The Real Reason Putin Invaded Ukraine — Sir Bill Browder

The Putin said, "Real simple, 50% for Vladimir Putin." And that was the moment Putin became the richest man in the world. And that was the moment that my life changed forever. I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, dining Sergey Magnitsky. They chain him to a bed and ate riot dars with rubber batons, beat Sergey Magnitsky, until he died. And so it became clearer there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, "How do we get justice outside of Russia? Don't why not take away their ability to use their money in the West?" And that became known as the Magnitsky Act. The reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money that he's afraid of his own people. And so the best way to have your own people not get mad at you is to create somebody else for them to be mad at. That's Machiavelli 101, creative foreign enemy, start a war. So Bobrado, welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be here. It's great to have you. You have one of the most fascinating stories to tell, having gone from growing up in the United States, being the grandson of a communist, a labor organizer, going to Russia as a capitalist at this point, and then getting into very big trouble with the Putin government. Of some terrible events. And then, of course, some of the work you've done after that is an activist as well. So tell us the story. Well, it's a long story. So I guess we should start at the very beginning. You mentioned my grandfather. His name was Earl Browder, and he was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas. He was so good at organizing the union. He was spotted by the communists. They said, "If you like labor unionism, you're going to love communism." Why don't you come and check it out. He went from Wichita to Moscow. He did what many other young American men do when they get to Moscow. He met a young Russian girl who became my grandmother. My father was born there. And then five years later, he returned to America and became the general secretary of the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice against Roosevelt in 1936, 1940. Obviously, he didn't get that many votes. He was imprisoned by Roosevelt in 1941, pardoned in '42. At the end of the Second World War, when there was no longer any kind of relationship or need for a relationship between Russia and the United States, Stalin kicked him out of the Communist Party and started, in fact, he started murdering my grandfather, Earl Browder. He had something called Browderism and they started murdering his followers in Eastern Europe. In the 1950s, the MacArthur era, he gets persecuted, obviously, for being a communist. So, this was my family legacy I was born in 1964, I'm 62 years old. When I was going through my teenage rebellion, I was trying to figure out how do you rebel from a family of communists? And I grew my hair long and it grew in John Afro, you can't tell now. That didn't seem to upset my family. I followed a grateful dad around the country. That also didn't upset my family, but when I put on a suit and time, became a capitalist, that really pissed them off, good and proper. I became a capitalist. I went to Stanford Business School, I graduated Business School in 1989, which was a very auspicious year because that was the year that the Berlin Wall came down. And as I was trying to figure out what to do post-business school, I had this epiphany, which is that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, and the Berlin Wall has just come down, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that's what I set out to do and I couldn't get quite all the way to Eastern Europe at the time. London in '89, and I had several jobs, but the job that defined me was a job at Solomon Brothers, which doesn't exist anymore, but it's a very famous American financial institution that was immortalized in Michael Lewis's book Liars Poker. I got a job at Solomon Brothers as an investment banker on the East European Investment Banking team. My first assignment was to advise a fishing fleet located in Murmansk, Russia, on their privatization. So I fly from London to Murmansk. I get picked up at the airport by the head of the fishing fleet. He takes me down to the docks. He shows me one of their vessels, which was an enormously long, high, big ship. I asked him, "How much is one of these things cost?" and he said, "20 million dollars new. How many do you have in your fleet? A hundred. So two billion dollars with the ships. How old is your fleet?" I didn't know anything about ships or fleets, but he said seven years old, and so I figured maybe that's a billion dollars with the ships. And I had been hired, or if it's just Solomon Brothers, that had been hired by the management of this company, to advise them on whether to buy 51% of the fleet, which had been offered by the government in the privatization program of Russia. And so I said, "What price is the government selling 51%?" They said, "Two and a half million dollars." So you don't have to be a Stanford MBA or a financial wizard to know that if there's a billion dollars with the ships and you can buy 51% for two and a half million dollars, that's got to be a pretty good deal. And so then I said to myself, "I'm in the wrong business. I shouldn't be advising on this stuff. I should be investing in this stuff." And is this just like some kind of anomaly with the fishing fleet or is this something going on more widespread? So I flew from romance to Moscow and sort of poked around Moscow for a week. And I realized that this was the whole country. Or basically just giving the whole country away for free in what they called the mass privatization program. Boris Yeltsin, who is the president at the time, said, "I want to go from communism to capitalism. How do we create a country of capitalists? Let's give all the property away for free." And so it didn't work out that way in the end. Twenty-two oligarchs ended up with 40% of the country. But little crumbs were falling off the table in terms of this privatization and off the back of that. I left Solomon Brothers. I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund. And I started investing in the privatization of Russia. And it was really a very spectacular time to be an investor in Russia. I was all of 31 years old when I started this fund. And there's this expression in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And not nobody knew more than me, just because nobody knew more than anybody, but anything back then. And I started investing. And my fund was the best performing fund in the world in 1997. I went from zero to a billion dollars of assets in our management, which these days doesn't sound like a lot of money because there's trillionaires running around. Back then, that was an enormous amount of money. Back then, the billion was real money. Exactly. And it was just the most glorious time ever. And I thought my billion was going to turn into ten billion and turned out that all the success coming so quickly in the hands of a 31-year-old was the biggest self-signal there ever was. Of course, I was 31 years old and I didn't really understand that. The Russian government in August of 1998 devalued their currency and defaulted on their bonds. And my portfolio went from a billion to a hundred million. I lost 900 million of my clients' money. I was ashamed, I was humiliated, and I was determined to try to get from a hundred million back up to a billion and then some. And in theory, it shouldn't have been all that hard an exercise. In theory, I owned oil companies. The oil companies sold their oil and dollars. They paid for their costs in rubles. The rubble has just gone down by 75%. And so, if your revenues are saying the same or growing, and your costs are going down by 75%, that means your profits should be exploding. In