Bill Browder

Bill Browder is the author of "Red Notice" and "Freezing Order," which delineate his investments in Russia and the ultimate death of his attorney Sergei Magnitsky after he refuses to back down on his accusation that Russian government officials fraudulently claimed a $230 million tax refund for Browder's company, Hermitage Capital. We cover Browder's history and ultimate investments in Russia as well as Putin's personal vendetta against him and the status of Russia today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Said Podcast.
My guest today is author, investor Russia expert Bill Browner. Bill,
good to have you on the podcast. Agree to be here.
Can you please explain what the Magnitsky Act is? So,
the Magnisky Act is a piece of legislation that was
passed in two thousand twelve. It's named after my lawyer,

(00:31):
Sergei Magnitsky. Serge was killed in a Russian prison in
two thousand nine after he exposed a massive government corruption
scheme and he testified against the officials involved, and in
in retaliation, they had arrested him, put him in jail,
tortured him for three or fifty eight days, and as
I mentioned, they killed him on November six nine. I

(00:56):
then went after the the Russian government and all of
their officials who were involved in his murder. And the
result of my efforts was this piece of legislation, which
was past four and Congress in the Senate and the
House of Representatives and signed into law on December four,

(01:17):
two thousand and twelve by President Obama. Okay, now, are
there Magnetsky Acts in other countries around the world. Indeed,
after the US past the Magnetsky Act, Vladimir Putin went
out of his mind and he banned the adoption of
Russian orphans by American families. Um he made it his
single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the Magnetskay Act.

(01:40):
And it was clear that we had hit the Achilles
heel of the Putin regime. So I then went out
and tried to get it past in all other countries
that I could. And so there's Magnetskay Act in Canada,
there's one in Britain where I live. There's one in
the European Union. Twenty seven members of the EU have
Magnetsky Acts. When in Australia, one in Norway, one in Montenegro,

(02:02):
when in Kosovo. We even have it in the all
the British off overseas and offshore territories like the British
Virsion Islands and the Cayman Islands and Jersey and Gibraltar,
which may sound insignificant, but that's where a lot of
the a lot of the bad guys stash their loot.
As a practical matter, hottest Magnitsky Act work. Well, what

(02:25):
happens is if somebody has done uh torture, murder like
the what they've done to Serge magnitsky Um and the government,
you can prove it to the government to a high
standard of evidence, then they put that person on the
Magnitsky List, and the Magniski Act will then freeze their assets,

(02:45):
banned their visas, and publicly name their names. And it's
quite devastating because anybody who gets put on the Magnisky
List effectively can't open a bank account anywhere in the world.
If you're on the U. S. Sanctions list, nobody wants
to mess with you, as government makes it almost impossible
for these people to get visas anymore. And in my mind,

(03:06):
probably the best part about the whole thing is that
all these regimes eventually crumble at one point or another,
and all these people then can't go and flee to
a civilized country when Russia gets taken over by the
next guy, because all the civilized countries are gonna say,
wait a second, you're on the Magniscy list, you're a
human rights biler. We don't want you. So how often

(03:28):
is someone on the list where it's just the fact
that it exists a disincentive to try to go to
another country. Well, I think that that it's it's a
disincentive the moment that they get put on the list
to try to go to another country because they know
that they won't be welcomed. I mean, there's another interesting
angle to the whole thing, which is that if somebody

(03:49):
is put on the Magniscy list, there's probably a hundred
other people who are terrified that they're going to be
put on the Magniscy List. And so it creates almost
like a reign of terror on all these bad guys
in these dictatorships because they're all worried abou this is
going to happen to them. Now, how much let's just
call the illegal Russian assets are in the US? Can

(04:09):
that be quantified? Can that be reached in light of
the war going on in Ukraine? Should the US government
attach and seize those assets? Well, the answer is absolutely yes. Um,
the US government is trying. It's um, it's a tough
it's a tough tough thing for them to do because
the Russians who have m accumulated all these assets, has

