The Real Reason Putin Invaded Ukraine — Sir Bill Browder

27:51I 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 Aeroflot 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.

28:32So 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. 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.

29:19These guys are probably gonna go after the money. We 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, phew, people's safe, money's safe, you know, time to move on to other stuff. Set up a new investment fund, investing in other places, started investing in other places. I'm at a board meeting in Paris, June 4th, 2007. I get 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 breaking down the door.

30:06What should I do? I said, 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 in 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 those 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.

30:58So 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 because remember, we got everything out to steal these empty investment holding companies. I'm not worried about the money. Money is already safe. It's offshore. But if the police are doing all this stuff, working with killers, I'm going to be walking through Frankfurt airport one day and someone's going to arrest me on a Russian Interpol warrant. And I say to myself, we got to 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.

31:47He 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 to him, hey, 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. And so he goes out, he researches everything, and he's a super smart guy and he figures it out. 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.

32:23And off that billion dollars of profits, I paid$230 million 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 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 of December 2007 and was approved and paid out the next day, Christmas Eve.

33:21It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia paid out in one day on a fraud. I mean, 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. On Christmas Eve. They actually celebrate Christmas, whatever, 13 days later. But anyways.

33:54Francis Foster:No one's working at this time anyway. That's the point. Right. 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, an 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 off talking about how the greater good of Russia. this must be something, you know, he must be getting, and by the way, this wasn't our money. This was the Russian government's money that was being stolen.

34:33So Sergei and I were convinced, wrongly, but we were convinced that this was a rogue operation and we brought it to the attention at the highest levels in the Russian government, then the good guys would get the bad guys. So we wrote criminal complaints to the head of 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.

35:11Turns 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 a cell in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds, kept the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation and They put him in cells with no heat and no window panes in December in Moscow. So he nearly froze to death. They'd move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night.

35:57They had to put him in cells with no toilet, 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, buys Starbucks in the morning on his way into work. you know, they figure 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 they wanted him to say that he did so on my instructions.

36:34So, you know, here's this guy that doesn't look 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 subjecting him to, and 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.

37:19The operation was scheduled for the 1st of August, 2009. About a week before the operation, the same people who were torturing him before came to him and said, listen, you know, if you sign this false confession, everything will be good. He refused again. And 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 Butyrka, which is considered to be one of the most awful prisons in Russia. And at Butyrka, there were no medical facilities for his operation, and they refused him all subsequent medical treatment.

37:59He went into a terrible downward word spiral. He was in 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 16th, 2009, he went into critical condition. On that night, the Butyrka authorities didn't want to have responsibility from 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.

38:41They chain him to a bed and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat 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 on 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 made 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 and make sure they face justice.

39:38And 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, but it's also about the nature of heroism. And we think about heroes looking a particular way or sounding a particular way. But Sergei 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, you know, he was a tax lawyer. You know, he was not a human rights lawyer. He was not a political activist. He's not Alexei Navalny or, you know, a journalist. He was just a tax lawyer working for rich guys, helping them with their taxes.

40:23But when he got thrown into this horrible situation, he was, he did exactly the, the, the, what, I mean, I wish he hadn't been a hero. I, I wish he had, he had been a flawed individual and would have, he could have testified against me for anything and it would have been fine. He'd still be alive. But he was truly, he had principles, and when he was faced with this kind of duress, he did the most heroic thing. And the one thing I've learned a lot over the last 20 years is that 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 Sergei turned out to be an amazing hero.

41:05because 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. Yeah. And whatever path that you take, however you attempt to address it fairly by legal means, you know it's not going to go anywhere. Well, this is the interesting thing about Sergei, was that up until the very end, he was an idealist. He actually believed that if he filed a complaint or he made a legal application, that somewhere in the system that the law would protect him.

41:52You know, I asked him before he was arrested, I asked him to leave. And he said, you know, Bill, this is not 1937. This is not Stalin's Russia. The law will protect me. And he believed it. And 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 they were beating him, that somehow it was going to come out all right. So he was a hero and an idealist, and I guess a naive idealist. And if he had been more cynical like everybody else in Russia, he would have signed what they wanted him to sign, and then he'd still be alive.

42:46But also the subsequent part of the story shows that you say 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. And so I made it my life's work to make sure that there was some meaning to this tragedy. 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 mean, I wanted to make sure that the people that did this to him just couldn't laugh it off and enjoy their money.

43:45and we'd first, I mean, I guess me naively, at first, we thought, like, maybe we can get justice in Russia. It had become very well-known, this whole story. It was not, it didn't get, you know, swept under the carpet. I made sure of that. And because Sergei 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 this, you know, 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, a long letter, in its entirety on the front page and like eight pages in for everyone to read.