theory, the reality was that all these companies were majority-owned by these people known as the Russian oligarchs. And the Russian oligarchs said to themselves, "Well, before all this crash, they thought they could get money from Wall Street. They had all these bankers with fancy suits showing up in Moscow saying, "If you behave yourself, we can get you some money from Wall Street." And after the default and devaluation, they called up their bankers and said, "You know, we can really use some of that money right now." And the guys picked up the phone, said, "Vladimir, who?" And put the phone down because they didn't want to be, and nobody wanted to have any association with Russia after that. It was like. toxic waste being connected to Russia." And so the oligarchs said, "Well, wait a second, there's no incentive to behave, and in Russia, there's never been any disincentive against misbehavior." They said to themselves, "Why don't we just steal everything that's not nailed down, and even stuff that is nailed down?" And so the oligarchs embarked on an orgy of stealing, which has been unprecedented in the history of business. They were doing assets stripping, transfer pricing, embezzlement, delusion. They were doing it on an industrial scale. And I was sitting there with my last 10 cents on the dollar, hoping that I was somehow going to get from, you know, 10 cents up to a dollar or 100 million back up to a billion, and they were going to try to steal the last 10 cents on the dollar that I had. And so not as an investment strategy, but as a matter of desperation or survival, I said, "I need to try to stop the stealing that's going on in these companies." Well, how do you stop stealing in Russian companies? There was no class taught on that at Stanford Business School. And it's not as if there's any institutions in Russia that are going to be there to help out some foreign minority shareholder. It's unhappy about the stealing. You can't go to the police and say, "I've just discovered stealing at Gasprom." What are they going to do? Nora could, I go to the courts, the judges were bribed. The parliament was on the payroll, the government regulated. There was nothing, except for one thing, which is that I had a really good team of Russian people, analysts working for me, who were really smart, who could research how the stealing was going on. And I would go to all the same bars and restaurants as the foreign correspondence. And so what we decided to do was to research who was doing the stealing, how they were stealing, where the money was going. And these guys were so brazen, they weren't even covering it up. And in Russia, there's no such thing as data protection. Every piece of data is available for a price. And so we would gather all the information, put it together, and then share it with these journalists that I was hanging out at the bars with. And they were loving me because I was saving them a lot of time and effort. And we would publish all the scams that we're going on. And you could, you might say, well, why do you expect anything good to happen? And the answer is we didn't know what was going to happen. But when we first started doing this, this was the moment that Vladimir Putin had just come to power. And Vladimir Putin, back then, he might have been the same person, but he wasn't, he was faced with a whole different set of constraints back then. And the oligarchs were more powerful than him. And he wanted to take away the power from the oligarchs. And so there's an expression in the world that your enemy's enemy is your friend. And I've never met Vladimir Putin, I haven't met him then and I haven't met him since then. But I was busy exposing the oligarchs who were stealing money from me. And he was hating the oligarchs because they were stealing power from him. And so what did he do? He stepped into the fights. So we exposed the corruption of the management of gas prom. And the state owned 51%. They fired the management of gas prom. And the share price rose spectacularly. We went after spare bank. We went after surrogate and after gas. These are all big Russian companies. And he would step in on a regular basis and do stuff. Every time he would step in, the share price would go up. And so I was feeling pretty good about him. I thought this was great. I was making money, making Russia a better place. This Putin guy was like helping out. What could be better than that? Problem was that he wasn't helping out because he wanted to make Russia a better place. He wanted to clean up Russian companies. He was helping out because he didn't like these oligarchs. And one day, he decided that he was going to win his war with the oligarchs. How is he going to do that? He was going to arrest the richest oligarch in the country, a man named Mikhail Hordekovsky. He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos. He arrests him off his private jet in Siberia. They bring him back to Moscow. They put him in a cage in a courtroom. In Russia, there's a 99.7% conviction rate in criminal cases. And so they just keep you in the cage because that's where you're going to be afterwards. They allow the television cameras to come into the courtroom to film the richest man in Russia sitting in a cage. They eventually sentence him to 10 years in prison. And the other oligarchs in Russia are just going out of their minds. One by one by one, after Hordekovsky was sentenced, they go to Putin and say, you know, Vladimir, what do we have to do so that doesn't happen to us? Putin said, real simple, 50%. Not for the Russian government, not for the presidential administration of Russia, 50% for Vladimir Putin. And that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world. And that was the moment that things really started turning bad for me. A few weeks ago, we pointed you toward Hillsdale's free course on the Odyssey. The course has been so popular that when they told us they'd built a follow-up course on Homer's Iliad, we wanted you to hear about it first. Hillsdale College's new free online course is taught by Professor Stephen Smith. It's not a highlight reel, and it's not Homer for beginners. It's a proper walk through the text, honor, courage, leadership, friendship, sacrifice, and what it means to live a noble life. 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I'm curious how we know that that's what happened between him, and I remember seeing him dressing down various oligarchs in a public meeting. But how do we know that he personally is taking that money from them? I could that kind of deal. Because they told me, various people told me that that was the deal. I can say, well, maybe they were not correct or exaggerating. But I think we've now seen enough anecdotal information to support what I was told that it becomes pretty. So for example, there's Putin's House on the Black Sea. I'm sure you know about that. I don't know if you're a reader or listeners know about that. But Lexi Navalny made a great video that's been watched by 25 million people about Putin's. It's a billion dollar house on the Black Sea. Nice place. Not really. I mean, it's really a crude place. They've got stripper poles and a bowing out. I mean, I'm not sure that any of us would actually want to like live there, but billion dollars for that. He's got an 800 or maybe 900 million dollar super yacht. And where does he get the stuff from? All the money trails lead back to the oligarchs. When his daughter got married, the son got a dowry, which was the gift of like 30% of a major multi-billion dollar petrochemical firm. When he cheated on his daughter and they got divorced, the son-in-law gave it back to the oligarch. I mean, there's a million of these stories. - See, that is a testament to the power of the male libido. Like, you marry Putin's daughter and then cheat on her. That is not a well thought through a move, is it? - You know, I