(04:33):
spent years, if not decades, preparing for this moment. So
all these assets are held in the names of shell
companies and trust companies and shell companies owning trust companies,
and then trust companies looking after nominee arrangements and so
on and and so forth. And so there's a whole layer
and layer and layer of stuff that needs to be

(04:55):
gone through. And so I think we're just getting started
in this whole process right now. But that' the objective
is to is to freeze the assets and seize the
assets of these oligarchs and people close to Laderma and Putin,
and they have a lot of assets. These people are
extremely rich. The kleptocracy was really revealed to the general
person in ten with all the graft and other expenses

(05:19):
with the socio Olympics. So what don't we know Putin
took power, he has a dominimous salary, yet he's considered
to be the wealthiest person in the world. Explain how
this works, how he and his cronies get the money,
how he distributed to the understandings that it's his money,

(05:40):
even though in name it may not be. So. The
way it works is this. When you go into government
in Russia, um, nobody does it to serve the public.
If you if you're an American and you go into government,
you want to do it to serve the people. In Russia,
the only reason a person goes into government is to
steal money. Um And the more the higher you are

(06:02):
in the government, the more money you can steal. And
the person who gets to steal the most money is
the most powerful person, which is the President of Russia.
And so over a long period of time, Vladimir Putin
has stolen an enormous amount of money. I estimate these
worth well north of two billion dollars personally. And if

(06:22):
we had to quantify the amount of money that's been
stolen in his twenty two years in power, he and
all the people around him, the thousand or so other
people who are involved in this thing, I would estimate
they've stolen a trillion dollars a thousand billion dollars from
the Russian state, from the Russian people. That's money that
should have gone to how build hospitals and schools and

(06:45):
phil potholes in the road, but instead it's gone to
uh pay for villas and yachts and Swiss bank accounts
and private jets. And and that's really the sort of
tragedy of the whole thing, is that it's the definitely
lots of victims of this crime, which are the people
of Russia. Now we hear that these oligarchs who are

(07:06):
named in the papers and other news media are really
holding Putent money and trust it's really not their money,
or most of it is not. Is that true? That's
exactly right. And so the way it works is that
there's no such thing as an independently wealthy person in Russia.
Anybody who's wealthy is dependently wealthy, and they're dependent on

(07:28):
Vladimir Putin and so um there. Their their whole arrangement
with him is that he allows them to keep some
of the money that they have stolen from wherever as
long as they give him a cut. And I I
estimate that he's a fifty shareholder and all this stuff.

(07:49):
So when you see an oligarch who's worth billion dollars
on paper, the reality is that he's only worth ten
because the other ten belongs to Vladimir Putin. And and
that's how the whole system works, is that these oligarchs,
when you when you see them all out there and
you want to go after Putin's money, you go after
the oligarch's money. So drilled down a little bit deeper.

(08:10):
Exactly how do they steal the money? Well, do we
have about twelve hours, because I can tell you twelve
hours worth of ways in which they steal the money.
But let me give you a couple of good examples.
There's the example of what Sergei Magniski discovered and what
he was killed over. My company paid two million dollars
of taxes to the Russian government and we were then

(08:32):
my offices were then rated by the police, who then
seized all of our corporate documents and those documents were
then used to fraudulently reregister my companies that have paid
the taxes. And then they went and applied for a
illegal to thirty million dollar tax refund and it was

(08:54):
approved by the tax authorities overnight and paid out the
next day, and it was the largest tax refund in
the history of Russia. UH. As one example, so you
know complex scheme, and it's it's actually ten times more
complicated than I've just explained it. Um. But that's one way.
And then I mean I could give you so for
example another one. UH they build a pipeline, an oil

(09:17):
pipeline from Russia to Turkey. Normally, if you go out
to a contractor and say how much does it cost
to build a pipeline? That contractor will say a million
dollars per kilometer, and of course the contractor is probably
even giving you a high price so they can make
a big margin. And then you look on the on

(09:40):
the balance sheet of gas prom and they've spent ten
million dollars per kilometer to build a pipeline, so they
spent ten times the real the cost to the contractor
um so nine million dollars per kilometer then goes as
kickbacks to the people who organized the construction project for
State Gas company. How do you get in on the action?

