TRIGGERnometry - The Real Reason Putin Invaded Ukraine — Sir Bill Browder

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00:01:00.000 Putin said real simple 50% for Vladimir Putin and that was the moment that Putin became the

00:01:08.520 richest man in the world and that was the moment that my life changed forever. I hire the smartest

00:01:17.340 lawyer I know in Russia a guy named Sergei Magnitsky. They chain him to a bed and eight

00:01:24.240 riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergei Magnitsky

00:01:28.480 until he died.

00:01:29.740 And so it became clear there was no chance

00:01:31.380 of getting justice inside of Russia.

00:01:33.540 So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia?

00:01:35.800 Then why not take away their ability 0.78

00:01:37.300 to use their money in the West?

00:01:39.240 And that became known as the Magnitsky Act. 0.60

00:01:41.600 The reason that he's doing this war

00:01:44.020 is that he stole so much money

00:01:46.800 that he's afraid of his own people.

00:01:48.600 And so the best way to have your own people

00:01:51.460 not get mad at you is to create somebody else

00:01:53.840 them to be mad at. It's Machiavelli 101, create a foreign enemy, start a war. 0.90

00:02:02.000 So Bill Browder, welcome to Trichonometry. Great to be here. It's great to have you. You have one

00:02:06.240 of the most fascinating stories to tell, having gone from growing up in the United States,

00:02:14.000 being the grandson of a communist, a labor organizer, going to Russia as a capitalist at

00:02:21.280 at this point, and then getting into very big trouble with the Putin government over

00:02:25.740 some terrible events.

00:02:26.680 And then, of course, some of the work you've done after that as an activist as well.

00:02:31.340 So tell us the story.

00:02:33.980 Well, it's a long story, so I guess we should start at the very beginning.

00:02:38.680 You mentioned my grandfather.

00:02:40.560 His name was Earl Browder, and he was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas.

00:02:47.020 He was so good at organizing the union, he was spotted by the communists.

00:02:50.700 and they said, if you like labor unionism, you're going to love communism. Why don't you come and

00:02:55.280 check it out? He went from Wichita to Moscow. He did what many other young American men do when

00:03:02.140 they get to Moscow. He met a young Russian girl who became my grandmother. My father was born

00:03:07.620 there. And then five years later, he returned to America and became the general secretary

00:03:12.720 of the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice against Roosevelt in 1936 and

00:03:18.880 1940. Obviously, he didn't get that many votes. He was imprisoned by Roosevelt in 1941, pardoned

00:03:26.600 in 42. At the end of the Second World War, when there was no longer any kind of relationship

00:03:33.580 or need for a relationship between Russia and the United States, Stalin kicked him out

00:03:39.660 of the Communist Party and started, in fact, he started murdering my grandfather, Earl

00:03:46.820 Browder, he had something called Browderism. They started murdering his followers in Eastern Europe.

00:03:55.460 The 1950s start, the McCarthy era. He gets persecuted, obviously, for being a communist.

00:04:02.980 So this is my family legacy. I was born in 1964. I'm 62 years old. When I was going through my

00:04:09.460 teenage rebellion, I was trying to figure out how do you rebel from a family of communists.

00:04:13.940 and I grew my hair long and it grew into an afro, you can't tell now, but

00:04:20.420 that didn't seem to upset my family. I follow the Grateful Dead around the country,

00:04:26.500 that also didn't upset my family, but when I put on a suit in time, became a capitalist,

00:04:32.660 that really pissed them off, good and proper. I became a capitalist, I went to Stanford Business

00:04:39.220 school. I graduated business school in 1989, which was a very auspicious year because that was the

00:04:45.700 year that the Berlin Wall came down. And as I was trying to figure out what to do post-business

00:04:50.100 school, I had this epiphany, which is that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America

00:04:56.900 and the Berlin Wall has just come down, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist

00:05:00.980 in Eastern Europe. And that's what I set out to do. And I couldn't get quite all the way to

00:05:07.940 Eastern Europe at the time. I moved to London in 89, and I had several jobs, but the job that

00:05:13.700 defined me was a job at Salomon Brothers, which doesn't exist anymore, but it's a very famous

00:05:19.300 American financial institution that was immortalized in Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker.

00:05:26.660 I got a job at Salomon Brothers as an investment banker on the East European

00:05:31.780 investment banking team and my first assignment was to advise a fishing fleet located in mermansk

00:05:39.300 russia on their privatization so i fly from london to mermansk i get picked up at the airport

00:05:48.180 by the head of the fishing fleet he takes me down to the docks he shows me one of their vessels which

00:05:54.260 was this enormously long, high, big ship. I asked him, how much does one of these things cost? And

00:06:03.940 he said, $20 million new. How many do you have in your fleet? A hundred. So $2 billion worth of ships.

00:06:12.340 How old is your fleet? I didn't know anything about ships or fleets, but he said seven years

00:06:16.660 old. And so I figured maybe that's a billion dollars worth of ships. And I had been hired,

00:06:22.900 or I should say Solomon Brothers had been hired by the management of this company to advise them

00:06:29.380 on whether to buy 51 percent of the fleet which had been offered by the government in the

00:06:34.740 privatization program of Russia. And so I said, what price is the government selling 51 percent?

00:06:41.780 They said two and a half million dollars. So you don't have to be a, you know, Stanford MBA or a

00:06:49.380 financial wizard to know that that if if there's a billion dollars worth of ships and you can buy

00:06:54.020 51 for two and a half million dollars um that's got to be a pretty good deal and so then i said

00:06:59.700 to myself i'm in the wrong business i shouldn't be advising on this stuff i should be investing

00:07:03.460 in this stuff and um and is is this just like some kind of anomaly with the fishing fleet or is this

00:07:10.020 something going on more widespread so i flew from romansk to moscow and um sort of poked around

00:07:17.060 Moscow for a week, and I realized that this was the whole country. They were basically just giving

00:07:21.860 the whole country away for free in what they called the mass privatization program. Boris Yeltsin,

00:07:27.380 who was the president at the time, said, I want to go from communism to capitalism. How do we

00:07:32.980 create a country of capitalists? Let's give all the property away for free. And so it didn't work 0.99

00:07:38.900 out that way in the end. 22 oligarchs ended up with 40% of the country. But little crumbs were

00:07:46.660 falling off the table in terms of this privatization. And off the back of that,

00:07:50.260 I left Salomon Brothers. I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund,

00:07:54.820 and I started investing in the privatization of Russia. And it was really a very spectacular

00:08:03.300 time to be an investor in Russia. I was, you know, all of 30, 31 years old when I started

00:08:12.660 this fund and there's this expression in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king and

00:08:19.540 not nobody knew more than me um just because nobody knew more than anybody about anything

00:08:24.020 back then and i started investing and um i was uh my fund was the best performing fund in the world

00:08:31.780 in 1997. um i i got i went from zero to a billion dollars of assets under management which these

00:08:39.460 These days doesn't sound like a lot of money because there's trillionaires running around,

00:08:42.640 but back then that was an enormous amount of money.

00:08:45.320 Back then a billion was real money.

00:08:47.700 Yeah, exactly.

00:08:49.860 And it was just the most glorious time ever, and I thought my billion was going to turn

00:08:56.240 into 10 billion, and it turned out that all the success coming so quickly in the hands

00:09:04.400 of a 31-year-old was the biggest sell signal there ever was.

00:09:07.220 Of course, I was 31 years old and I didn't really understand that.

00:09:13.400 The Russian government in August of 1998 devalued their currency and defaulted on their bonds

00:09:21.100 and my portfolio went from a billion to a hundred million.

00:09:26.340 I lost 900 million of my clients' money.

00:09:30.120 I was ashamed, I was humiliated, and I was determined to try to get from the 100 million

00:09:37.360 back up to a billion and then some.

00:09:40.560 And in theory, it shouldn't have been all that hard an exercise in theory.

00:09:47.740 I owned oil companies.

00:09:49.880 The oil companies sold their oil in dollars.

00:09:53.780 They paid for their costs in rubles.

00:09:56.840 The ruble has just gone down by 75%.

00:09:59.740 And so if your revenues are staying the same or growing, and your costs are going down

00:10:04.120 by 75%, that means your profits should be exploding, in theory. 0.86

00:10:11.780 The reality was that all these companies were majority-owned by these people known as the

00:10:16.460 Russian oligarchs.

