely Rishi sunak has mentioned Evan gershkovitz on a number of occasions has never mentioned the name Vladimir caramurza even though Vladimir caramurza is a journalist and a British citizen um the British government is is providing Vladimir with sort of basic Consular Services what that means is is they they'll provide him with the uh English uh language periodicals and warm socks in the winter um but they're not going to bat they're I don't hear any any public statements that the British government is trying to free Vladimir karamorza and I find that really upsetting and shameful and and it really reflects badly on a much bigger problem which is that the British government when you get taken hostage if you're if you've got a British blue passport don't expect the government to do anything for you and there's many other cases just like it we've actually asked the foreign Commonwealth and development office for response to to the points that you're making and um so far the comments they've made about this is they've condemned um that his incarceration and his sentencing and they say they've already sanctioned the judge and will consider further measures so I'm guessing it's one we're going to have to watch for further developments on this but it has emerged that two British peers were among 50 people at a party by the Russian ambassador to the UK to Mark the creation of the Russian of Russia independent Russia of the Soviet Union this this happened in the last week how confused do you think the uks and by extension at the West's relationship has been up until now with Russia well so what we had going on up until 2022 February 2022 was a uh a a complete sort of appeasement approach towards Russia from Britain from the EU from the United States and various other places and and one of the reasons for this appeasement approach was everybody really enjoyed all the um Financial benefits that Russia provided so if you were in Germany you loved the cheap Russian gas same thing in Italy in Austria if you were in the UK you loved the oligarch money and and so what we saw was was that all these people became almost addicts to Russia to Russian influence and Russian Financial influence and um and this was really very upsetting for me I spent 10 years trying to get the West to to basically stop this this appeasement and and start to contain Putin and to call it call him what he what he is which is a criminal and nobody wanted to go anywhere near that because everybody enjoyed the money and um and there was a lot of people in the House of Lords um who were on the Russian payroll this stuff was on and on and on in the in the UK on a regular basis um and and everybody sort of stopped and now you have now we discover that that there are two members of the House of Lords going to the Russian Embassy to celebrate Independence Day for Russia from the Soviet Union um while while Putin is bombing civilians in in Ukraine it's shocking if we're to look a little further at the confused standards um can I ask the same question about China because we see the U.S treasury secretary in Beijing this week this is days after China hosted two Russian warships which would sell past Taiwan and Japan and a due to take part in a joint drill with the Chinese what do you think of those circumstances well I mean we're we're falling into the same exact trap we did with Russia so everybody said you know yes Russia Putin's bad but we need to do business with him um then then and the look we've done we've we've we've provided we've sort of enabled him um and we gave him the sort of green light that he could go into Ukraine and nothing would happen and now we're doing the same thing with China you know China is is a um a hustle dictatorship um they just took over Hong Kong they violated and abrogated all sorts of um terms of the treaty that was signed they're now eyeing up Taiwan they're imprisoning uyghurs and concentration camps and we're busy sending trade missions that we should be doing everything we can to extricate ourselves from any kind of mutual dependence on China because they will use any kind of economic leverage they have to carry on in doing malign foreign and the line things around their their borders and in other places and we've we've seen it before with this this is this is the same Playbook as the Russians played and now we're now it's being played out in China and we're falling into the same trap and I think it's a very big mistake what do you think the consequences could be well the consequences are are going to be that that if if we end up in a situation where we're doing more business with China and they were to invade Taiwan um we either have to then suffer a a bigger economic consequence if we decide to um condemn that or if we decide to sanction them or if we decide to support Taiwan militarily um or or the alternative is that there's no economic consequence and they get away with murder and either of them are two things that we don't want to have happen and so um the ideal situation isn't is to instead of expanding our uh interaction economic interactions with China we should be um cutting them down cutting them off and so that by the time uh even if even if there's a short-term cost so we don't end up having a major long-term costs like we're seeing with the war in Ukraine you've talked about the need for a more muscular foreign policy when a country invades another in Europe where has the foreign policy gone wrong well the foreign policy went wrong for the entire foreign policy was it was a chamberlain-esque policy of appeasement up until the moment that that Putin rolled across the border on February last year we we have been um uh just craving appeasers of Vladimir Putin and that foreign policy didn't work and and if we had had a foreign policy like we actually have right now as far as Russia is concerned which is a very tough policy if we had done that after for example the invasion of Georgia in 2008 um Putin might not have moved on Crimea or if we had a very tough policy after we moved on Crimea he might not have had the confidence to do a full-scale Invasion uh of Ukraine last year you know everything is all about rewards and risks every dictator looks at what's available to them uh what kind of actions they can take that would be helpful to them and in Putin's case it was helpful to him to invade Ukraine because his his power was waning after 23 years as president and he thought that a good foreign Invasion would Elevate his approval ratings so that was the upside for him and he thought there's no downside you know every time I've done he said every time I've done something bad these guys all just carry on do business with me you know they all very narrowly just want the money to continue to flow and so he was under the impression that he was going to go into Ukraine we were going to issue a few statements and carry on doing business with him and um and if he had seen that there was a risk um that was so great that the reward wouldn't be justified he might not have done it and that's what a muscular foreign policy means which is creating enough sense of consequence and using and creating consequences when when necessary so that um both the people you're dealing with and others who are looking on don't have the impression that you're a pushover and that's why we need to be much more