(10:02):
The only way you can get in on the action
is to be part of the criminal enterprise. And so
it's like, how do you become a member of the
New York mafia. You know, you have to be a
made man. There's some special ways that people have become
made men there, but the main ways you you work
in government, and generally you work in part the part
of the government that's the has the power to arrest people,

(10:26):
to take people hostage. So you work in one of
the security services, you work in the FSB, which is
their secret police, or you work in the Interior ministry
or which is the regular police, or you work in
the prosecutor's office. And then what you do once you're
in those places is you go around and arresting people
until they hand over stuff to you, until they become

(10:48):
a sort of client. And and so there's many many
people in jail who shouldn't be in jail and Russia
who are they put there so that all these crimes
could be committed without any questions being asked? So what
is the head space of the average Russian citizen? Are
they aware of this? Do they go along? We have
Nivali who's resisting, But generally what's the mindset? The mindset

(11:09):
is this happens at every level of Russian society. It
happens down to the local mayor and the local policeman
right up to the President of Russia. Everybody accepts it.
They know it happens, and they only think in wish
that they could be so lucky as to be involved
in this. And so it's a it's a weird cynical,
almost defeatist attitude. And of course people at the same

(11:32):
time are pretty piste off by it, because you know
that somebody is getting something that they're not, and so
that they they they wish they had it, but it's
not like they're morally outraged. There's outraged that they're not,
you know, the recipients when somebody else is what is
the average quality of life in Russia? We have gross
incommittee quality. In the United States, there's somewhat of the

(11:55):
social safety net. What's the situation in Russia. It's just dramatic,
worse than than any any place in the world in
terms of incoming inequality. There's a thousand people that control
like and I don't know the exact number, but like
more than of all the assets in the country, and
everybody else lives and lives in destitute poverty. It means

(12:15):
a very very small middle class. And the average Russian
is like, you know, living in a in a shack
on an unpaved dirt road and they have to use
an outhouse. I mean, it's just horrible. If we were
to quiz these people were old enough to remember, would
they say things were better or worse under communism? I
think the average Russian would say that things were better
under communism because at least in that period of time,

(12:38):
there wasn't this whole sort of criminal regime running the country.
It was you know, the people who are running the
country were dictators and oppressive and and not not agreeing
to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But
but it wasn't a criminal organization where they were taking
all the money and spending on on on santrope villas.

(12:59):
So how did you personally decide to move to Russian
invest in Russian companies? So that's an interesting story. My
grandfather was the general secretary of the American Communist Party
between ninety and and so my family sort of followed
in his footsteps. And we're extremely before you go there,

(13:21):
where was he originally born? Was he American? Were there
any roots here? So my grandfather was from Wichita, Kansas.
He was a labor union organizer. In n seven, he
was spotted by the Communists in the Soviet Union and
they said, if you if you like labor unionism, you're
gonna love communism when you come over here and check

(13:41):
it out. So my grandfather moved to Moscow and he
did what most other single, red blooded American men do
when they get to Moscow. He found a Russian girl
who became my grandmother. They had three sons, My father
was one of them, who was born in Moscow, and

(14:04):
then he returned to America to Yonkers, New York, and
he became head of the American Communist Party. He ran
for president against Roosevelt in nineteen thirty six and nineteen
forty on the Communist ticket. He was actually imprisoned by
Roosevelt in nine and then pardon in nineteen two. Eventually

(14:26):
kicked out of the Communist Party in ninety five for
being too much of a capitalist, and then persecuted viciously
during the McCarthy era in the nineteen fifties. And so
this was my family legacy. I was born in nineteen
sixty four, fifty eight years old, and when I was
going through my teenage rebellion, I tried to come up