00:10:18.460 And the Russian oligarchs said to themselves, well, before all this crash, they thought

00:10:28.420 they could get money from Wall Street. They had all these bankers with fancy suits showing up in

00:10:33.360 Moscow saying, if you behave yourself, we can get you some money from Wall Street. And after the

00:10:42.840 default and devaluation, they called up their bankers and said, you know, we could really use

00:10:45.960 some of that money right now. And the guys who picked up the phone said, Vladimir who? And put

00:10:53.480 phone down because they didn't want to be, and nobody wanted to have any association with Russia

00:10:58.680 after that. It was like toxic waste being connected to Russia. And so the oligarchs said,

00:11:04.120 well, wait a second, there's no incentive to behave. And in Russia, there's never been any

00:11:09.080 disincentive against misbehavior. They said to themselves, why don't we just steal everything 0.80

00:11:15.640 that's, you know, not nailed down, and even stuff that is nailed down, and so the oligarchs

00:11:23.040 embarked on an orgy of stealing which has been unprecedented in the history of business.

00:11:28.600 They were doing asset stripping, transfer pricing, embezzlements, dilution.

00:11:33.680 They were doing it on an industrial scale, and I was sitting there with my last 10 cents

00:11:38.220 on the dollar hoping that I was somehow going to get from, you know, 10 cents up to a dollar

00:11:42.500 or 100 million back up to a billion, and they were going to try to steal the last 10 cents

00:11:46.800 on the dollar that I had.

00:11:48.560 And so, not as an investment strategy, but as a matter of desperation or survival, I

00:11:55.660 said, I need to try to stop the stealing that's going on in these companies. 0.52

00:12:00.260 Well, how do you stop stealing in Russian companies?

00:12:06.860 There was no class taught on that at Stanford Business School.

00:12:10.940 And it's not as if there's any institutions in Russia that are going to be there to help

00:12:16.060 out some foreign minority shareholder that's unhappy about the stealing.

00:12:23.140 You can't go to the police and say, I've just discovered stealing at Gazprom.

00:12:28.700 What are they going to do?

00:12:30.460 Nor could I go to the courts, all the judges were bribed, the parliament was on the payroll,

00:12:38.580 government the regulator there was nothing except for one thing which is that i had a really good

00:12:44.900 team of russian uh people analysts working for me who were really smart who could research how

00:12:52.340 the stealing was going on and i would go to all the same bars and restaurants as the foreign

00:12:59.220 correspondents and so what we decided to do was to research who was doing the stealing how they

00:13:06.340 they were stealing, where the money was going. And these guys, they were so brazen, they

00:13:10.580 weren't even covering it up. And in Russia, there's no such thing as data protection.

00:13:17.380 Every piece of data is available for a price. And so we would gather all the information,

00:13:24.780 put it together, and then share it with these journalists that I was hanging out at the

00:13:28.240 bars with. And they were loving me because I was saving them a lot of time and effort.

00:13:35.020 we would publish all the scams that were going on. And you might say, well, why did you expect

00:13:45.260 anything good to happen? And the answer is, we didn't know what was going to happen. But

00:13:49.900 when we first started doing this, this was the moment that Vladimir Putin had just come to power.

00:13:56.160 And Vladimir Putin, back then, he might have been the same person, but he was faced with a whole

00:14:01.620 different set of constraints back then, and the oligarchs were more powerful than him.

00:14:09.640 And he wanted to take away the power from the oligarchs.

00:14:14.840 And so there's an expression in the world that your enemy's enemy is your friend.

00:14:21.640 And I've never met Vladimir Putin, I haven't met him then and I haven't met him since then,

00:14:26.480 But I was busy exposing the oligarchs who were stealing money from me, and he was hating

00:14:32.780 the oligarchs because they were stealing power from him.

00:14:36.060 And so what did he do?

00:14:38.860 He stepped into the fights.

00:14:41.160 So we exposed the corruption of the management of Gazprom, and the state owned 51%.

00:14:47.380 They fired the management of Gazprom, and the share price rose spectacularly.

00:14:53.540 We went after Sparebank.

00:14:54.900 We went after Surgood and Eftegast. 0.94

00:14:56.440 These are all big Russian companies.

00:14:59.100 And he would step in on a regular basis and do stuff.

00:15:03.980 Every time he would step in, the share price would go up.

00:15:08.100 And so I was feeling pretty good about him.

00:15:09.860 I thought, this is great.

00:15:11.740 You know, I was making money, making Russia a better place.

00:15:15.480 This Putin guy was like helping out, you know, what could be better than that?

00:15:23.500 was that he wasn't helping out because he wanted to make Russia a better place. He wanted to clean

00:15:27.980 up Russian companies. He was helping out because he didn't like these oligarchs.

00:15:32.540 And one day he decided that he was going to win his war with the oligarchs.

00:15:37.100 How was he going to do that? He was going to arrest the richest oligarch in the country,

00:15:41.980 a man named Mikhail Hordakovsky. He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos. He arrests him

00:15:47.980 him off his private jet in Siberia. They bring him back to Moscow. They put him in a cage

00:15:55.880 in a courtroom. In Russia, there's a 99.7% conviction rate in criminal cases, so they

00:16:01.960 just keep you in the cage because that's where you're going to be afterwards. They allow 0.98

00:16:06.100 the television cameras to come into the courtroom to film the richest man in Russia sitting

00:16:12.540 in a cage. They eventually sentence him to 10 years in prison. And the other oligarchs

00:16:19.280 in Russia are just going out of their minds. One by one by one, after Hortokovsky was sentenced,

00:16:25.580 they go to Putin and say, you know, Vladimir, what do we have to do so that doesn't happen

00:16:32.180 to us? Putin said, real simple, 50%. Not for the Russian government, not for the presidential

00:16:41.400 administration of Russia, 50% for Vladimir Putin. And that was the moment that Putin became the

00:16:47.180 richest man in the world. And that was the moment that my life changed forever. And that was the

00:16:53.860 moment that things really started turning bad for me. Most businesses don't have a communication

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00:18:28.400 Well, we'll get to that part.

00:18:30.100 I've heard you say before about the 50%.

00:18:32.120 I just, I'm curious how we know that that's what happened between him

00:18:36.740 And I remember seeing him dressing down various oligarchs in a public meeting.

00:18:41.040 But how do we know that he personally is taking that money from them, like that kind of deal?

00:18:47.200 Because they told me.

00:18:51.060 Various people told me that that was the deal.

00:18:54.120 And, you know, one could say, well, maybe they were not correct or exaggerating.

00:19:01.920 But I think we've now seen enough anecdotal information to support what I was told that

00:19:08.340 it becomes pretty, I mean, so for example, there's Putin's house on the Black Sea.

00:19:13.680 I'm sure you know about that or, well, I don't know if your reader or listeners know about

00:19:18.120 that, but Lexi Navalny made a great video that's been watched by 25 million people about

00:19:23.660 Putin's, it's a billion dollar house on the Black Sea.

00:19:27.520 Nice place.

00:19:28.160 not really i mean it's it's it's really a crude place they've got stripper poles and

00:19:37.800 bowling out i mean it's i'm not sure that any of us would like actually want to like live there but

00:19:42.620 but um uh a billion dollars for that he's got an 800 or maybe 900 million dollar super yacht

00:19:50.760 and and where does he get this stuff from all the all the money trails lead back to the oligarchs

00:19:57.460 Um, when his daughter got married, um, the son got a dowry, um, which was the gift of

00:20:05.740 like 30% of a major multi-billion dollar petrochemical firm.

00:20:10.300 When he cheated on his daughter and they got divorced, the son-in-law gave it back to the

00:20:16.640 oligarch.

00:20:17.740 I mean, it's, you know, there's a million of these stories.

00:20:20.500 See, that is a testament to the power of the male libido.

00:20:23.760 Like you marry Putin's daughter and then cheat on her.

00:20:27.300 That is not a well-thought-through move, is it?

00:20:30.620 You know, I mean, I guess he just couldn't control himself.

00:20:34.160 Either that or he just backed himself.

00:20:36.100 Yeah, I don't think that's a smart move.

00:20:39.080 He's still alive, though, as far as I'm aware.

