Bill Browder tells Katie what Putin’s really like — and why the world must stand up to him.
Few people understand the complicated psychology of Vladimir Putin like Bill Browder does.
In his 2015 book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice, he shared his personal story about attempting to expose corruption among Russia’s financial elite, which ultimately led to the death of his Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered after speaking out on the subject.
Now he’s releasing a fascinating new follow-up, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath, which chronicles Putin’s efforts to bring Browder down after all the attention he drew to the nefarious behavior among the highest echelons of the Russian government. He describes how Putin’s crew chased him around the world, murdered more of his allies, and engaged in a sweeping campaign to destroy him.
Katie called up Browder to hear more about his personal journey, his unique understanding of what motivates Putin, and his take on the invasion of Ukraine.
Katie Couric: Bill, you must be watching what’s happening in Ukraine with incredible interest and a sense of déjà vu. Tell us about your history in Russia. You are really a mortal enemy of Vladimir Putin — can you help us understand why?
Bill Browder: I went to Russia at the end of the Soviet union, when Russia became a capitalist country, and I set up an investment fund to invest in Russia. I discovered that oligarchs and other corrupt officials were stealing money from those companies I was investing in. I thought, I guess naively, that I could stop the stealing by publicly exposing it, so I launched these naming-and-shaming campaigns against Russian oligarchs. As you can imagine, I didn’t make myself too popular. After living there for 10 years, I was expelled from the country. In 2005, I was declared a threat to national security.
Then my real problems began: My office in Moscow was raided by the police. The office of my law firm was raided by the police. They seized a bunch of documents, which were then used to create a very complex fraud in which corrupt Russian officials and organized criminals stole $230 million of taxes that I had paid to the Russian government from the Russian government. I had a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky who investigated this and discovered who was involved and how. He publicly denounced them, made a formal witness statement, and then the people who he testified against subsequently arrested him and put him in pretrial detention, where he was then tortured for 358 days until he was murdered on Nov. 16, 2009, in Russian police custody.
Since his murder, I’ve made it my life’s work to go after the people that killed him and make sure they face justice. For the last 12 years, that’s what I’ve been doing, and this culminated in a piece of legislation named after Sergei Magnitsky called the Magnitsky Act, which freezes the assets and bans the visas of the people who killed him and the people who commit similar types of human-rights abuses in Russia and around the world.
Vladimir Putin hates the Magnitsky Act more than anything, but I’m happy to say he hasn’t succeeded in repealing it. It’s been broadened. It’s now the Global Magnitsky Act, and it doesn’t just apply to Russia. It applies to bad actors all over the world.
Didn’t Putin actually mention you by name when he was meeting with Donald Trump?
Yes. Putin is so angry with the Magnitsky Act because he’s a very rich man who’s probably worth north of $200 billion, and that money is held through oligarchs and oligarch trustees who hold that money in the West. Putin, a man who values money more than human life, is seeing that all this money that he worked so hard and killed so many people to get was put at risk. And so he’s come after me in every possible way.
I’ve been threatened with death, kidnapping, arrest warrants. They’ve issued eight Interpol warrants for my arrest. They’ve sentenced me to 18 years in Russian prison in absentia. They’ve accused me of murder. They’ve accused me of espionage. They make movies about me. They sue me. And at the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki in 2008, Putin went so far as to publicly ask Donald Trump to hand me over, and amazingly, Donald Trump thought that was a brilliant idea.
He thought it was a brilliant idea?
I believe the exact words he used were, “That’s an incredible offer.” Putin was saying he would hand over the 12 military intelligence officers who were accused by the Department of Justice of hacking the U.S. election if Donald Trump handed me over. And Donald Trump’s response was, “That’s an incredible offer.” It took Trump four days to walk it back, and it was only when there was a Senate vote coming up, which ultimately voted 98-0 not to hand me and others over, that Trump decided it wasn’t such an incredible offer.
That must have been a scary four days for you.
It was. It’s interesting because I’ve lived in London for 32 years, and I’m a British citizen, but at the time I was in Aspen, Colorado, and I just pictured a bunch of SUVs from the Department of Homeland Security circling where I was staying, grabbing me, and putting me on some rendition flight back to Russia. I was terrified.
You’ve known Putin for some time. How would you describe Vladimir Putin today compared to the man you became familiar with during your time in Russia?
What we’ve seen over the course of 22 years is that Putin, who was kind of a timid and almost tentative president when he first came in, has become very familiar with how the levers of power work. He understands how to threaten people, blackmail them, extort them. The main objective of his presidency has been to steal money from the Russian people, and all this money that should have gone to pay for medicines and education and filling potholes and providing public services has gone to yachts and private jets and villas in the south of France.