(14:46):
with a good way of rebelling from this family of communists,
and I tried several things out. I grew my hair
along can't you can't tell because we're in a podcast,
but actually don't have any hair anymore. But it grew
into an afro um. But that, strangely, that didn't upset
my family. I followed the grateful dead around for a
couple of months. That didn't upset my family. Then I

(15:08):
came up with a perfect way of upsetting my family,
which was to put on a student tie and become
a capitalist, and that really upset them very much. So
I became a capitalist. I went to Stanford Business School.
I graduated business school in nine which is the year
of the Berlin Wall came down. And as I was
trying to figure out what to do with my life,

(15:28):
I had this epiphany one day, which is that of
my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, and the
Berlin Wall has just come down. I'm gonna try to
become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that's what
I set out to do. And I originally moved to London,
and then I moved to Moscow and I set up
an investment fund called the Hermitans. A little bit slower.

(15:50):
You graduated from Stanford, Is this your first employment situation?
What are the companies you work for before you become
a dependent? So at first I went to the Boston
Consulting Group. I was the My first job was in
the East European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London,

(16:12):
and my very first assignment was to go out to Poland.
They sent me out to a bus company, a failing
bus company on the Polish Ukrainian border in a little
town called Sanak, And the only there was a very
low paying assignment. The World Bank was paying the fees
and they could only afford to send out a first

(16:33):
year associate like myself. So I go out to this
little town, um and this bus factory is just in
a horrific condition. The main problem was that the state company,
state bus company that buys the buses from the factory,
stopped their orders and they were responsible from their sales,

(16:54):
and so all of a sudden they were down. And
so it was kind of painful assignment because the main, uh,
the obvious thing to do. If you've lost your sales,
you've got to cut your costs, and that meant firing
a lot of people in a town, which was effectively
in one company town. So it was very depressing assignment.

(17:17):
But while I was walking around sort of making lists
of people that probably should be fired, I had this translator.
His name was Lesk, and I noticed, and he was
always following me around and translating wherever I need to be,
wherever I need a translation, And he had this newspaper
under his arm, and I noticed that all these financial

(17:38):
figures on his newspaper and I I asked him what
are those and he said, ah, these are the very
first privatizations. I thought that that kind of piqued my interest,
and I said, can you explain them to me? And
so we went into a conference room and he laid
out the paper on the table and I said, what's
this number and he said, that's the number of shares

(18:00):
outstanding of the company. And I said what's this number?
He said, that's the the share price that the government's
selling the shares. And I'm multiply the two numbers together
and it got got to eighty million dollars, which is
the value of the company. And then I said, what's
this number, the one right below that? Uh? And he

(18:20):
said this is the net income of the company, the earnings.
I said, no, no, no, that that that must not
be right. He said, I said, just read it, read
it word for word, and it's like net income of company.
And that number was a hundred and sixty million dollars.
So you don't have to be a Stanford NBA or
even a financial professional to understand that if you can

(18:43):
buy a company for eighty million dollars and it earned
a hundred and sixty million dollars in the previous year. Um.
Then basically all you have to do is hold the
shares for half a year and you've already got your
money back. And so and this was this was not
the bus company we're working at. It was another company.
And so I said, well, how do we buy shares

(19:04):
of it? And he said, oh, it's very easy. We
we we can go to the post office and and
fill out an application form. And I thought, God, this
is like crazy. I I mean, I was very young,
I didn't have much money, but I had I think
I had like two thousand dollars of savings total life savings.