00:20:40.940 Really?

00:20:41.380 Yeah.

00:20:41.780 But he's the son of one of Putin's best friends.

00:20:45.220 You know, they're not killing each other.

00:20:47.460 I mean, you would think, I mean, anyways.

00:20:50.160 It's a dispute within the family sort of thing.

00:20:52.360 Uh-huh. We're joking around, of course, but I was just very curious to hear that. So you had

00:20:58.000 oligarchs who personally told you, this is what Putin said to us. And why did this begin to

00:21:05.420 interfere with your business and what you were doing? Because I was busy carrying on with my

00:21:10.540 naming and shaming campaigns. So you'd think it's pretty ridiculous for some guy from Chicago 0.93

00:21:19.780 to be outing the oligarchs and doing all this kind of stuff? 0.98

00:21:24.320 And the answer is it was ridiculous. 0.72

00:21:26.120 I had kind of shaved off the risk sensors in my brain

00:21:31.860 because you couldn't go out there with like a full set of risk reward

00:21:36.620 and take that and do that.

00:21:40.620 And so I was just plowing forward even after Hortokovsky was imprisoned,

00:21:47.160 exposing more malfeasance. But I wasn't exposing the enemies of Putin anymore.

00:21:54.140 I was exposing his 50% interest. But I wasn't thinking about that.

00:22:00.480 And I was going to ask you about that because I remember growing up in Russia in the 1990s

00:22:04.900 and objectively, it was a wild and crazy time. What did you think when you arrived in Russia

00:22:13.260 in the early 90s and just you must have, you know, with your American background, I visit

00:22:17.820 America all the time.

00:22:18.820 The mindsets are so different.

00:22:20.660 You must have found it a huge shock, but also probably a thrill, right?

00:22:25.660 Well, I mean, so first of all, I wasn't... 0.96

00:22:29.980 In Russia, they really, over generations, they've kind of destroyed initiative, idealism, 0.96

00:22:40.780 public concern, philanthropy. 0.75

00:22:43.200 just destroyed all of that. But in America, you know, all that kind of stuff was in our DNA and

00:22:49.680 brought up and pounded into you. And probably, you know, can-do attitude, optimism, everything

00:22:55.600 could be better in the future than it is today. That was my thinking. So I show up in this country,

00:23:00.880 which is completely chaos. And when communism ended, they didn't have a system, you know,

00:23:06.720 they called it capitalism, but nobody had created anything, really. It was just total chaos.

00:23:13.200 But I showed up there and I said to myself, my bet is that it's going to go from chaos or to something less chaotic, horrible to bad. 0.87

00:23:23.240 I called it the Nigeria to Brazil trade.

00:23:26.180 And so I showed up there and I thought, you know, I wanted to be part of this process of, and by the way, you're going to make a lot of money if it goes from horrible to bad.

00:23:34.600 That was my thinking.

00:23:36.020 And it started to go from horrible to bad.

00:23:39.620 In Putin's first few years, he wasn't this monstrous guy that he is right now.

00:23:44.820 And he was like, you know, he was kind of like a nameless, faceless technocrat.

00:23:51.300 That's how we thought of him in those first few years.

00:23:55.060 And he was like reforming the tax system and doing all sorts of stuff that you could honestly

00:24:01.380 say were economic reforms.

00:24:03.300 And so the thought was that we were going to be in this transition.

00:24:07.580 so it was kind of cool to be there when, when it was all total chaos and, and in watching the

00:24:12.940 little green sprouts of like, you know, civil society start to form. And so I thought, you know,

00:24:17.640 this is, this is great. And, and I wanted to be part of it and I, and I wanted to profit off of

00:24:21.480 it as well. So Bill, going back to the story, Putin is going around asking for 50% here, 50%

00:24:28.800 there. How did that change? And how was your life completely different after those events?

00:24:34.880 Well, um, so I was now going after him, I mean, his interests and, and I became very inconvenient.

00:24:43.840 You know, here I was, um, I wasn't talking to him. I wasn't, you know, they were, um,

00:24:49.520 I wasn't giving him 50% of anything. I was not part of that thing. I was just

00:24:54.960 running my fund, getting mad about different companies doing bad stuff, exposing them,

00:24:59.760 working with the journalists, and they had to figure out what to do with me.

00:25:05.600 And, you know, if I'd been Russian, they would have killed me. But because I was a foreigner,

00:25:14.240 and not just a foreigner, I was the largest foreign investor in the country at this point.

00:25:17.280 I was managing $4.5 billion at the top of the market. And so I think, and by the way,

00:25:24.160 I'd be killed this minute if I was anywhere near Russia or anywhere within their grasp. So it's 0.99

00:25:28.240 It's not like Putin, I mean, he's become more brazen.

00:25:32.100 Back then, he was a bit scared.

00:25:33.420 He was still sort of feeling his way around the world.

00:25:37.100 So they didn't want to kill me.

00:25:39.180 But one day, I was flying back.

00:25:41.260 I had been living there for 10 years.

00:25:42.680 I was flying from London.

00:25:44.760 I was here in London for the weekend.

00:25:46.140 I was flying back to Moscow.

00:25:49.080 And I was at Sheremetyevo Airport at the VIP lounge.

00:25:52.160 And I was sitting there waiting for my passport to be processed.

00:25:54.780 and four heavily armed border guards burst into the lounge,

00:25:59.320 grabbed me, and then take me down

00:26:01.040 to the detention center of the airport.

00:26:04.180 And I stayed there overnight, not sure whether I was being...

00:26:07.100 And there were two things that could have happened.

00:26:09.080 They could have sent me to Siberia, like Hordikovsky,

00:26:11.940 or they could have deported me.

00:26:14.080 I didn't know what was going to happen that night

00:26:15.560 when I was sitting in that airport detention cell.

00:26:18.880 And I had a lot of hard questions for myself

00:26:22.200 about life choices and how I'd gotten here, and maybe I should have been a little bit more careful

00:26:29.500 and all this kind of stuff. And the next morning, I wasn't sure what was going to happen. And then

00:26:36.120 finally, they come for me and they put me back onto an Aeroflot flight and deport me. And then

00:26:42.940 when I land in London, I get a letter from the foreign ministry saying I've been expelled because

00:26:48.740 a threat to national security. So, good news. I'm not dead. I'm not in a Russian prison. 0.97

00:27:01.220 I'm just deported. But when the Russians go after you, they don't do it. That was a mild sanction. 0.86

00:27:12.340 When they go after you, they usually do some really nasty stuff. And I said to myself,

00:27:17.940 this is not the end of the story. This is the beginning of something really bad.

00:27:22.740 And so what did I do? I had a bunch of people working for me in Moscow. And so I say to myself,

00:27:30.820 these people could be victimized. We need to get them out. And I evacuated my team and their

00:27:36.660 family members. Once I got everyone out, I said, well, we have a lot of money over there.

00:27:40.900 um these guys are probably gonna go after the money we should get get our money out and and we

00:27:48.760 quickly and quietly sold every last share we held in Russia got all of our money out so I kind of

00:27:56.900 dusted off my hands I said phew people safe money safe you know time to move on to other stuff set

00:28:05.960 a new investment fund investing in other places started investing in other places i'm at a board

00:28:11.320 meeting in paris um june 4th 2007. i get a frantic call from the only last last remaining person i

00:28:20.760 have in in russia which was a secretary sitting in our empty office and she says there's 25 police

00:28:26.600 officers you know breaking down the door what should i do i said i don't know let me call up

00:28:31.720 up my lawyer. I've got an American lawyer in Moscow. I say, there's 25 police officers

00:28:36.300 breaking down my door. And he said, we got 25 police officers in our office looking for

00:28:42.520 your documents. 50 police officers doing simultaneous raid in my office and my law firm's office

00:28:48.720 looking for our official documents for our investment holding companies, all the stamp

00:28:53.840 seals and certificates. They find them at the law firm's office. They take those documents

00:29:01.080 away and the next thing we know we no longer own our investment holding companies they had

00:29:08.280 been fraudulently re-registered into the main into the name of a man who had been convicted of

00:29:13.000 manslaughter and let out of jail early presumably to put his name on these documents so i'm sitting

00:29:21.480 there thinking okay so the police have raided my office seized the documents used the documents

00:29:32.120 to steal my empty the companies were empty now because remember we got everything out