mean, I guess he just couldn't control himself. (laughing) - Either that or he just backed himself. Yeah, I don't think that's a smart move. - So he's still alive, though, as far as I'm aware. - Really? - Yeah. - But he's the son of one of Putin's best friends. You know, they're not, they're not killing each other. - I mean, you would think, I mean, I, anyways. - It's a dispute within the family sort of thing. We're joking around, of course. But I was just very curious to hear that. So you had oligarchs who personally told you, this is what Putin said to us. - That's right. - And why did this begin to interfere with your business and what you were doing? - Because I was busy carrying on with my naming and shaming campaigns. So I, it wasn't, so, you'd think it's pretty ridiculous for some guy from Chicago to be outing the oligarchs and doing all this kind of stuff. And the answer is it was ridiculous. I had kind of shaved off the risk sensors in my brain. Because you couldn't go out there with like a full set of risk reward and take that and do that. And so I was just plowing forward even after Hordekovsky was imprisoned exposing more malfeasance. But I wasn't exposing the enemies of Putin anymore. I was exposing his 50% interest. But I wasn't thinking about that. - And I was gonna ask you about that because I remember growing up in Russia in the 1990s and objectively it was a wild and crazy time. What did you think when you arrived in Russia in the early 90s? And you must have, you know, with your American background, I visit America all the time. The mindsets are so different. You must have found it a huge shock but also probably a thrill, right? - Well, I mean, so first of all, I wasn't in Russia, they really over generations, they've kind of destroyed initiative, idealism, public concern, philanthropy, they've just destroyed all of that. But in America, you know, that was all that kind of stuff was in our, you know, DNA and brought up and pounded into you that, and probably, you know, can do attitude, optimism, everything could be better in the future than it is today. That was my thinking. So I show up in this country, which is completely chaos. And when communism and they didn't have a system, you know, they called it capitalism, but nobody had created anything, really. It was just total chaos. But I showed up there and I said to myself, my bet is that it's gonna go from chaos or to something less chaotic, horrible to bad. I called it the Nigeria to Brazil trade. And so I showed up there and I thought, you know, I wanted to be part of this process of, and by the way, you're gonna make a lot of money if it goes from horrible to bad. And it started to go from horrible to bad. And Putin's first few years, he wasn't this monstrous guy that he is right now and he was like, you know, he was kind of like a name was faceless technocrat. That's how we thought of him in those first few years. And, you know, he was like reforming the tax system and, you know, doing all sorts of stuff that you could honestly say were economic reforms. And so the thought was that we were gonna be in this transition. And so it was kind of cool to be there when it was all total chaos. And in watching the little green sprouts of like, you know, civil society start to form. And so I thought, you know, this is great. And I wanted to be part of it. And I wanted to profit off of it as well. - So Bill, going back to the story, Putin is going around asking for 50% here, 50% there. How did that change and how was your life completely different after those events? - Well, so I was now going after him. I mean, his interests. And I became very inconvenient. You know, here I was, I wasn't talking to him. I wasn't, you know, they were, I wasn't giving him 50% of anything. I was not part of that thing. I was just running my fund, getting mad about different companies doing bad stuff, exposing them, working with the journalists. And they had to figure out what to do with me. And you know, that they're, if I'd been Russian, they would have killed me. But because I was a foreigner, and not just a foreigner, I was the largest foreign investor in the country at this point. I was managing four and a half billion dollars at the top of the market. And so I think, and, and, and by the way, I'd be killed this minute. If I was anywhere near Russia or anywhere within their grasp. So I'm like Putin, I mean, he's chained. I mean, he's, he'd become more brazed. Back then he was a bit scared. He was still sort of feeling his way around the world. So they didn't want to kill me. But one day I was flying back. I was, I'd been living there for 10 years. I was flying from London. I was here in London for the weekend. I was flying back to Moscow. And I was at Cherimetschivov airport at the VIP lounge. And I was sitting there waiting for my passport to be processed and four heavily armed border guards burst into the lounge, grabbed me, and then take me down to the detention center of the airport. I stayed there overnight, not sure whether I was being, and then there were two things that could have happened. They could have sent me to Siberia, like Hordekovsky, or they could, could have deported me. I didn't know what was going to happen that night when I was sitting in that airport detention cell. And I had a lot of hard questions for myself about life choices and how I'd gotten here. And maybe I should have been a little bit more careful and all this kind of stuff. And the next morning I wasn't sure what was going to happen. And then finally they come for me and they put me back onto an air-flot flight and deport me. And then when I land in London, I get a letter from the foreign ministry saying I've been expelled because I'm a threat to national security. So, good news, I'm not dead, I'm not in a Russian prison, I'm just deported. But when the Russians go after you, they don't do it, so that's, you know, it doesn't happen. That was a mild sanction. When they go after you, they usually do some really nasty stuff. And I said to myself, this is not the end of the story, this is the beginning of something really bad. And so what did I do? I had a bunch of people working for me in Moscow and so I say to myself, these people could be victimized, we need to get them out. And I evacuated my team and their family members. Once I got everyone out, I said, "Well, we have a lot of money over there." These guys are probably gonna go after the money. They should get our money out. And we quickly and quietly sold every last share we held in Russia, got all of our money out. So I kind of dusted off my hands. I said, "Few, people safe, money safe, you know, time to move on to other stuff." Set up a new investment fund, investing in other places, start investing in other places. I'm at a board meeting in Paris. June 4th, 2007, I got a frantic call from the only last remaining person I have in Russia, which was a secretary sitting in our empty office. And she says, "There's 25 police officers, you know, breaking down the door, what should I do?" As I don't know, let me call up my lawyer. I've got an American lawyer in Moscow. I say, "There's 25 police officers breaking down my door." And he said, "We got 25 police officers in our office looking for your documents. 