(19:26):
And I converted my two thousand dollars of life savings
to Polish lotty. UM. I went down to the post
office with Leschek and I subscribed to the very first
privatizations and and over the next year I made ten
times my money. And there's this uh, weird chemical that

(19:49):
gets released in your stomach when you make ten times
your money on an investment. It's like crack cocaine. You
want to you want to have, you want to do
it again and again and again, And that was the
moment I just I didn't. I didn't. I didn't want
to be a consultant anymore. I wanted to be an
investor in all this stuff. So what was the next step?
Fast forward a little bit. UM. I ended up at
Solomon Brothers. Solomon Brothers um is used to be one

(20:13):
of the big investment banks made made famous by liars poker.
You have a Michael Lewis book exactly. So I joined
the East European investment banking team at Solomon Brothers. And
my very first assignment at Solomon Brothers was to advise
a fishing fleet called the Mermants Trawler Fleet located in

(20:36):
mermantsk which is a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.
I think it's the furthest north population center in the world.
So I go up to murmansk Um to advise this
management of this fishing fleet. And I get up there
and the head of the fishing fleet meets me at
the airport and he says, before we have our business meetings,

(20:58):
so I just want to take you on a little
tour so you can see what one of our trawlers
looks like. So we go down to the docks, and
in front of me is this enormous vessel. It's like
four or five feet long and on the and it's
on all multiple decks, and on the top deck there's
this uh nets to catch the fish, and then the

(21:20):
next level there's they separate the fish. Then the next
level they treat the fish, and all the way down
to the to the lowest level where they have these
canning machines which they put the fish into cans. And
so this wasn't just a fishing vessel. This was like
an ocean going factory, ocean going fish factory. And I

(21:41):
am I asked the guy, the management, the manager, the
CEO of this of this fleet. I said, how much
is one of these things cost? And he says twenty
million dollars new? And then I say, how many do
you have in your fleet? A hundred, So twenty million

(22:01):
dollars times a hundred, because he has two billion dollars.
And I said, what's the average age of your ships?
He is his seven years. Now. I don't know anything
about ships for fishing, but I figured that makes them
maybe half depreciate it. So billion dollars with the ships,
and the reason that this guy had hired me was
to um advise him, revise him and his management team

(22:26):
on whether to exercise their legitimate right under the privatization
program of Russia to buy of the shares of this company.
And so I asked him, at what price is the
government selling you? And he said two and a half
million dollars. So let me just repeat the math. So

(22:48):
there's a billion dollars with the ships, and you can
buy for two and a half million dollars. So I
got that feeling in my stomach, you know, the one
I had from the ten bagger in Poland. And I'm
thinking to myself, I don't want to be advising on
this stuff. I want I want to uh, I want
to own this stuff. And so instead of going back

(23:12):
to London, which was where I lived, I am flew
to Moscow and I got a I bought a very
thin English language yellow page directory that they sell at
the airport, and I went to my hotel room at
the Metropol Hotel and I started cold calling people in
the yellow pages to see whether someone could explain to

(23:32):
me how the Russian privatization program worked. And so I
started having these meetings and over the course of a week,
I had forty or so meetings, and from those four
or so meetings, I figured out that the Russian privatization
program was and always will be the single most compelling

(23:55):
investment opportunity that's ever existed in the history of financial markets.
And what I had learned was that the main way
in which the Russian government was privatizing everything was through
something called the mass privatization program, and the mass privatization
program they gave away a physical certificate, a voucher they

(24:17):
called them, to every person in the country. So they
spread these vouchers out for free to everybody in the country.
And these vouchers were tradeable, sellable, givable, takeable, whatever you
wanted to do with your voucher. You could do whatever
you want, there's no restriction. And as a result, a

(24:37):
secondary market emerged for these vouchers. And again, to do
a simple math, they traded for about twenty dollars each
dred and fifty million of them in circulation because that
was the population of Russia. So multiply twenty times a
d fifty million, that gets to three billion dollars worth
of vouchers that were in circulation. And those three billion

(25:01):
dollars with vouchers were exchangeable for the shares of every
single Russian company. So what that meant was that the
total value of the entire country of Russia was ten
billion dollars. Now that's for the whole country. This is

(25:24):
a country with thirty five of the world's natural gas,
ten percent of the world's oil, ten percent of the
world steel, ten percent of the world's aluminum. There's fertilizer companies,
car companies, and telephone companies, you name it, they had it.
I means it's a full economy all For ten billion dollars.