00:29:37.240 to steal these empty investment holding companies i'm not worried about the money money is already

00:29:42.600 safe it's offshore but if the police are doing all this stuff working with killers i'm going to be

00:29:47.880 walking through Frankfurt Airport one day and someone's gonna you know arrest

00:29:52.320 me on a Russian Interpol warrant and I say to myself we got to figure out how

00:29:57.180 to how to stop whatever is happening here and so I hire the smartest lawyer I

00:30:06.660 know in Russia a guy named Sergei Magnitsky he worked for an American law

00:30:10.680 firm he was one of these people that could just literally run circles around

00:30:14.520 everybody else with the law. He just knew exactly what he was doing. And I say to him,

00:30:19.320 hey, once you figure this out, figure out who's doing what, what are they doing? Why are they

00:30:23.240 doing it? How are they doing it? We need to stop it. And so he goes out, he researches everything,

00:30:29.000 and he's a super smart guy, and he figures it out. He said, this is the most cynical thing

00:30:34.840 I've ever seen. So when I was expelled and after I sold everything, we had a billion dollars of

00:30:42.360 profits on the securities that we sold. And off that billion dollars of profits, I paid $230

00:30:49.060 million of capital gains tax to the Russian government. What Sergei had figured out was that

00:30:56.140 this group of crooks that stole our companies with the police documents, they stole our companies.

00:31:03.860 And then they went to the tax authorities and they said there was a mistake made in the previous

00:31:09.220 year's tax filings. These companies didn't earn a billion dollars. They earn zero. They came up

00:31:15.300 with a complicated way of explaining it. Therefore, the 230 million dollars that was paid in taxes

00:31:24.260 in the previous year was paid in error, and we'd like that money back. They applied for this illegal

00:31:31.860 $230 million tax refund on the 23rd of December, 2007, and it was approved and paid out the

00:31:42.100 next day, Christmas Eve.

00:31:44.100 It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia, paid out in one day on a fraud.

00:31:51.300 I mean, if I had genuinely overpaid $10,000 of taxes in 2007, I'd still be waiting for

00:32:01.500 the tax refund today, but an illegal $230 million tax refund was refunded in one day

00:32:07.500 on a fraud. On Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve. They actually celebrate Christmas,

00:32:13.720 whatever, 13 days later. But anyways. No one's working at this time. That's the point. Right.

00:32:19.660 So people at the very highest level of government have clearly been involved in making this happen.

00:32:24.400 So, Sergey and I looked at this, and we said to ourselves, obviously, this is a rogue operation,

00:32:31.840 an inside job, corruption at the highest level. But we also said to ourselves that

00:32:37.240 this couldn't have been authorized by Putin because he's a patriot and a nationalist, right?

00:32:44.260 He's off talking about how the greater good of Russia, this must be something, you know,

00:32:50.440 he must be getting, and by the way, this wasn't our money. This was the Russian government's

00:32:53.800 money that was being stolen. So Sergei and I were convinced, wrongly, but we were convinced that

00:33:00.060 this was a rogue operation. And if we brought it to the attention at the highest levels in the

00:33:05.240 Russian government, then the good guys would get the bad guys. So we wrote criminal complaints to

00:33:11.160 the head of all the different law enforcement agencies. I went on television, radio, newspapers

00:33:17.960 explaining the whole scam and putting it out there. Sergei went to the Russian State Investigative

00:33:23.420 which is their version of the FBI,

00:33:25.420 testified against the police officers

00:33:27.420 who were involved in the fraud,

00:33:29.420 and then we sat back and waited for the good guys

00:33:31.420 to get the bad guys.

00:33:33.420 Turns out, in Putin's Russia, there are no good guys.

00:33:39.420 Five weeks after Sergei testified against the police officers,

00:33:42.420 the same police officers came to his home

00:33:45.420 on the 24th of November, 2008, and arrested Sergei.

00:33:50.420 They put him in pre-trial detention, and they started to really, like, put the screws to him.

00:33:58.100 They put him in cells with 14 inmates and 8 beds, kept the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation.

00:34:06.880 And they put him in cells with no heat and no window panes in December in Moscow, so he nearly froze to death.

00:34:16.260 They'd move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night.

00:34:18.860 They had to put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage

00:34:23.980 would bubble up.

00:34:24.980 And they figured, this is a guy who wears a blue suit and a red tie.

00:34:30.620 He works in a fancy American law firm, buys Starbucks in the morning on his way into work.

00:34:37.040 They figure they put the screws to him, he'll do whatever they want him to do.

00:34:43.320 And they wanted him to withdraw his testimony, and they wanted him to sign a false confession

00:34:47.140 say that he stole the 230 million dollars, and they wanted him to say that he did so on my

00:34:53.140 instructions. So, you know, here's this guy that doesn't look so powerful, but he had a will of

00:35:03.780 steel. And for him, the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more awful than

00:35:09.060 whatever they were subjecting him to and he just refused. And so the pressure and

00:35:17.040 the torture and the pain and the unpleasantness just got worse and worse

00:35:20.880 and worse over a long period of time. And he started getting pains in his stomach.

00:35:29.220 He started losing weight. He lost 20 kilos. He went to the prison infirmary

00:35:35.400 and they diagnosed him as having pancreatitis and gallstones, and they

00:35:40.740 said he needed to have an operation. The operation was scheduled for the 1st of

00:35:44.400 August 2009. About a week before the operation, the same people who were

00:35:52.980 torturing him before came to him and said, listen, you know, if you sign this

00:35:57.780 false confession, everything will be good. He refused again. In retaliation, they moved

00:36:06.040 him from the prison that had a hospital where he was scheduled to have an operation to a

00:36:09.960 maximum security prison called Butyrka, which is considered to be one of the most awful prisons

00:36:14.420 in Russia. And at Butyrka, there were no medical facilities for his operation, and they refused

00:36:19.260 him all subsequent medical treatment. He went into a terrible downward spiral. He was constant,

00:36:26.520 agonizing, pain. He and his lawyers wrote desperate requests to every different

00:36:34.080 branch of the criminal justice system begging for medical attention. Every one

00:36:38.560 of their requests was either ignored or denied in writing. On November 16, 2009,

00:36:45.800 he went into critical condition. On that night, the Butyrka authorities didn't

00:36:51.560 want to have responsibility for him anymore, so they put him in an ambulance

00:36:54.360 and sent him across town to a different prison

00:36:57.360 that had a medical wing.

00:36:59.360 They don't put him in the emergency room.

00:37:01.360 They put him in an isolation cell and they chain him to a bed

00:37:04.360 and eight riot guards with rubber batons

00:37:07.360 beat Sergei Magnitsky until he died.

00:37:10.360 This was November 16th, 2009.

00:37:14.360 He was 37 years old.

00:37:16.360 He left a wife and two children.

00:37:19.360 I got the news the next morning and it was the most horrifying,

00:37:23.360 traumatizing, life-changing news I could have ever gotten. I assumed that the

00:37:30.200 worst-case scenario for him was like a long prison sentence on trumped-up

00:37:33.540 charges. I couldn't have ever imagined that they would kill him. And when I was

00:37:37.760 finally able to kind of clear my head and think about what I was going to do

00:37:41.540 with this, I made a decision. I made a vow, which is that I was going to put

00:37:48.760 aside my life as a businessman, and I was going to devote all of my time, energy, and resources

00:37:56.360 going after the people who killed him and make sure they face justice.

00:38:01.640 And that's what I've been doing for the last 17 years.

00:38:06.460 It's such a powerful story, Bill, because it's obviously about many things, but it's

00:38:11.220 also about the nature of heroism.

00:38:13.500 And we think about heroes looking a particular way or sounding a particular way.

00:38:18.040 But Sergei was a hero in the truest sense of the word.

00:38:23.480 He really was. He really was. And the thing about it is that he was like an unexpected hero. I mean,

00:38:30.440 in the sense that he was a tax lawyer. He was not a human rights lawyer. He was not a

00:38:37.640 political activist. He's not Alexei Navalny or a journalist. He was just a tax lawyer working

00:38:43.240 for rich guys, helping them with their taxes. But when he got thrown into this horrible situation,

00:38:49.080 he did exactly the... I mean, I wish he hadn't been a hero. I wish he had been a flawed individual

00:38:57.560 and would have... He could have testified against me for anything, and it would have been fine.