50 police officers doing simultaneous raid of my office and my law firm's office, looking for our official documents for our investment holding companies, all the stamp seals and certificates. They find them at the law firm's office. They take this documents away. And the next thing we know, we no longer own our investment holding companies. They had been fraudulently re-registered into the name of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out of jail early, presumably, put his name on these documents." So I'm sitting there thinking, "Okay, so the police have raided my office, seized the documents, used the documents to steal my empty, the companies were empty now. But remember, we got everything out. To steal these empty investment holding companies. I'm not worried about the money, the money is already safe, it's offshore. But if the police are doing all this stuff, working with killers, I'm gonna be walking through Frankfurt Airport one day and someone's gonna, you know, arrest me on a Russian Interpol warrant. And I say to myself, "We gotta figure out how to stop whatever is happening here." And so I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, a guy named Sergei Magnitsky, he worked for an American law firm, he was one of these people that could just literally run circles around everybody else with the law. He just knew exactly what he was doing. And I say him, and once you figure this out, figure out who's doing what, what are they doing? Why are they doing it? How are they doing it? We need to stop it. So he goes out, he researches everything, and he's a super smart guy, and he figures it out. He said, he said, this is the most cynical thing I've ever seen. So when I was expelled, and after I sold everything, we had a billion dollars of profits on the securities that we sold. And off that billion dollars of profits, I paid 230 million dollars of capital gains tax to the Russian government. What Sergei had figured out was that this group of crooks that stole our companies, with the police documents, they stole our companies. And then they went to the tax authorities, and they said there was a mistake made in the previous year's tax filings. These companies didn't earn a billion dollars. They earned zero. They came up with a complicated way of explaining it. Therefore, the 230 million dollars that was paid in taxes in the previous year was paid in error. And we'd like that money back. They applied for this illegal $230 million tax refund on the 23rd December 2007 and was approved and paid out the next day, Christmas Eve. It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia paid out in one day on a fraud. If I had genuinely overpaid $10,000 of taxes in 2007, I'd still be waiting for the tax refund today. But an illegal $230 million tax refund was refunded in one day on a fraud. On Christmas Eve. They actually sell big Christmas, whatever, 13 days later, but anyways. No one's working at this time, and it's the point, right? So people at the very highest level of government have clearly been involved in making this happen? So Sergei and I looked at this and we said to ourselves, obviously, this is a rogue operation and inside job corruption at the highest level. But we also said to ourselves that this couldn't have been authorized by Putin because he's a patriot and a nationalist, right? He's all talking about how the greater good of Russia. This must be something he must be getting, because, and by the way, this wasn't our money. This was the Russian government's money that was being stolen. So Sergei and I were convinced wrongly, but we were convinced that this was a rogue operation and we brought it to the attention of the highest levels in the Russian government and the good guys would get the bad guys. So we wrote criminal complaints to the head of the all the different law enforcement agencies. I went on television, radio, newspapers explaining the whole scam and putting it out there. Sergei went to the Russian State Investigative Committee, which is their version of the FBI, testified against the police officers who were involved in the fraud and then we sat back and waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Turns out in Putin's Russia, there are no good guys. Five weeks after Sergei testified against the police officers, the same police officers came to his home on the 24th of November, 2008, and arrested Sergei. They put him in pretrial detention and they started to really like put the screws to him. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds, kept lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and no window pains, December and Moscow, so he really froze to death. They moved him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night. They had to put him in cells with no toilet or just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. And they figured this is a guy who wears a blue suit and a red tie, he works in a fancy American law firm by Starbucks in the morning on his way into work. They figured they put the screws to him, you know, he'll do whatever they want him to do. And they wanted him to withdraw his testimony and they wanted him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million and he then wanted him to say that he did so on my instructions. So you know, here's this guy that looks so powerful, but he had a will of steel and for him the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more awful than whatever they were subject to him doing, he just refused. And so the pressure and the torture and the pain and the unpleasantness just got worse and worse and worse over a long period of time. And he started getting pains in his stomach. He started losing weight, he lost 20 kilos. He went to the prison infirmary and they diagnosed him as having pancreatitis and gallstones and they said he needed to have an operation. The operation was scheduled for the first of August 2009. About a week before the operation, the same people who were torturing him before came to him and so listen, you know, if you sign this false confession, everything will be good. He refused again. In retaliation, they moved him from the prison that had a hospital where he was scheduled to have an operation to a maximum security prison called Bhutirka, which is considered to be one of the most awful prisons in Russia. And at Bhutirka, there were no medical facilities for his operation and they refused him all subsequent medical treatment. He went into a terrible downward spiral, he was constant, agonizing pain. He and his lawyers wrote desperate requests to every different branch of the criminal justice system begging for medical attention. Every one of their requests was either ignored or denied in writing. On November 16, 2009, he went into critical condition. And that night, the Bhutirka authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore. So they put him in an ambulance and sent him across town to a different prison that had a medical wing. They don't put him in the emergency room. They put him in an isolation cell, and they chain him to a bed and ate riot guards with rubber batons, beats Sergei Magnitsky until he died. This was November 16, 2009. He was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children. I got the news the next morning, and it was the most horrifying, traumatizing, life-changing news I could have ever gotten. I assumed that the worst-case scenario for him was like a long prison sentence from trumped up charges. I couldn't have ever imagined that they would kill him. And when I was finally able to kind of clear my head and think about what I was going to do with this, I made a decision, I mean a vow, which is that I was going to put aside my life as a businessman, and I was going to devote all of my time, energy, and resources going after the people who killed him, make sure they face justice, and that's what I've been doing for the last 17 years. It's such a powerful story, Bill, because it's obviously about many things. It's also about the nature of heroism. And we think about heroes looking a particular way or sounding a particular way, but Sir Guy was a hero in the truest sense of the word. He really was. He really was. And the thing about it is that he was like an unexpected hero, I mean, in the sense that he was a tax lawyer. He was not a human rights lawyer. He was not a political activist, he's not a Lexi Navalny or a journalist. He was just a tax lawyer, working for Rich Guy's helping them with their