44:21And 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 and a lot of people were upset about it.

44:37But 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 exonerated every single official who played any role top to bottom in this whole thing, everybody. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia?

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46:24Francis Foster:After you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about them, So make sure to mention Trigonometry to support the show. Once again, head to superpower.com and use our code Trigger at checkout. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia? And the answer is that these people killed Sergei because they stole$230 million. And the$230 million that 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.

47:01And by the way, it's not like a mystery that that's what the Russians do. We see them everywhere, all over London and the south of France and Courcheval and Sardinia. I mean, they're everywhere with their money. And Russia is 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?

47:38And I took this idea to Washington and I shared it with a Democratic senator named Benjamin Cardin and Republican Senator John McCain. And I told them 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 Magnitsky Act. 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 14th, 2012. And Putin went out of his mind.

48:22This was probably the first time 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 in 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.

48:45Francis Foster: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 countries, so we need to impose. And so, I mean, it was really the ultimate insult to Putin 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.

49:33And the orphans that are being adopted are the sick ones that are being brought back to the West for, you know, I mean, they're adopted, they get medical treatment, they end up, you know, having normal lives in Russia, they die in the orphanages. So he's basically sentencing 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.

50:15But the red notice. Yeah, so International Police Organization. It's like if someone is a fugitive from the, let's say someone like burns your house down in Britain, everyone knows it. If they flee to another country, Britain can put them on the Interpol 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 sent to Russia so that they could do the same thing to me that they did to Sergei Magnitsky. They applied to the British government a dozen times to have me extradited.

50:56They were making movies about me. There were smear campaigns. there was lawsuits. I mean, 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 with all this intensity and all this danger and all these threats, that I would back down. And they thought that all these threats to America with the adoptions, that these senators would 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, then name it Magnitsky, which was the ultimate insult to Putin.

51:39And I started going to other countries, and I started getting Magnitsky Acts in other countries. 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. And coming back to Sergei's, you know, 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 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 is not safe, if their money is going to be frozen.

52:32Um, 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 that don't do terrible things because they don't want their money frozen. They don't want to be become, they don't want to become international pariahs. I think that Sergei's death saves lives. Um, and it certainly gives victims some, something to, um, some, some measure of justice.

53:00Francis Foster:Bill, and while Sergei was in pretrial 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, you know, there's always sort of criminal justice entrepreneurs.

53:37They 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, like, no chance of anything happening. And, of course, we would have done, you know, I 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.

54:05Francis Foster: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 Sergey, and blame me for stealing the$230 million. That was their scam. And they needed the 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 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.

55:08Francis Foster: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. 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 and millions of pounds sloshing around for British lawyers, British tax advisors, all kinds. And the city of London was awash with Russian money.

55:53Francis Foster: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 Mandelson on Oleg Deripaska'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.

56:38And same thing in Germany with the Russian gas and 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, you know, 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, you know, zero sum. There's the, you know, the dictator and the dictatee. That's how it works.

57:25And there's no compromise. No one ever compromises in Russia. And so when I hear about all these ideas that, you know, right now, the European Union 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. It's 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. And so the The best way to have your own people not get mad at you is to create somebody else for them to be mad at.

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1:00:00Live better, longer. For a limited time, get 20 % off your entire order at bubsnaturals.com with code TRIG or click the link in the description of this episode. That's B-U-B-S naturals.com, code TRIG. And when they ask where you heard about them, tell them Trigonometry sent you. Once more for 20 % off, use code TRIG at bubsnaturals.com. Why do you think his leadership has changed as much as it has?

1:00:32Francis Foster:Because when he first came in, as you mentioned, he was a kind of faceless technocrat. Then he cracked down on the oligarchs. And, you know, there will be a lot of people who hate his regime, who nonetheless will objectively say you couldn't have a country run by what was called seven bankers. You're probably one of them. I was one of them. I was cheering when he took down Hortokovsky. 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 Chukotka region, which is like some state of Russia. So on one hand, you take down one oligarch, another one, you give him$13 billion.

1:01:07How is that taking down the oligarchs? So it's...

1:01:12Francis Foster:But what I was going to ask you, Bill, sorry, just to... I hear you about the 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 period when they were self-made. When Putin came in, that was the moment that they became... There's no such thing as independently wealthy oligarchs. They're all dependently wealthy. 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.

1:01:46You should see them in his presence. They're just like these little, you know, they're all pounding their chests when they're by themselves. But the moment they're in Putin's presence, they're all just scared to death of him. Cowardly people.

1:01:58Francis Foster:And so why do you think his leadership evolved? Because my understanding is the reason that he was, I mean, objectively successful as Russian president for a long time and popular, is that the price of oil went up massively from like$9 a barrel to over$100 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 doing up Moscow, making it 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.