(25:45):
You couldn't buy it like one midsized Oklahoma oil company.
For ten billion dollars, you could buy the entire country
of Russia. And so I just got crazy with with excitement.
This was just the best thing I had ever seen.
I go back to Solomon Brothers and I try to
convince them that we should invest in Russia. And it

(26:09):
took a while before I was able to overcome all
the doubt, but I eventually got twenty five million dollars
put that money to work, and about six months after
I invested that million dollars, the Economist magazine wrote an
article called Sale of the century where they just went
through the same math that I've shared with you. And

(26:32):
on the back of that article, a whole bunch of people,
big investors, billionaires, hedge fund managers, etcetera, all wanted to
get in on the action. And it was a tiny, little,
thinly traded, a liquid stock market, and all of a sudden,
all these big eighteen pound guerrillas um start filtering in

(26:55):
in a tiny through a tiny little door, and over
a three week period, the stock market went up and
our million dollars turned into five million dollars, and all
of a sudden everyone wanted to know me. They started
taking me around to all the big investors on Wall Street,
and one of them, a man named Edmund saffra Uh,

(27:19):
said he would give me tillion dollars to start my
own fund. And so I moved to Moscow. And this
is no set up. A company called Hermitage Capital Management
started a fund called the Hermitage Fund with dollars from
saffra and it was just an incredible launch. Over the

(27:40):
next eighteen months we were up eight Okay, you were
an individual, and now after this Economist article, everybody is in.
Was everybody doing that well or was something you knew

(28:00):
that nobody else did. And what accounts for that huge increase. Well,
what happened was that all the other investors were sitting
in New York, in London and Geneva and other places,
and I was on the ground in Moscow. And there's
an expression in the Land of the Blind, the one
eyed man as king, and and so it's one of

(28:24):
these weird things where like you could get the most
unbelievable information just by showing up. So all the guys
in in New York, we're having to rely on other
people to tell them what was going on, And so
they would tell them about one oil company called Luke
Oil that's a famous Russian oil company. And they did
a lot of research on Luke Oil because there was

(28:45):
a lot of shares trading, and they get big commissions
the brokers. And I'm thinking, okay, yeah, that's interesting, But
what about this other oil company. It's almost as big
as Luke Oil, and it trades it about a discount
of Luke Oil because nobody has bothered to show up
and ask a few questions at the company, which I did.
So I'd buy shares of the of the one that

(29:07):
was much cheaper and and so I ended up doing
phenomenally well for a period of time. Did you speak
Russian not a word? Did you go into a brilitche
program or you just said I'm never gonna know it.
I tried to learn it, but the things we're moving
so fast in the business world that I just, you know,

(29:28):
I couldn't take two hours out of my day to
do it. I mean, I just I didn't even have
a minute to to rest or, to think or do anything.
I was It was like riding a dirt bike. You
just had to keep your hands on the handlebar the
whole time or else you get thrown off. So I
didn't speak Russian. I had some good Russians working for me.
I ended up marrying a Russian who spoke perfect English,

(29:48):
and so somehow I was able to manage without speaking
the language amazingly. Okay, how many Bill Browders were there
in that era? Just one Bill Browder? Me? Really, no
one else followed your half? Well, how do there were?
There are a few guys who are trying to but
nobody ever could pull it off. It was I mean, yeah,
I mean, there was like there was one, you know,

(30:09):
one couple of guys that were like, you know, sort
of nipping at my heels and stuff like that. But
but for the most part, I was like sort of
you know, there was it was an incredible, um you know,
incredible to be the sort of king of this little sandbox. Now.
Needlet's say you went to business school and you're sophisticated,
but everybody is. And if you take this twenty five

(30:29):
million dollars and you invested, it is not your money,
Mr Saffros, how much of that do you get? Well,
what happens is if it goes up, I got and
so um as things started going up, I started making
a lot of money. And did you keep that money?
In Russia? It's like, you know, when your company is

(30:51):
going up in silicon value, most people take some money
off the table just in case it crashes, or did
you keep all your money in the game. What what
happened was eventually started to piss off the Russian government
by complaining about corruption because all the companies. I discovered
that all the companies I was invested in were corrupt,

(31:13):
and and I would do these naming and shaming campaigns
where I had researched the corruption and then expose it,
which were very successful. These campaigns. But eventually they got
angry with me and they expelled me from the country.
And when they expelled me from the country, I sold everything.