taxes. But when he got thrown into this horrible situation, he did exactly the, I wish he hadn't been a hero. I wish he had been a flawed individual and he could have testified against me for anything and it would have been fine. He'd still be alive. And he was truly, he had principles. And when he was faced with this kind of duress, he did the most heroic thing. And you know, the one thing I've learned a lot over the last 20 years is that the, sometimes the people you expect to be heroic aren't, and sometimes the people you had no idea are heroes turn out to be, and Sir Guy turned out to be an amazing hero. Because that is, you know, I don't think we can actually comprehend in the West what that's like to experience, what that's like to have the weight of a government come down on you. And the knowledge that there is literally nothing that you can do. And whatever path that you take, however you attempt to redress it fairly by legal means, you know it's not going to go anywhere. Well, this is the interesting thing about Sir Guy was that up until the very end, he was an idealist. He actually believed that if he filed, he filed the complaintry. He made a legal application that's somewhere in the system that the law would protect him. I asked him before he was arrested. I asked him to leave. He said, "Bill, this is not 1937. This is not Stalin's Russia. The law will protect me." He believed it. He believed it so much in a true lawyer's lawyer way. In his 358 days in detention, he filed 450 complaints documenting all this mistreatment and abuse and all this terrible stuff because he believed until the end, probably until the last until they were beating him that somehow it was going to come out all right. He was a hero and an idealist and I guess a naive idealist. If he had been more cynical like everybody else in Russia, he would have written, he would have signed what they wanted him to sign and then he'd still be alive. But also, the subsequent part of the story shows that he was a naive idealist, but with your help, he did enact some change. He did. He changed the world. His sacrifice. So for me, the idea that he would die and it would be a meaningless death, I just couldn't live with that. I could not live with this thought that it would be a meaningless death. I made it. My life's work to make sure that there was some meaning to this tragedy and and the way that we got some meaning for this tragedy is that I wanted to, first of all, I wanted to get justice. I wanted to make sure that the people that did this to him just couldn't laugh it off and enjoy their money and we'd first, I guess, me, naively. At first, I thought we thought maybe we can get justice in Russia. It'd become very well known this whole story. It didn't get swept under the carpet. I made sure of that. And because Sergey had written all these complaints, we had all this documentary evidence of what had happened to him, not on the last night of his life that we got later, but all these complaints. And so I gave them to the newspapers. There was a Russian opposition newspaper called Novaya Gazeta. They published one of his letters with a long letter in his entirety on the front page and like eight pages in for everyone to read. And so it became a national cause celebra. And I thought at first that we'd be able to get some kind of justice inside of Russia. And a lot of people were talking about it and a lot of people were upset about it. But the authorities completely circled the wagons, completely and absolutely circled the wagons. And Putin got involved. Putin personally got involved. He got involved and he personally is honorated every single official plate any role top to bottom in this whole thing. Everybody. And so it became clearer. There was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia? Going into this year, I told myself I was finally going to stop guessing about my health. Like most people, I want more energy, better focus and to be still strong and sharp years from now. But every time I've gone to the doctor, I walk out with basically nothing. Everything's fine. Drink more water, sleep a bit more, no real insight, no plan, just vibes. That's why superpowers stood out to me. Superpower makes it simple to actually understand what's going on inside your body. You do one blood draw either at home or in a nearby lab and they analyze over a hundred biomarkers. That's heart health, hormones, metabolism, vitamins, minerals, and even environmental toxins. What I love is that you don't just get numbers. You get a personalized action plan, supplements, nutrition, guidance, lifestyle changes, and even your true biological age that you can track over time. Rice wise, this is a no brainer compared to the alternatives. Superpower used to cost $499. Right now it's $199 while other testing services charge $500-$1000 sometimes more for similar of an inferior information. Your blueprint activated with superpower. Superpower is just $199 and for a limited time you can get an additional $20 off with our code Trigger. Head to superpower.com and use code Trigger at checkout for $20 off your membership. After you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about them so make sure to mention Trigger on the truth to support the show. Once again, head to superpower.com and use our code Trigger at checkout. And the answer is that these people killed Sergey because they stole $230 million. And the $230 million they stole, they don't keep in Russia because as easily as they stole it, it could be stolen from them. So what do they do with the money? They take it outside the country. And by the way, it's not like a mystery that that's what the Russians do. We see them everywhere. All over London and this out of France and Korscheval and Sardinian. I mean, they're everywhere with their money. And in Russia, it's a poor country, but if you see Russians in Europe, you think it's a rich country because they're all spending all this stolen money. And so I came up with this idea, which is that if they killed Sergey for this money and they're traveling with this money and doing all this kind of stuff, why not take away their ability to travel to the West and why not take away their ability to use their money in the West. And I took this idea to Washington and I shared it with a democratic senator named Benjamin Cardin and a Republican senator, John McCain. And I told him the same story that I've just shared with you and your audience today. And I said, can we freeze their assets and ban their travel? And these two senators said, yes. And that became known as the Magnitskiat. And it really took off. It really took off in Washington. And by the time it came for a vote, it passed the Senate 92 to 4. It passed the House of Representatives with 89% and it became a federal law on December 14, 2012. And Putin went out of his mind. This is probably the first time that anything that anyone pushed back. I mean, we were living in a world of total appeasement of Putin. Everybody just wanted to appease him. People wanted Russian money. They wanted Russian gas and Germany. And this is the first time that something happened to him that wasn't his liking. He couldn't bluster his way out of this. Was he named in the act? He wasn't named in the act. But this was like, so the act basically said Russia is such a corrupt country full of such nasty human rights abuse and dirty business among corrupt officials. And they have such impunity that we have to punish them because they can't control themselves. There's such a bunch of dirty barbarians that they can't control their own country. So we need to impose. And so I mean, it was really the ultimate insult to Putin that and the ultimate recognition of what's going on in Russia. And so as officials started getting sanctioned, he got so mad. He got so mad that he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families