aggressive about uh China and perhaps even more aggressive about Russia in terms of oil uh not allowing them to sell their oil providing more uh lethal weapons to Ukraine where are the f-16s what what about the long these um uh long-range missiles that they're asking for Etc foreign of course uh members of NATO are meeting in Vilnius next week and it's not that long ago that the French President actually described NATO as brain dead um what do you think NATO needs to do going forward well it's pretty obvious that that um Russia invades countries that are not NATO members and doesn't invade countries that are NATO members so um uh there's going to be a moment in time when when Ukraine um will have hopefully pushed back Russia out of their borders and one of two things will happen after that either Russia will then uh rearm and have another go or Ukraine joins NATO and Russia doesn't doesn't do it anymore it's as simple as that and you know we we everybody says we don't want to we don't want to directly be involved in a war with Russia um and therefore we don't want to we don't want Ukraine to be part of NATO because they're involved in war with Russia well um uh Russia doesn't want to be involved in a war with NATO and so it's very simple that if Ukraine was part of NATO and this wouldn't have happened in the first place if Ukraine becomes part of NATO at a moment when the whole thing calms down um there won't be any more trouble with Ukraine Russia invading Ukraine and so uh Ukraine should be admitted into NATO and and to the extent that that's um uh is you know is it a question are they uh a net benefit or or a detractor from NATO they become the most fierce fighting force in Europe now probably more Fierce than than we are and and so I think that it would be to the great benefit to the great defense of of all of NATO to have Ukrainian allies in this fight and you would like um Frozen Russian assets to be redistributed in the future to rebuild Ukraine how optimistic are you that that can actually happen so Putin invades Ukraine in February 2022 he causes a trillion dollars of damage um as a part of his invasion and the numbers keeps on Rising uh at the beginning of the invasion we have uh Frozen 350 billion dollars of Central Bank Reserves it seems absolutely morally um and financially sensible that we don't just freeze that money but we seize it and we use that money for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine um there are the Russians are arguing you can't do that this money is protected by law the law of sovereign immunity in the same way as our Embassy is protected this money belongs to the government of Russia and therefore it should be protected and it just doesn't work that way you can't um invade a foreign country create a trillion dollars of Damages and then say unprotected by law there's another law which is the law of counter measures which says that if you create that kind of damage that money should be confiscated and so um I believe that eventually the financial realities of this whole story are going to play themselves out and we in the west who are at the moment tiptoeing around this money we're saying oh my God we you know we don't want to do anything that might be seen to be um legally controversial um well I don't think that when we're starting to raise taxes in order to rebuild Ukraine people are going to be all that worried about the um legal controversy I think there's a legal case many many top uh International legal experts have said it's legal and have come up with very clear explanations for how it can be done and it's sort of the obvious thing we're going to still have to dig into our pockets because they've the Damage Done to Ukraine is far bigger than the amount of money that's been frozen of Russian Central Bank Reserves but that's a that's a clear obvious and and sensible place to start suffices to say then you are optimistic well in this so at the very beginning of the war um nobody would it would even none of the West would even Supply tanks to Ukraine and now there's hundreds and hundreds of Tanks going in we wouldn't Supply long-range missiles now there's lots of long-range missiles going in I believe that that I don't know whether it's a year or two years or six months but I believe that that it's sort of a a no-brainer that this is going to happen because why would we um why would we basically allow Russia to use law to protect their money when they're violating the law on such a profound way and killing so many people and creating so much damage to Ukraine doesn't make any sense the way this war ends will have so many consequences for Europe what is the best scenario for it and for wider global stability well the way that this war should end is that we should give the ukrainians what they need to forcefully expel Russian troops from their Sovereign territory and that includes Crimea and then after that once Russia is defeated in Ukraine we should provide uh NATO membership uh to Ukraine and we should provide them with enough financial resources to rebuild and and then we should create um the Iron Curtain again which what I mean by that is that we should create a a set of disincentives for Russia ever to try this again um to any neighbor uh that we care about and we should be absolutely brutal about it and we should not um in any way have a uh re-engagement a reset an appeasement of Russia this is a country that doesn't believe um in uh international law doesn't believe in in uh respect uh for its neighbors it's a conquest country and we should stop them from doing that and so we had this situation during the Cold War and a cold war is a lot better than a hot War which is what we're involved in right now and so to the extent that we get to this place um the key is is to be so robust like we were during the Soviet times that they never try anything again so do you think then that one of the lessons that will be taken away from this whole experience this the war in Ukraine is that appeasement politics is over well the lesson should be taken that appeasement policy politics is over um I don't know if it will be taken and as as you mentioned before you have you have um you know in the midst of of China flexing its military muscles you have you have trade missions with senior uh UK officials going to China um I I think we haven't learned the lesson yet we're sort of uh addicts and we're we keep on going back to the dealer when when we should be um basically understanding that there's a lot of people in the world that that don't believe in the same things we believe in and will do harm unless we have a robust policy and we can still do business with with country with with bad countries as long as they understand that we're we are you know we have uh uh tough values and if they cross a line we'll do something about it Bill Browder it's been great speaking to you thank you very much for joining us on Frontline you've been watching Frontline for times radio my thanks to Louis Sykes our producer to support the work of Frontline hit the Subscribe button you can also listen to times radio throughout the day or read it at times dot Co dot UK thanks for watching bye

Channel: Times Radio

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Id: O7n3ID7vykM

Length: 32min 24sec (1944 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023