(31:37):
And when I sold everything, I crystallized my profits. And
so there's an expression better lucky than smart um. But
they kicked me out like ten percent below the top
of the market, and I was able to crystallize the
profits from my clients and take my own money off
the table. And so it was an extraordinary um sort

(31:58):
of turn of events, which I don't think anyone intended
it to be the way it was, but worked out
financially very well for me. Now this late date, Hermitage
Capital still exists. What does it invest in? Hermage Capital
doesn't invest in anything. I gave up investing a long
time ago after Sergaymagnitsky was killed. I still have a

(32:19):
website and a business card and a and a company
formation that's called Hermitage Capital. But basically what I do
day in, day out now is is a fight for
justice for my murdered lawyer, s Gaymagnitsky. Okay, but you
do have employees, what are they doing? They're helping me
find out who's committed what crimes, where help me do

(32:41):
the research into the money laundering connected to the Magnitsky murder.
It's like a It's like a sort of h Batman
type of operation where we have ah an operation to
go after the bad guys. And who is managing your
money and how actively today? I've managed my money as
sort of an afterthought and not very actively at all. Okay,

(33:04):
let's go back, and as I say, Americans tend to
be unsophisticated, even about their own country. So tell us
what is happening in Russian history and Russian government concomitant
ly with your enterprise when you moved there, et cetera.
When I moved to Russia in it was total chaos.

(33:28):
It was Yelson was the president of Russia. Um he
had done a deal with the oligarchs where basically he
allowed them to steal forty pc of the country. There's
twenty two of these guys in exchange, they would use
all of their resources to support him and make sure
he stayed in power. As a results of this massive

(33:50):
theft and compromise that Yelson made, the life expectancy of
a male in Russia was like fifty seven years. Just
a terrible place to live. Everything didn't work. It was
just horrific and humiliating and horrible. And then at the
as Jelson was looking particularly frail and and like he

(34:14):
was going to die of a heart attack or some
other thing, he decided to put in his successor, and
his successor ultimately was Vladimir Putin. Let's stop there for
a second. Some people say that Yelsen was impressed with
how Putin got another criminal. I think it was a

(34:37):
mayor out of the country, and he put Putin in
with the understanding that he would make sure he wasn't prosecuted.
Is that true? To what degree is that known by
the public. Untrue, That's very true. It's the crux of
the whole situation. Well, let me back up. Yelson needed
to have somebody who would pardon him as the first

(34:57):
act of being the new president of Russia. Um, why
did Yelson need that? Because he had done so many
compromises and the illegal things that he was worried about
being indicted so and he was also knowing for sure
that he couldn't last being president that much longer. So

(35:18):
his goal was to find somebody who was strong enough
to be to become president, stay as president, not lose
it so that the pardon with stick, and he actually
went through three other candidates who became prime minister. They
had three different prime ministers who, for one reason or

(35:38):
another he chose badly didn't work out, and so he
would fire one and replace them with another. And so
Putin was actually Yelson's fourth choice, so and and and
it was almost like you know, when you're kind of
like running out of options, and and what everybody thought

(35:59):
Putin would be good for was that he was very
sober um, sort of kept his cards close to the chest,
but it seemed like a technocrat, and it was extremely loyal.
And you mentioned his story about how his boss who
was the mayor, he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.