Over a period of time, we’ve seen that Putin has gotten richer and more powerful, but he’s also gotten more scared because he understands that at some point, the Russian people can say, “Enough is enough. We’re supposed to be a democracy, why are we allowing you to just ruin our lives like this?” And so he needed to do something quite radical to change the narrative, and he did whatever dictator does when they’re worried about being overthrown by their people: He started a war.
When you look at what he’s doing now, I don’t believe it has anything to do with the stated reasons. The idea that NATO encirclement caused him to invade Ukraine is nonsense. So is the idea that he wants to rebuild the legacy of the former Soviet Union — I don’t think he cares about the legacy of anything. If he did, he wouldn’t have been stealing from the people for so long. I think this is purely a desperate play to stay in power, and that informs how to respond to him.
The only thing that will cause him to stop this war is if he’s defeated. I believe that to be the case, and the only option for us is to do everything we can possibly do to help the Ukrainians win this war. That’s including more arms, a no-fly zone, financial support, crippling sanctions. If for whatever reason Putin is able to win this war, then his next stop is going to be a NATO border, like Estonia or Lithuania or Poland. He’s going to see whether Article 5 of NATO, this collective defense treaty that we all have, really works — and whether the U.S. military is ready to go to war with Russia over a country that 99 percent of Americans couldn’t locate on a map. And we don’t wanna ever get there.
As you know, a no-fly zone has been a nonstarter, for fear that it will start a third world war and Putin may unleash nuclear weapons. How likely is he to do that?
In my opinion, if Putin feels like he wants to unleash nuclear weapons, there’s absolutely nothing preventing him from that, and it doesn’t matter whether we do a no-fly zone or not. If we are in the position of saying we’re so scared of Putin using nuclear weapons that we don’t want to challenge him in any way, he will use that to eventually come and say, “OK, I’m going to use my nuclear weapons on you unless you give me all of Eastern Europe from 1945 on — Poland and Hungary and all the other countries.” He could do anything. The only thing this man understands is hard power.
If we were to set up a no-fly zone, for example, and give him fair warning that if any Russian jets enter Ukrainian aerospace, we will shoot them down, the question becomes, does Putin really want to start a war with NATO that he’ll lose in an afternoon? I don’t think so. He only respects strength, and the idea of publicly saying we’re not going to engage with him is just encouraging him to do whatever he wants in Ukraine.
We should make no mistake: Putin will use nuclear weapons, no matter what, if he sees it in his interest to do so. It’s not like we can provoke him to do that. If he decides that he wants to threaten us with nuclear weapons, he will. The one thing he does understand is strength and power. He’s a thug, he’s a bully, and we have to stand up to him.
Why do you think no one in his inner circle has challenged him or tried to remove him from office?
Putin is the most paranoid person you could ever imagine. He’s spent his whole life poisoning people, killing people, and assassinating people. He knows every trick in the book, and he is desperately afraid of that happening to him. For the last 22 years, he’s been looking for disloyalty anywhere and getting rid of those people, making huge examples of anybody who’s been disloyal. Anybody who shows the signs of disloyalty will be identified and killed, and therefore everybody is just completely scared of this man.
Should sanctions against Russia have been imposed earlier?
Sanctions are kind of like medicine for a disease: The medicine has a different efficacy depending on when you take it. If you take it at the early stages, then it could wipe out the disease before it becomes full-blown. If we had applied sanctions earlier, before the invasion, Putin might have done something differently. That’s because he was banking on the fact that we wouldn’t do any sanctions, and he had reason to believe that because for the last 22 years, when he’s done something terrible, there’s never been any real material reaction. [With earlier sanctions], he might have had a different calculus and he might have done something differently. But once he made his decision to invade, he’s a guy who never backs down. He’s a guy who never compromises. The purpose of these sanctions now is to dry up his financial resources, so he just doesn’t have the money to wage this war in Ukraine.
And what about all the civilians who are being brutally murdered, including children?
This behavior is organized from the top. Russian soldiers don’t do anything unless they’re told to do it. If they’re told to go and rape and pillage and dismember and torture, they will. This is organized brutality. That’s coming from the very top, from Putin, and he is doing it for a very specific reason. He wants to be feared. The best way of terrifying people is to be a terrorist, and he is terrorizing the Ukrainians in the most awful, terrible way. This is Osama bin Laden on September 11th, every day in Ukraine.
How do you see this ending?
Sadly, I don’t see it ending. That’s the terrible part. There’s basically three possible outcomes: Either the Ukrainians win, which I give a 15 percent probability; the Russians win, which I give another 15 percent probability; and the most likely scenario is that it just goes on and on and on. And that I would give a 70 percent probability.