00:39:01.960 He'd still be alive. But he was truly... He had principles, and when he was faced with this kind

00:39:07.560 of duress he he he did the most heroic thing and and you know the one thing i've learned a lot

00:39:15.800 over the last 20 years is that the sometimes the people you expect to be heroic aren't and

00:39:21.880 sometimes the people you had no idea are heroes turn out to be and sergey turned out to be an

00:39:25.560 amazing hero because that is you know i don't think we can actually comprehend in the west

00:39:33.640 what that's like to experience, what that's like to have the weight of a government come down on

00:39:40.880 you and the knowledge that there is literally nothing that you can do. And whatever path that

00:39:49.960 you take, however you attempt to redress it fairly by legal means, you know it's not going to go

00:39:56.160 anywhere. Well, this is the interesting thing about Sergei was that up until the very end,

00:40:01.400 he was an idealist. He actually believed that if he filed a complaint or he made a legal

00:40:07.660 application, that somewhere in the system that the law would protect him.

00:40:14.800 I asked him before he was arrested, I asked him to leave. And he said, you know, Bill,

00:40:21.360 this is not 1937. This is not Stalin's Russia. The law will protect me. And he believed it. And he

00:40:28.600 believed it so much in a true lawyer's lawyer way. In his 358 days in detention, he filed 450

00:40:37.540 complaints documenting all this mistreatment and abuse and all this terrible stuff.

00:40:43.340 Because he believed until the end, probably until they were beating him, that somehow

00:40:50.240 it was going to come out all right. So he was a hero and an idealist. And I guess

00:40:58.280 a naive idealist. And if he had been more cynical like everybody else in Russia, he would have

00:41:05.500 written, he would have signed what they wanted him to sign and then he'd still be alive.

00:41:09.480 But also the part of the story, the subsequent part of the story shows that, you know, you say

00:41:15.320 he was a naive idealist, but with your help, he did enact some change. He did. He changed the world,

00:41:22.780 his sacrifice. So, for me, the idea that he would die and it would be a meaningless death,

00:41:33.360 I just couldn't live with that. I could not live with this thought that it would be a meaningless

00:41:42.440 death. And so, I made it my life's work to make sure that there was some meaning to this tragedy.

00:41:48.180 And the way that we got some meaning for this tragedy is that I wanted to, first of all,

00:41:57.720 I wanted to get justice. I mean, and I wanted to make sure that the people that did this to him

00:42:02.620 just couldn't laugh it off and enjoy their money. And we'd first, I mean, I guess me naively,

00:42:10.860 at first, we thought, like, maybe we can get justice in Russia. It had become very well-known,

00:42:17.020 this whole story. It didn't get swept under the carpet. I made sure of that. And because Sergey

00:42:23.540 had written all these complaints, we had all this documentary evidence of what had happened to him,

00:42:26.840 not on the last night of his life, that we got later, but all these complaints. And so I gave

00:42:32.200 them to the newspapers. There was a Russian opposition newspaper called Novaya Gazeta.

00:42:37.100 They published one of his letters, a long letter, in its entirety on the front page and like eight

00:42:42.300 pages in for everyone to read. And so it became a national cause celebra. And I thought at first

00:42:48.700 that we'd be able to get some kind of justice inside of Russia. And a lot of people were

00:42:55.500 talking about it and a lot of people were upset about it. But the authorities completely circled

00:43:02.400 the wagons, completely and absolutely circled the wagons. And Putin got involved. Putin personally

00:43:10.200 got involved. He got involved and he personally exonerated every single official who played any

00:43:16.440 role top to bottom in this whole thing. Everybody. And so it became clear there was no chance of

00:43:22.160 getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia?

00:43:27.760 Going into this year, I told myself I was finally going to stop guessing about my health.

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00:44:56.340 at checkout. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. 0.74

00:45:01.740 So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia?

00:45:04.780 And the answer is that these people killed Sergei because they stole $230 million.

00:45:11.140 And the $230 million that they stole, they don't keep in Russia.

00:45:16.160 Because as easily as they stole it, it could be stolen from them.

00:45:20.200 So what do they do with the money?

00:45:21.940 They take it outside the country. 0.90

00:45:24.340 And by the way, it's not like a mystery that that's what the Russians do. 0.95

00:45:27.000 We see them everywhere, all over London and the south of France and Corcheval and Sardinia. 0.97

00:45:33.520 I mean, they're everywhere with their money. 0.79

00:45:35.240 And, you know, Russia is a poor country, but, you know, if you see Russians in Europe, you'd think it's a rich country because they're all spending all this stolen money. 0.54

00:45:44.620 And so I came up with this idea, which is that, you know, if they killed Sergei for this money and they're traveling with this money and doing all this kind of stuff, 0.77

00:45:53.920 why not take away their ability to travel to the West, and why not take away their ability to

00:45:59.340 use their money in the West? And I took this idea to Washington, and I shared it with a

00:46:04.100 Democratic senator named Benjamin Cardin and Republican Senator John McCain. And I told him

00:46:10.040 the same story that I've just shared with you and your audience today. And I said, can we freeze

00:46:15.240 their assets and ban their travel? And these two senators said yes. And that became known as the

00:46:20.840 Magnitsky Act. And it really took off. It really took off in Washington. And by the time it came

00:46:30.960 for a vote, it passed the Senate 92 to 4. It passed the House of Representatives with 89 percent.

00:46:37.260 And it became a federal law on December 14, 2012. And Putin went out of his mind. This was probably

00:46:45.760 first time that anything that anyone pushed back i mean you know we we were living in a world of

00:46:51.680 total appeasement of putin everybody just wanted to appease him people wanted russian money they

00:46:58.160 wanted russian gas in germany and this is the first time that like something happened to him

00:47:03.280 that that wasn't his liking he couldn't he couldn't bluster his way out of this was he named in the

00:47:09.120 act he wasn't named in the act but it would this was like so the act basically said russia is such 0.60

00:47:14.640 a corrupt country full of such nasty human rights abuse and dirty business among corrupt officials,

00:47:25.520 and they have such impunity that we have to punish them because they can't control themselves. 0.99

00:47:30.960 They're such a bunch of dirty barbarians that they can't control their own country, 0.99

00:47:35.680 so we need to impose. And so, I mean, it was really the ultimate insult to Putin 0.99

00:47:41.680 that and the ultimate recognition of what's going on in russia and um and so as as officials started

00:47:47.760 getting sanctioned he got so mad he got so mad that he banned the adoption of russian orphans

00:47:53.040 by american families in retaliation and the orphans that are being adopted are the sick ones

00:47:57.920 that are being brought back to uh to the west for for uh you know medic i mean they're adopted they

00:48:05.440 They get medical treatment, they end up having normal lives.

00:48:11.440 In Russia, they die in the orphanages.

00:48:13.840 So he's basically sentencing his own orphans to death as a political gesture.

00:48:20.560 He made repealing the Magnitsky Act his single largest foreign policy priority.

00:48:25.900 And then he started going after me, death threats, kidnapping threats, Interpol red

00:48:31.460 notices.

00:48:32.460 I've been on the Interpol red notice list eight times.

00:48:34.920 What does that mean, Bill?

00:48:36.080 Interpol, International Police Organization.

00:48:38.400 But the Red Notice.

00:48:39.240 Yeah, so International Police Organization.

00:48:41.200 It's like, if someone is a fugitive from the,

00:48:43.820 let's say someone burns your house down in Britain,

00:48:46.900 everyone knows it.

00:48:48.280 If they flee to another country,

00:48:49.880 Britain can put them on the Interpol Red Notice system,

00:48:53.560 and then France will pick them up and return them to. 0.77

00:48:56.760 So this is what Russia did to me.

00:48:58.960 They said, you're a criminal. 0.71

00:49:01.220 We want you arrested, we want you sent to Russia so that they could do the same thing

00:49:08.540 to me that they did to Sergei Magnitsky.

00:49:11.480 They applied to the British government a dozen times to have me extradited.

00:49:19.500 They were making movies about me, there were smear campaigns, there was lawsuits.

00:49:25.000 There was probably 200 people working in the Russian government trying to ruin my life.

00:49:30.980 because they were so angry with me about the Magnitsky Act.