1:02:40Because he stole too much money. So he's been a crook since before he started. He was in the mayor's office in St. Petersburg, you know, taking skimming. He's been... 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 a planning, a regional planning person, you want to get a planning permission for a building, you extract a bribe. And the bribes get bigger and bigger. And so Putin stole an absolute enormous amount of money, like more money than you can imagine. And by the way, it wasn't just him. All the people around him stole a lot of money.

1:03:25My guess, my estimate, is that over the course of 22 years up until the start of the war that a thousand individuals, Putin and a thousand or 999 individuals, had stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian government. A trillion dollars. And by the way, that is the estimate of capital flight from Russia. And so that's money that should have been spent 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 a thousand 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, there could be a million people storming the Kremlin.

1:04:30And nobody knows what that match would be. You know, like in Tunisia, a fruit seller set himself on fire, and that led to the Tunisian government falling, and that led to the Egyptian 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 he's a very careful, he's a very smart guy in terms of understanding all this. And so he said, I'm not going to wait for people to get mad at me. And so let's manufacture an enemy. And the Ukrainians, by almost any definition before all this stuff happened, weren't enemies.

1:05:10There 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. 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 capture. There was a bunch of soldiers already there. Almost nobody died. His approval ratings went through the roof and he was sitting there very pretty and and um but he needed to keep that up there and he needed to keep this enemy going and so then they went into eastern ukraine in my estimation why did they launch a full-scale invasion in february of 2022 is this this was right after covid um 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.

1:06:11They already had a self-proclaimed enemy, which is the Ukrainians, based on this thing. 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 think that's why he went in. And I think that, you know, it used to be profit maximization when him 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 his money gets taken away, and one day he'll be hanging from the rafters.

1:06:49Francis Foster:Well, this is what I don't actually understand about the rationale with 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 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 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 it out loud means he will not leave power ever. There you go. He can't leave power.

1:07:31and so he can never give up. And by the way, if he ends this war, 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 to stay in power. He needs power. He needs 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 stay in power. But Bill, he can't do this indefinitely.

1:08:15There 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 really, really take Russia down a terrible dark road. He 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 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.

1:08:55You know, Pol Pot was like that. But 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? In 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, have a negotiation and give him what he wants, because it's kind of what we would want. 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 the Eastern European countries joining NATO.

1:09:37I'm upset with these Nazis and fascists in Ukraine. I have a vision of a grander, of a bigger part of the map that I want it for my... And he's created these narratives. And 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 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, he needs this war. And so it's all this complete sort of, we're almost negotiating with ourselves based on this fake stuff he puts out there.

1:10:14And 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 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 why he's at 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 actually, I mean, if we gave them the resources that they need, and we've sort of drip-fed resources to them, we've given them enough so that they could not lose, but not so much that they could win.

1:10:55If we gave them the resources to win, and by the way, they'd be doing us a great service, getting rid of this guy who's threatening us right now. 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 sort of sitting here all immune from this thing. So how could we deal with this? There's got to be 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 what we could do is give the Ukrainians, you know, the stuff so they shoot down the missiles coming into Ukraine.

1:11:34Give them the 220 billion euros sitting in, that belongs to Russia, sitting in Brussels so they can buy weapons. Give them to cut off all Russian oil exports so that Russia has no more money. You know, we could help them a lot. We could help them win this war. But we're all just sort of, you know, 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.

1:12:09Francis Foster:I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. I have family in Ukraine. You know, people watching the show will 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's 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? Well, so that is the exact reason that 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.

1:12:45But he said you can't use them hitting targets in Russia, which is the worst thing in the world. I mean, it's actually, 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. 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. 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.

1:13:22Does he win the war? So let's say he hits Kiev with a nuclear attack. What happens the next day? 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, 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.

1:13:58And so Putin becomes, you know, an absolute 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. I mean, 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, 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.

1:14:43I mean, so my prediction is a Korean War type of thing where the Korean War, by the way, 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 gonna become so painful for Putin, all these oil refinery attacks and all the attacks on his economy, that he's not gonna then attack Ukrainian civilians anymore because that's gonna be the quid pro quo. And then you have a front line, and then it eventually just sort of calms down. Nobody declares, nobody negotiates anything, nobody declares peace, and it eventually just becomes reinforced on both sides, and that's how this war ends.

1:15:22I think that's the ultimate ending for this whole thing.

1:15:26Francis Foster:I was going to say, normally we finish by asking, well, 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, he's a Christian, he's a Caucasian, you know, he's a European, they say.

1:16:07You 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'll 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.

1:16:33Francis Foster: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.

1:16:58We'll see you next time.