in retaliation. And the orphans that are being adopted are the sick ones that are being brought back to the west for, for, you know, I mean, they're adopted. They get medical treatment there. They end up, you know, having normal lives in Russia, they die in the orphanages. So he's, he's basically sensing his own orphans to death as a political gesture. He made repealing the Magnitsky Act his single largest foreign policy priority. And then he started going after me, death threats, kidnapping threats. Interpol red notices. I've been on the Interpol red notice list eight times. What does that mean, Bill? Interpol, international police organization. But the red notice. Yeah. So international police organization. It's like, if someone is a fugitive from the, let's say someone like burns the house to your house down in Britain. Everyone knows it. If they flee to another country, Britain can put them on the Interpol notice the red notice system. And then France will pick them up and return them to. So this is what Russia did to me. They said, you're a criminal. We want you arrested. We want you rich. We want you sent to Russia so that they could do the same thing to me that they did to surrogate Magnitsky. They applied to the British government a dozen times to have me extradited. They were making movies about me. There were smear campaigns. There was lawsuits. I mean, there were, there was probably 200 people working in the Russian government trying to ruin my life because they were so angry with me about the Magnitsky Act. And they thought, they thought that that with all this intensity and all this danger and all this threats that I would back down. And they thought that all these threats to America with the adoptions that these senators were back down. But it had just the opposite effect. The senators decided to make a global Magnitsky act. So to sanction anybody who does this stuff anywhere in the name at Magnitsky, which was the ultimate insult to Putin. And I started going to other countries. and I start. started getting Magnitskiacs in other countries. And we got the Magnitskiac in Canada in 2017 in the, here in the UK in 2018, in the European Union in 2020, Australia in 2021, various other Iceland, Norway, Montenegro, Kosovo, 35 countries now have Magnitskiacs. And coming back to Surgeis, how he's changed the world is that now if you're a victim of human rights abuse anywhere in the world, you can go to the US or to the UK or to Canada and get those people sanctioned. And it scares the hell out of people, bad guys. If they can't travel, if they can't spend their money, if their money's not safe, if the money's gonna be frozen, it scares them really profoundly. And so I think, I don't know for sure, but I think that there are probably people who are asked to do terrible things, don't do terrible things, they don't want their money frozen, they don't wanna become, they don't wanna become international barriots. So I think that Surgeis, death saves lives. And it certainly gives victims something to some measure of justice. Bill, and while Sergei was in pre-trial detention, I imagine you were doing everything in your power to try and help him get him released. Did you ever have contact through intermediaries with the Russian government or other people who you thought, well, if I concede on something, if I pay them a bribe, I don't know, the Russian way at the time would have been something like that. Did you ever have any attempts like that? - We had a million people approaching us with a million different proposals, but you don't know who was real and who was not. And what became very clear, very quickly, was that there's always on-truppen sort of criminal justice on-truppen orders, they weren't part of the system, they were all, if you do this, you do that. And none of it sounded incredible. And everything that we were seeing was that there was no chance of anything happening. And of course we would have done anything to get him out, if there was anything that we could have done to get him out. I mean, it was just, you know, just, I mean, and by the way, I didn't know he was going to get killed. I was just feeling terrible because he was in prison. And he was in prison because of me. - Of course, no, I totally understand. I guess what I'm getting at is, did you ever have a message through the grapevine from the people who were actually doing this to him, saying, do this and then we'll leave him alone? - No, we never got a credible message. And the reason is, because they wanted to blame us, for stealing the $230 million. So the whole scam was to steal the $230 million, arrest, surge, and blame me for stealing the $230 million. That was their scam. And they needed to end part so that they could wrap it up in a nice little bow and keep their money. - That makes sense. And do you think that in, you know, I don't want to call it a mistake, obviously. But do you think that the fact you mentioned surge was naive and you both thought this was corruption that was below the level of light in my boots? And he thought it's not 1937. People, I'm not going to get put in a gulag, I'm not going to get killed, et cetera. 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, et cetera. Do you think, I mean, I remember, I used to, before I did this, I used to work as a translator. And in the 2000s, Russian oligarchs were suing each other in British courts. There was hundreds of thousands and millions, millions of pounds sloshing around for British lawyers, British tax advisors, and the city of London was a wash with Russian money. And because of that, people and the government seemed very reluctant, if you remember, people of both parties, you know, Boris Johnson playing tennis with the wife of some oligarch. Peter Mendelssohn on Alec Derepaska's yacht, there was just absolutely no willingness to recognize the Russian regime for what it was. - You couldn't be more right. It was absolutely, this country was bought and paid for by Russian oligarchs. And this country would do nothing. 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. And it's the same thing in Germany with the Russian gas in France, nobody wanted to do anything. Nobody wanted to have anything against Russia. And coming back to the naivete that we experienced, it's going on today. There are people that believe that Putin is ready to negotiate the end of this war. They think, let's give diplomacy a chance. It's kind of like thinking that they're going to let Sergei out of prison. There's no diplomacy. Putin has no, they don't do diplomacy in Russia. It's all win-lose, zero sum, there's the dictator and the dictator, that's how it works. And there's no compromise. No one ever compromises in Russia. And so when I hear about all these ideas that, oh, let's, right now, the European Union, that you're fighting among themselves, who should negotiate with Putin? Nobody should negotiate with Putin because the only way that Putin is going to stop is if he's stopped. That is not going to be by agreement that this happens. And by the way, the reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money that he's afraid of his own people. It's Machiavelli 101, creative foreign enemy, start a war. Let me say this because I know I'm not alone. At some point, your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to. You train hard, you travel, you push yourself, and suddenly recovery takes longer. You wake up stiff, joints complain, skin hair nails, things don't look or feel quite right anymore. So many people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about. What surprised me is that this isn't just getting older in some vague sense. A huge part of it is collagen. 