00:49:34.440 And they thought that with all this intensity

00:49:38.100 and all this danger and all this threats,

00:49:40.680 that I would back down.

00:49:42.600 And they thought that all these threats to America

00:49:44.740 with the adoptions that these senators would back down.

00:49:48.640 But it had just the opposite effect.

00:49:50.840 The senators decided to make a global Magnitsky Act.

00:49:54.000 So to sanction anybody who does this stuff anywhere,

00:49:57.640 then name it Magnitsky,

00:49:58.600 which was the ultimate insult to Putin.

00:50:00.980 And I started going to other countries, and I started getting Magnitsky acts in other countries.

00:50:08.420 And we got the Magnitsky act in Canada in 2017, here in the UK in 2018, in the European Union in 2020, Australia 2021, various other, Iceland, Norway, Montenegro, Kosovo, 35 countries now have Magnitsky acts.

00:50:27.940 and coming back to Sergei's, you know, how he's changed the world, is that now if you're a victim

00:50:35.200 of human rights abuse anywhere in the world, you can go to the U.S. or to the U.K. or to Canada

00:50:42.860 and get those people sanctioned. And it scares the hell out of people, bad guys, if they can't

00:50:50.260 travel, if they can't spend their money, if their money is not safe, if their money is going to be

00:50:53.320 frozen um it scares them really profoundly and so i i think i don't know for sure but i think that

00:51:01.320 there are probably people who are asked to do terrible things that don't do terrible things

00:51:05.320 because they don't want their money frozen they don't want to be become they don't want to become

00:51:08.120 international pariahs i think that sergey's death saves lives um and it certainly gives

00:51:16.200 victim, some, something to, um, some, some measure of justice.

00:51:22.440 Bill, and while Sergei was in pretrial detention, I imagine you were doing everything in your power

00:51:28.440 to try and help him, get him released. Did you ever have contact through intermediaries with

00:51:34.260 the Russian government or other people who you thought, well, if I, you know, if I concede on

00:51:38.720 something, if I pay them a bribe, I don't know, the Russian way at the time would have been

00:51:41.720 something like that. Did you ever have any attempts like that?

00:51:47.040 We had a million people approaching us

00:51:48.440 with a million different proposals,

00:51:50.520 but you don't know who was real and who was not.

00:51:52.440 And what became very clear very quickly was that,

00:51:56.480 you know, there's all these sort of

00:51:58.720 criminal justice entrepreneurs.

00:52:00.200 They weren't part of the system.

00:52:01.120 They were all, if you do this, you do that.

00:52:03.400 And none of it sounded incredible.

00:52:05.640 And everything that we were seeing

00:52:07.360 was that there was like no chance of anything happening.

00:52:09.600 And of course we would have done, you know,

00:52:12.320 I would have done anything to get them out

00:52:13.800 if there was anything that we could have done to get them out.

00:52:16.080 We, I mean, it was just, you know, just, I mean, and by the way, I didn't know he was

00:52:24.160 going to get killed.

00:52:24.740 I was just feeling terrible because he was in prison and he was in prison because of 0.95

00:52:27.960 me.

00:52:28.380 Of course.

00:52:28.820 No, I totally understand.

00:52:29.700 I guess what I'm getting at is, did you ever have a message through the grapevine from

00:52:34.260 the people who were actually doing this to him saying, do this and then we'll leave him

00:52:38.220 alone?

00:52:39.400 No, we never got a credible message.

00:52:41.880 And the reason is because they wanted to blame us for stealing the $230 million.

00:52:46.840 So the whole scam was to steal the $230 million, arrest Sergey, and blame me for stealing the

00:52:58.640 $230 million.

00:53:00.140 That was their scam.

00:53:01.140 And they needed the end part so that they could wrap it up in a nice little bow and

00:53:06.640 keep their money.

00:53:07.640 That makes sense.

00:53:09.120 And do you think that in, you know, I don't want to call it a mistake, obviously, but do you think that the fact you mentioned Sergei was naive and you both thought this was corruption that was below the level of Vladimir Putin, he thought it's not 1937, people, I'm not going to get put in a gulag, I'm not going to get killed, etc.

00:53:30.380 Do you think, effectively, that misunderstanding, let's call it, of Vladimir Putin and his regime is what we have seen since from pretty much every government around the world when it came to understanding his intentions in relation to foreign policy, to Ukraine, to Georgia, etc.?

00:53:50.860 Do you think, I mean, I remember, I used to, before I did this, I used to work as a translator.

00:53:55.940 And in the 2000s, Russian oligarchs were suing each other in British courts.

00:54:02.760 There was hundreds of thousands and millions and millions of pounds sloshing around for British lawyers, British tax advisors, all kinds.

00:54:12.580 And the city of London was awash with Russian money.

00:54:15.880 And because of that, people and the government seemed very reluctant.

00:54:19.580 If you remember, people of both parties, you know, Boris Johnson playing tennis with the wife of some oligarch, Peter Mandelson on Oleg Deripaska's yacht.

00:54:27.780 There was just absolutely no willingness to recognize the Russian regime for what it was. 0.96

00:54:33.020 You couldn't be more right. 0.91

00:54:34.800 It was absolutely, this country was bought and paid for by Russian oligarchs. 0.70

00:54:43.320 And this country would do nothing. 0.64

00:54:45.260 I mean, I could barely get a meeting in the Foreign and Commonwealth office to complain about this or to fight for this or that during most of this time because everybody was just so enjoying feeding at the trough.

00:55:00.740 And same thing in Germany with the Russian gas and France.

00:55:03.540 Nobody wanted to do anything.

00:55:04.760 Nobody wanted to have anything against Russia.

00:55:10.200 And coming back to the naivete that we experienced, it's going on today.

00:55:17.020 There are people that believe that Putin is ready to negotiate the end of this war.

00:55:23.000 They think, you know, let's give diplomacy a chance.

00:55:26.800 It's kind of like thinking that they're going to let Sergei out of prison.

00:55:30.600 There's no diplomacy.

00:55:32.280 Putin has no, they don't do diplomacy in Russia.

00:55:34.880 It's all win-lose, you know, zero-sum. There's the dictator and the dictatee. That's how it works. And there's no compromise. No one ever compromises in Russia.

00:55:52.840 And so when I hear about all these ideas that, let's, you know, right now the European Union, they're fighting among themselves, who should negotiate with Putin?

00:56:02.220 Nobody should negotiate with Putin because the only way that Putin is going to stop is if he's stopped.

00:56:08.960 It's not going to be by agreement that this happens.

00:56:14.160 And by the way, the reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money that he's afraid of his own people.

00:56:21.880 And so the best way to have your own people not get mad at you

00:56:28.320 is to create somebody else for them to be mad at. 0.82

00:56:30.840 It's Machiavelli 101, create a foreign enemy, start a war.

00:56:35.040 Let me say this because I know I'm not alone.

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00:56:46.380 You wake up stiff, joints complain, skin, hair, nails,

00:56:49.460 things don't look or feel quite right anymore. So many people listening to this know exactly

00:56:54.360 what I'm talking about. What surprised me is that this isn't just getting older in some vague sense.

00:57:00.120 A huge part of it is collagen. Your body starts producing less of it from your mid-twenties

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00:58:30.900 or click the link in the description of this episode.

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00:58:39.140 and when they ask where you heard about them, tell them Trigonometry sent you. Once more for

00:58:44.180 20% off, use code TRIG at bubsnaturals.com. Why do you think his leadership has changed as much

00:58:54.180 as it has? Because when he first came in, as you mentioned, he was a kind of faceless technocrat,

00:58:59.300 then he cracked down on the oligarchs and, you know, there'll be a lot of people who hate his

00:59:05.160 regime who nonetheless will objectively say you couldn't have a country run by what was

00:59:08.980 called seven bankers. You're probably one of them. I was one of them. I was cheering when he took

00:59:13.120 down Hortokovsky. I thought one down, 21 to go. And then he paid Roman Abramovich $13 billion for

00:59:20.040 his oil company and made him the governor of Chukotka region, which is like some state of

00:59:25.480 Russia. So on one hand, you take down one oligarch, another one, you give him $13 billion.

00:59:29.500 How is that taking down the oligarchs? So it's... But what I was going to ask you, Bill,

00:59:35.940 sorry, I hear you about the oligarchs, and in fact, we know that now an oligarch in Russia

00:59:41.460 has become a government-appointed position, effectively, right?

00:59:44.020 It always was.

00:59:45.540 Yeah. Well, no. In the 90s, there was a period when they were self-made.

00:59:48.980 When Putin came in, that was the moment that they became...

00:59:52.020 There's no such thing as independently wealthy oligarchs. They're all dependently wealthy.

00:59:55.780 And by the way, people say, how come they're not rising up right now because the business

01:00:00.100 is so bad and so on. These guys are the most cowardly, beta cuck people ever when it comes 0.99

01:00:08.120 to Putin. You should see them in his presence. They're just like these little, you know, they're 1.00

01:00:12.340 all, you know, they're all pounding their chests when they're by themselves. But the moment they're

01:00:15.720 in Putin's presence, they're all just scared to death of him. Cowardly people. 1.00

01:00:20.820 And so why do you think his leadership evolved? Because my understanding is the reason that he

01:00:26.360 was I mean objectively successful as Russian president for a long time and popular is that

01:00:31.500 the price of oil went up massively from like nine dollars a barrel to over a hundred at one point

01:00:36.500 and so Russia which generates almost all of its revenues by exporting oil and gas

01:00:41.440 was very rich all of a sudden and he could spend money on you know doing up Moscow making it nice

01:00:47.460 and all sorts of other things public services etc. Why would a leader of a country that's

01:00:53.580 flourishing in this way, go and start a war that would get the country sanctioned, all of his

01:00:59.680 people sanctioned, cause all sorts of economic turbulence, et cetera? Because he stole too much

01:01:04.420 money. So he's been a crook since before he started. He was in the mayor's office in St. 0.60

01:01:11.420 Petersburg, you know, taking skimming. He's been, and by the way, nobody in Russia goes into public

01:01:18.300 service to serve the public. If you're a traffic cop, you stop cars and extract bribes. If you're

01:01:23.560 a regional planning person, you want to get a planning permission for a building, you extract

01:01:31.680 a bribe. And the bribes get bigger and bigger. And so Putin stole an absolute enormous amount

01:01:39.980 of money, like more money than you can imagine. And by the way, it wasn't just him. All the people

01:01:46.120 around him stole a lot of money. My guess, my estimate is that over the course of 22 years,

01:01:54.000 up until the start of the war, that 1,000 individuals, Putin and 1,000 or 999 individuals

01:02:01.100 had stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian government. A trillion dollars. And by the way,

01:02:06.340 that is the estimate of capital flight from Russia. And so that's money that should have

01:02:12.160 been spent on schools and hospitals and roads and public services. Instead, it was spent on

01:02:19.460 private jets and yachts and houses in the south of France. And you could probably do this on a

01:02:26.880 smaller scale over a shorter period of time and get away with it, but they just stole too much

01:02:32.680 money. I mean, there's 141 million Russians living in destitute poverty and 1,000 people living in

01:02:39.320 the most lavish life you can ever imagine. And I believe that Putin saw that all it would take

01:02:47.080 was someone lighting a match somewhere, and the whole thing could come, you know, there could be

01:02:51.180 a million people storming the Kremlin. And nobody knows what that match would be. You know, like in

01:02:55.780 Tunisia, a fruit seller set himself on fire, and that led to the Tunisian government falling, and

01:03:02.700 that led to the Egyptian and Syria, and so on and so forth. Nobody knows how these things work. But

01:03:07.700 what Putin knew was that he didn't want to be sitting in the Kremlin just waiting for the day

01:03:11.320 that people came for him. And he's a very careful, he's a very smart guy in terms of understanding

01:03:17.540 all this. And so he said, I'm not going to wait for people to get mad at me. And so let's

01:03:24.500 manufacture an enemy. And the Ukrainians, by almost any definition before all this stuff 1.00

01:03:31.480 happened, weren't enemies. There was no beef between them. It was completely manufactured.

01:03:36.500 They started calling the Ukrainians

01:03:37.760 Nazis and fascists.

01:03:39.340 It has some historical resonance

01:03:42.460 because of the Second World War,

01:03:43.920 and people still think about that in Russia.

01:03:45.380 And they call them Nazis and fascists.

01:03:46.980 They said that they were doing

01:03:47.740 all these terrible things

01:03:48.580 that they weren't doing.

01:03:49.700 They made up this whole thing

01:03:50.920 in order to have an enemy. 0.71

01:03:54.460 And then they went and took Crimea.

01:03:56.320 And by the way, Crimea was a bloodless capture.

01:03:59.400 There was a bunch of soldiers already there.

01:04:01.440 Almost nobody died.

01:04:03.440 His approval ratings went through the roof,

01:04:04.760 and he was sitting there very pretty and, and, but he needed to keep that up there and he needed

01:04:10.120 to keep this enemy going. And so then they went into Eastern Ukraine. In my estimation, why did

01:04:14.600 they launch a full-scale invasion in February of 2022? This was right after COVID. A lot of

01:04:22.200 leaders in different countries were losing their place because of COVID. People were pretty angry

01:04:27.600 at all. Everyone was angry at their governments. And Putin understood the value of war. They already

01:04:34.540 had a self-proclaimed enemy, which is the Ukrainians, based on this thing. And at this

01:04:41.660 point, it was all about saving his own ass, saving his own skin, not wanting to have the Russian 0.99

01:04:47.140 people turn on him after COVID. And I think that's why he went in. And I think that it used to be 0.99

01:04:52.740 profit maximization when him and all these guys were stealing a trillion dollars, and then they

01:04:56.900 stole too much money, and then it was purely about survival. And by the way, if Putin ever 0.58

01:05:02.220 loses power, what happens to him? He goes to jail, all his money gets taken away, and one day he'll

01:05:08.960 be hanging from the rafters. Well, this is what I don't actually understand about the rationale

01:05:14.400 with doing this, because once he started this war, the possibility that he's going to enjoy his

01:05:20.560 billions outside of Russia goes to zero. He will not be able to do that, objectively. But also,

01:05:29.660 he knows, of course, that, you know, he might be able to do a deal like Yeltsin did, but it's hard

01:05:36.240 to imagine. And so I guess what I'm saying is he's ended any possibility of him surviving

01:05:42.460 comfortably outside of Russia and inside of Russia, which I guess now that I'm saying it

01:05:48.540 means he will not leave power ever. There you go. He can't leave power. And so he can never

01:05:56.380 give up. And by the way, if he ends this war, he won't be in power anymore. And I think that's the

01:06:04.860 most important recognition that anyone can make, which is that all this talk about negotiation

01:06:10.240 isn't going to go anywhere because he needs the war to stay in power. He needs power. He needs

01:06:15.220 to be in power to stay alive. And that's what he's going to do. And even if it's going to cost

01:06:21.660 another 5 million Russian young men. It's going to cost another half a trillion dollars of

01:06:28.740 resources. He will burn through everything in order to stay in power. But Bill, he can't do

01:06:36.460 this indefinitely. There has to be an end at some point, surely. Well, I mean, look at North Korea.

01:06:43.640 You know, North Korea has been going on for a very long time. I mean, he can really, really

01:06:48.000 take Russia down a terrible dark road.

01:06:50.680 He already has, but it can get a lot darker. 0.67

01:06:53.780 Because he doesn't care about anything other than himself.

01:06:58.040 He has no sense of responsibility, no sense of empathy,

01:07:02.180 no sense of national interest whatsoever.

01:07:04.280 It's purely about himself.

01:07:05.480 And I think that's the big misunderstanding in the West

01:07:10.040 is that we have a guy who, I mean,

01:07:13.980 almost nobody else is like that. 0.89

01:07:15.740 I mean, Hitler was like that.

01:07:16.820 Stalin was like that. Pol Pot was like that. But it's kind of hard for us to imagine in our own 0.68

01:07:26.500 heads someone being like that in the modern day. And I think that's part of the problem,

01:07:30.620 isn't it? In that we look at Putin through a Western lens and we think, oh, he's a leader

01:07:35.520 of the country. He must think like us. Because he thinks like us, therefore we must be able to

01:07:42.160 get around a table with him, have a negotiation, and give him what he wants, because it's kind of

01:07:47.920 what we would want. And he's created a narrative about things that he's upset with. So he said,

01:07:54.000 I'm upset with NATO. NATO, people joining, Eastern European countries joining NATO.