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And you know, there will be a lot of people who pay his regime who nonetheless will objectively say, you couldn't have a country run by what was called seven bankers. I was one of them. I was cheering when he took down Hordeckowski. I thought, one down, 21 to go. And then he paid Roman Abramovich $13 billion for his oil company and made him the governor of Chukokka, region, which is like some state of Russia. So on one hand, you take down one oligarch, another one you give him $13 billion, how is that taken down the oligarchs? So it's, so. - But what I was going to ask you, Bill, sorry, just to, I hear you about oligarchs. And in fact, we know that now an oligarch in Russia has become a government appointed position effectively, right? - It always was. - Yeah, well, no. In the '90s, there was a very one they was self-managed. - When Putin came in, that was the moment that they became, there's a such thing as independently wealthy oligarchs. They're all independently wealthy. And they're the, and by the way, people say, how come they're not rising up right now because the business is so bad and so on? These guys are the most cowardly beta-cuck people, ever when it comes to Putin. You should see them in his presence. They're just like these little, you know, they're all pounding their chests when they were by themselves, but the moment they're in Putin's presence, they're all just scared to death at him, cowardly people. And so, why do you think his leadership evolved? Because my understanding is, the reason that he was, I mean, objectively successful is Russian president for a long time, and popular, is that the price of oil went up massively from like $9 a barrel to over a hundred at one point. And so Russia, which generates almost all of its revenues by exporting oil and gas, was very rich all of a sudden, and he could spend money on, you know, doing up Moscow, making a nice, and all sorts of other things, public services, etc. Why would a leader of a country that's flourishing in this way go and start a war that would get the country sanctioned, all of his people sanctioned, cause all sorts of economic turbulence, etc. Because he stole too much money. So, he's been a crook since that, since before he started, he was in the mayor's office in St. Petersburg, you know, taken the skimming. He's been, and, and by the way, nobody in Russia goes into public service to serve the public. If you're a traffic cop, you stop cars and extract bribes. If you're, you know, planning, a regional planning person, you know, you want to get a planning permission for a, for a building, you extract a bribe, and it just, the bribes get bigger and bigger as the, as the, and so Putin stole an absolute, enormous amount of money, like more money than you can imagine. And, and by the way, it wasn't just him. All the people around him stole a lot of money. My, my guess, my estimate, is that over the course of 22 years up until the start of the war, that 1,000 individuals, Putin and 1,000 or 999 individuals had stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian government, a trillion dollars. And that, and by the way, that is the estimate of capital flight from Russia. And so, that's money that should have been spent on, on, on schools and hospitals and roads and public services. Instead, it was spent on private jets and yachts and houses in the south of France. And you could probably do this on a smaller scale or a shorter period of time and get away with it. But they just stole too much money. I mean, there's 141 million Russians living in destitute poverty and 1,000 people living in the most lavish life you can ever imagine. And, and I believe that Putin saw that, that all it would take was someone lighting a match somewhere and the whole thing could come, you know, that there could be a million people storming the Kremlin. And, and nobody knows what that match would be, you know, like in Tunisia, a, a fruit seller set himself on fire. And that led to the Tunisian government falling and that led to the Egyptian and the, and Syria and so on and so forth. Nobody knows how these things work. But what Putin knew was that he didn't want to be sitting in the Kremlin, just waiting for the day that people came for him. And, and he's a very careful, he's, he's a very smart guy in terms of understanding all this. And, and so he said, well, I'm not going to wait for people to get mad at me. And so let's manufacture an enemy. And, and the Ukrainians, by, by almost any definition before all this stuff happened, weren't enemies. There was not, there was no beef between them. It was completely manufactured. They started calling the Ukrainians Nazis and fascists. It has some historical resonance because of the Second World War. And people still think about that in Russia. And they call them Nazis and fascists. They said that they were doing all these terrible things that they weren't doing. They made up this whole thing in order to have an enemy. And then they went and took Crimea. And by the way, Crimea was a bloodless some capture. There was a bunch of soldiers already there. And, and almost nobody died. And appropriations went through the roof and he was sitting there very pretty. And, and, but he needed to keep that up there. And, and he needed to keep this enemy going. And so then they went into Eastern Ukraine. And my estimation, why did they launch a full scale invasion in February of 2022? This, this, this was right after COVID. A lot of leaders in different countries were losing their place because of COVID. People were pretty angry at all. Everyone was angry at their governments. And Putin understood the value of war. They already had a self proclaimed enemy, which is the Ukrainians based on this thing. And, and, and at this point it was all about saving his own ass, saving his own skin. Not wanting to have the Russian people turn on him after COVID. And I, that's why he went in. And I, and I think that you know, it used to be profit maximization when he and all these guys were stealing a trillion dollars. And then they stole too much money. And then it was purely about survival. And by the way, if Putin ever loses power, what happens to him? He goes to jail, all the money gets taken away. And one day he'll be hanging from the, from the rafters. Well, this is what I don't actually understand about the rationale we're doing this because once he started this war, the possibility that he's going to enjoy his billions outside of Russia goes to zero. He will not be able to do that objectively. But also he, he knows of course that, you know, he might be able to do a deal like Yeltsin did, but it's hard to imagine. And so what I guess what I'm saying is he's ended any possibility of him surviving comfortably outside of Russia and inside of Russia, which I guess now that I'm saying I love means he will not leave power ever. There you go. He can't leave power. And so that, so he can never give up. And by the way, if he ends this war, he loses power. He'll, he won't be in power anymore. And I think that's the most important recognition that anyone can make, which is that all this talk about negotiation isn't going to go anywhere because he needs the war, stand power. He needs power. He's going to be in power to stay alive. And that's what he's going to do. And even if it's going to cost another 5 million Russian young men, it's going to cost another half a trillion dollars of resources. He will burn through everything in order to stand power. But Bill, he can't do this indefinitely. There has to be an end at some point, surely. Well, I mean, look at North Korea, you know, North Korea has been going on for a very long time. I mean, he can, he can really, really take Russia down a terrible dark road. He's already has, but it can get a lot darker because he doesn't care about anything other than himself. He has no sense of responsibility, no sense of empathy, no sense of national interest whatsoever. It's purely about himself. And, and that's, I think that's the big misunderstanding in the West is that we have a guy who, I mean, almost nobody else is like that. I mean, Hitler was like that. Stalin was like that, you know, Pol Pot was like that. But we don't, it's kind of hard for us to imagine in our own heads someone being like that in the modern day. And I think that's part of the problem, isn't it? And that we look at Putin through a Western lens. And we think, oh, you know, he's a leader of the country. He must think like us. He must, in that, because he thinks like us, therefore, we must be able to get around a table with him, having a negotiation and give him what he wants because it's kind of what we would want. And, and, and he's, he's created a narrative about things that he's upset with. So he said, I'm upset with NATO, NATO people joining, Eastern European countries joining NATO. I'm upset with these Nazis and fascists in Ukraine. I'm, you know, I have a vision of a, of a grandeur of a bigger part of a map that I want it from my, and he's created these, these narratives. And so people, so we in the West say, well, maybe if we give him this or do that or give him a little more of Ukraine, then, then he'll calm down. But it has nothing to do with what he wants. All he wants is just to save his own skin. And to save his own skin, he needs to be in power and to be in power and needs this war. And so it's, it's, we're, it's all this complete sort of, we're almost negotiating with ourselves based on this fake stuff he puts out there. And he, and he has reason to put it out there. Why does he put out this NATO stuff and this Nazi stuff? He puts it out for public consumption because the Russian people need something to, to hang their hat on. They can't just say, we're having a war for no reason. We need a reason for the war. But it's not the reason, there's not the reason why he's that war. It's just a reason for public consumption. So how should the West deal with this situation? What we should do is just let the Ukrainians finish him off. They're, they're actually, I mean, if we gave them the resources that they need and we've, we've, we've sort of drip fed resources to them. We've given them, you know, enough so that they could not lose, but not so much that they could win. If we gave them the resources to win, by the way, they'd be doing us a great service, getting rid of this guy who's threatening us right now. You know, they, some, some Russian sponsored guys tried to burn down the prime minister's house. I mean, that was just came out in court. It's not like we're, we're sort of sitting here all immune from this thing. So how, how could we, how could we deal with this? There, there's got to be, there, either one side is going to win and the other side lose or vice versa. So either Ukraine is going to win and Russia is going to lose or the other way around. And, and what we could do is give the Ukrainians, you know, the stuff so they shoot down the, the missiles coming into Ukraine, give them, give them the 220 billion euros sitting in in, but that belongs to Russia, sitting in, in Brussels so they can buy weapons. give them to cut off all Russian oil exports so that Russia has no more money. We could help them a lot. We could help them win this war, but we're all just wanting this negotiation, not wanting to push things too far. And while we're busy doing that, the Ukrainians are getting on with it as best they can. And doing a pretty good job, even without what we're doing. I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. I have family in Ukraine, people watching the show, be familiar, I don't want to repeat myself. But I'm also analyzing the logic of what you're saying. And I don't know that that works for me because if we give the Ukrainians what they need to win, whatever that means, surely Putin in the desperate straits that he is in will only continue to escalate as much as he can all the way up to using what tactical nuclear weapons or like, where do we go? So that is the exact reason, that sort of logic flow that you've just laid out is the exact reason why Biden gave the Ukrainians all the weapons they wanted. But he said you can't use him hitting Targets in Russia, which is the worst thing in the world. And it's actually, 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 and anyone who has been watching the news, that the images of these oil refineries in Moscow and St. Petersburg blowing up are quite extraordinary. So that was the logic. It's all going to lead to nuclear holocaust, we don't want to go there, let's not even consider this. But let's just think about what happens if he uses a nuclear weapon? Does he win the war? So if, let's say he hits Kiev with a nuclear attack, what happens the next day that did the Ukrainians give up? Are they completely discombobulated and they can't? I don't think so. It's a highly dispersed country, it's a very big country. The Russians are the main problem they're having is they can't get across the front line. Are all the guys operating the drones all dead? No, they're all over the place, they're not dead. And so all he's done is then all of a sudden the Chinese are saying, well, we can't give you any more money, and the rest, I mean, to the extent that the global south is supporting Putin, they all step away. And so Putin becomes, you know, an absolutely fully defined war criminal having committed atrocities against civilians, and he hasn't won the war. And so he understands that probably the launch of a nuclear weapon is the end of Putin. I mean, that's probably the logic that he would have already done it if he thought that that was going to help him. I mean, five years into this war longer than World War I don't think so. And so the answer is that the way this could all find itself over is that if the Ukrainians continue at this pace and continue making life so difficult for the Russians, then I imagine it being like the Korean war. I mean, so my prediction is a Korean war type of thing where the Korean war is still going on. Nobody ever ended it. You have a front line, you have a demilitarized zone. And they're not lobbying stuff at each other anymore. I imagine that at some point it's going to become so painful for Putin, all these oil refinery attacks and all the attacks on his economy, that he's not going to then attack the Ukrainians, civilians anymore because that's going to be the quid pro quo. And then you have a front line and then it eventually just sort of comes down. Nobody declares, nobody negotiates anything, nobody declares peace and eventually just becomes reinforced on both sides and that's where that's how this war ends. I think that's the ultimate ending for this whole thing. I was going to say normally we finish by asking all I guess what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be, and you should feel free to answer that. But in addition to that, one of the things I always wanted to ask you was what is it that you know about the Russian mindset and Vladimir Putin's mindset that most people don't understand? Well, I think the main thing I know about his mindset is that he is a total sociopath. I mean that we can't negotiate with a sociopath, that everybody looks at him and says he looks kind of like us. You know, we're all sort of, you know, that he's a Christian, he's a Caucasian, you know, he's a European, they say, you know, we must be able to talk to him. And there is no talking to him. You know, there's no similarity between him and us in any possible way. And as quickly as we can dispose of that notion that he's like us, I think the easier it will be for us to come up with the policies we need to contain him. So Bill Browder, thank you so much for coming on the show. And of course, the story that you told us and Sergei's story is told very beautifully and in much more detail in your book Red Notice Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.