01:07:59.720 I'm upset with these Nazis and fascists in Ukraine. I have a vision of a grander, of a bigger

01:08:08.200 part of the map that I wanted for my... And he's created these narratives. And so we in the West

01:08:15.240 say, well, maybe if we give him this or do that, or give him a little more of Ukraine, then he'll 0.65

01:08:19.320 calm down. But it has nothing to do with what he wants. All he wants is just to save his own skin.

01:08:24.780 And to save his own skin, he needs to be in power. And to be in power, he needs this war.

01:08:28.420 And so it's all this complete sort of, we're almost negotiating with ourselves based on this

01:08:34.560 fake stuff he puts out there. And he has reason to put it out there. Why does he put out this

01:08:39.340 NATO stuff and this Nazi stuff? He puts it out for public consumption because the Russian people

01:08:44.720 need something to hang their hat on. They can't just say, we're having a war for no reason. We

01:08:49.760 need a reason for the war. But that's not the reason why he's at war. It's just a reason for

01:08:55.100 public consumption. So how should the West deal with this situation?

01:09:00.440 what we should do is just let the ukrainians finish him off they're actually i mean if we

01:09:07.700 gave them the resources that they need and we've we've sort of drip fed resources to them we've

01:09:13.260 given them you know enough so that they could not lose but not so much they could win um if we gave

01:09:18.680 them the resources to win um and by the way they'd be doing us a great service getting rid of this

01:09:23.760 guy who's threatening us right now you know that some some russian sponsored guys tried to burn

01:09:28.420 down the prime minister's house.

01:09:30.680 I mean, that was just came out in court.

01:09:32.520 It's not like we're sort of sitting here all immune from this thing.

01:09:35.940 So how could we, how could we deal with this?

01:09:38.540 There's got to be either one side is going to win and the other side lose or vice versa.

01:09:44.740 So either Ukraine is going to win and Russia is going to lose or the other way around. 0.92

01:09:48.340 And what we could do is give the Ukrainians, you know, the stuff. 0.80

01:09:54.100 So they shoot down the missiles coming into Ukraine.

01:09:56.500 Give them the 220 billion euros that belongs to Russia sitting in Brussels so they can buy weapons.

01:10:06.940 Give them to cut off all Russian oil exports so that Russia has no more money.

01:10:13.760 You know, we could help them a lot.

01:10:15.720 We could help them win this war.

01:10:17.500 But we're all just sort of, you know, wanting this negotiation, not wanting to push things too far.

01:10:22.700 And while we're busy doing that, the Ukrainians are getting on with it as best they can and doing

01:10:28.180 a pretty good job even without what we're doing. I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. I

01:10:33.800 have family in Ukraine. You know, people watching the show will be familiar. I don't want to repeat

01:10:36.820 myself. But I'm also analyzing the logic of what you're saying. And I don't know that that works

01:10:42.440 for me because if we give the Ukrainians what they need to win, whatever that means,

01:10:48.300 surely Putin in the desperate straits that he's in will only continue to escalate as much as he

01:10:54.840 can all the way up to using what tactical nuclear weapons or like where do we go well so that that

01:11:00.000 that is the exact reason that that that sort of logic flow that you've just laid out is the exact

01:11:04.420 reason why Biden gave the Ukrainians all the weapons they wanted but he but he said you can't

01:11:09.920 use them hitting targets in Russia which is the worst thing in the world I mean it's actually

01:11:13.380 You know, even though Trump has cut off Ukraine fully for reasons of his own making, that means that the Americans can't tell Ukraine not to hit Russia.

01:11:23.800 And anyone who has been watching the news, you know, the images of these oil refineries in Moscow and St. Petersburg blowing up are quite extraordinary. 0.66

01:11:33.660 So that was the logic. 0.77

01:11:35.980 It's all going to lead to nuclear holocaust. 0.87

01:11:37.680 We don't want to go there. 0.61

01:11:38.460 Let's not even consider this.

01:11:40.100 But let's just think about what happens if he uses a nuclear weapon.

01:11:44.940 Does he win the war?

01:11:46.780 So let's say he hits Kiev with a nuclear attack.

01:11:51.200 What happens the next day? 0.92

01:11:53.020 Did the Ukrainians give up? 1.00

01:11:54.500 Are they completely discombobulated and they can't?

01:11:56.740 I don't think so.

01:11:57.660 It's a highly dispersed country.

01:11:59.300 It's a very big country.

01:12:01.180 The Russians, the main problem they're having is they can't get across the front line.

01:12:04.240 Are all the guys operating the drones all dead?

01:12:06.680 No, they're all over the place.

01:12:07.940 They're not dead.

01:12:08.420 And so all he's done is then all of a sudden the Chinese are saying, well, we can't give you any more money. And the rest, I mean, to the extent that the global South is supporting Putin, they all step away. And so Putin becomes, you know, an absolute, fully defined war criminal having committed atrocities against civilians, and he hasn't won the war.

01:12:31.640 And so he understands that probably the launch of a nuclear weapon is the end of Putin.

01:12:36.820 I mean, that's probably the logic.

01:12:39.520 I mean, he would have already done it if he thought that that was going to help him.

01:12:42.780 I mean, five years into this war, longer than World War I, I don't think so. 0.99

01:12:48.760 And so the answer is that the way this could all find itself over is that if the Ukrainians 0.99

01:12:59.040 continue at this pace 1.00

01:13:00.780 and continue making life

01:13:01.740 so difficult for the Russians,

01:13:03.420 then I imagine it being

01:13:05.120 like the Korean War. 0.91

01:13:06.140 I mean, so my prediction 0.63

01:13:07.220 is a Korean War type of thing

01:13:09.020 where the Korean War,

01:13:10.500 by the way, is still going on.

01:13:12.040 Nobody ever ended it.

01:13:14.520 You have a front line.

01:13:16.120 You have a demilitarized zone.

01:13:18.480 And they're not lobbying stuff

01:13:20.320 at each other anymore.

01:13:21.220 I imagine that at some point

01:13:22.560 it's going to become

01:13:23.460 so painful for Putin,

01:13:25.720 all these oil refinery attacks

01:13:27.100 and all the attacks on his economy,

01:13:28.500 that he's not going to then attack Ukrainian civilians anymore

01:13:32.100 because that's going to be the quid pro quo.

01:13:33.940 And then you have a front line,

01:13:34.960 and then it eventually just sort of calms down.

01:13:37.300 Nobody declares, nobody negotiates anything,

01:13:39.220 nobody declares peace,

01:13:40.340 and it eventually just becomes reinforced on both sides,

01:13:43.300 and that's how this war ends.

01:13:44.860 I think that's the ultimate ending for this whole thing.

01:13:49.040 I was going to say, normally we finish by asking,

01:13:51.140 oh, I guess what's the one thing we're not talking about

01:13:53.040 that we should be, and you should feel free to answer that.

01:13:55.300 But in addition to that,

01:13:56.920 One of the things I always wanted to ask you was,

01:14:00.580 what is it that you know about the Russian mindset

01:14:04.120 and Vladimir Putin's mindset that most people don't understand?

01:14:08.980 Well, I think the main thing I know about his mindset 0.99

01:14:11.180 is that he is a total sociopath. 0.98

01:14:15.920 I mean, that we can't negotiate with a sociopath, 0.99

01:14:18.960 that everybody looks at him and says,

01:14:21.140 he looks kind of like us, you know, we're all sort of,

01:14:22.920 you know, he's a Christian, he's a Caucasian, you know, he's a European, they say, you know,

01:14:30.840 we must be able to talk to him. And there is no talking to him. You know, there's no similarity 1.00

01:14:37.480 between him and us in any possible way. And as quickly as we can dispose of that notion that

01:14:45.480 he's like us, I think the easier it'll be for us to come up with the policies we need to contain him.

01:14:53.420 So Bill Browder, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:14:56.180 And of course, the story that you told us and Sergei's story is told very beautifully

01:15:00.760 and in much more detail in your book, Red Notice.

01:15:03.460 Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:15:05.220 Thank you.

01:15:22.920 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - July 04, 2026

The Real Reason Putin Invaded Ukraine — Sir Bill Browder

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