(36:19):
Putin was and his boss kind named Subcheck was the
mayor and there was some corruption scandal and he got
Subcheck out of the country um and put him in
a like hospital in Paris or something like that where
they couldn't get get hold of him. And so that
was a good sign for Yelson. And so when he
finally picked his fourth choice Putin, he did so on

(36:43):
that basis and and uh, probably a few other criteria
as well. Now being in the country. Obviously it's corrupt.
Could you feel a difference with the transition of power? Now,
supposedly they jinned up a war crisis to help the transition,
But what was like for you and the people during
this transition? So the transition, well, it wasn't clear how

(37:06):
this transition was going to work because the big problem
with Putin so he seemed you know, not and not,
he wasn't drunk and all that kind of stuff. But
the problem, um is that nobody had ever heard of
this guy. He was a total enigma. And um that
Putin had to be elected president. So what happened was

(37:26):
they appointed him Prime Minister. Yelson resigns as president. Putin
becomes acting president, but he has to be in three
months time, there's gonna be an election and he has
to be elected president. And this was back in the
days when democracy still existed in Russia. So what did
Putin do? Putin, Um, he had this organization under him

(37:49):
called the FSB, which used to be called the KGB,
the secret police, and the secret police started planting apartment
bombs inside Moscow and then blowing up apartment buildings with
people inside of them. And I was there at the time,
and so one building would blow up, and and everybody

(38:11):
in the entire city of Moscow would be horrified. And
you see these pictures and the mangled bodies and the
destroyed buildings, And then the next couple of days, another
building would blow up, more mangled bodies, and and like,
there wasn't a single person in Moscow, including myself, that
could sleep peacefully through the night because you're all thinking.
Everyone thought they were going to be in an apartment

(38:33):
that blows up. And eventually um Putin and his guys
planted a bomb in in a in a provincial city
outside of Moscow. Uh, but the local police, who weren't
in on the scam, caught them in on the act,
and uh, and it became obvious that this was not uh,

(38:57):
so it was Putin doing the bombs. But Putin blamed
the whole thing on Chechens. Chechen. The Chechens are a
group of people that live in southern Russia. They look
darker than the average Russian and they were kind of
blamed for all Russia's problems, and so Putin blamed it
on the Chechens. And and everybody was so angry and

(39:21):
upset and insecure because of all this U all these
apartment bombs going off and thinking they'd be in them.
Everyone wanted revenge and blood and reaction and something somebody tough,
and so Putin then says, it's the Chechens who did this.
I'm gonna bomb them wherever they are, even in the
ship house. He said. That was a famous quote from Putin,

(39:41):
and all the Russians cheered. Putin started the war against
Czechnia and literally flattened Grozni, which is their capital, to
the ground. There wasn't like a building left standing, killing
tens of thousands of Chechens. And guess what his approval
ratings went through the roof. And so Putin learned at

(40:05):
that moment in time how valuable wars were in solidifying
his support. And that's not a lesson that was lost
on him, because he's fought a few more wars at
times when he was feeling insecure. Okay, you're using your
American values in Russia, you're fighting corruption. Do you ever
think I'm a fish out of water here? This is

(40:27):
gonna end, There's gonna be trouble or were you so
caught up in your capitalistic ways that you felt no, no,
this is numbers. This is gonna work. Well, it's a
bit of a lot of things. So in order to
go to Russia, a normal person wouldn't have gone to Russia.
A normal person would have said, this is crazy. They're
killing people in the streets, They're doing all sorts of stuff.

(40:49):
So in order to go to Russia, you kind of
have to have your risk sensors sanded down. In the
first place. You can't be thinking all these bad things
are gonna happen to you, because there's too many bad
things that you can think about that might happen to you.
And so let's say that my risk sensors were sanded down.
And then when I got there, I started small and

(41:13):
started making money for my clients. For myself, I started
making more money, and after a while I had a
big business there, and so I had a lot to
lose if I ever were to like leave. And then
the first rip offs started to happen. And the first
big rip off was was a guy named Vladimir Batannan.

(41:36):
He's a famous oligarch. Tried to steal my shares in
an oil company called Sedanco A little bit slower. What
year resist and how did he try to steal them?
So this was in nineteen I think I owned two
percent of Sedanko, and Sedanco was an oil company that
was um trading at a huge discount to the other

(41:59):
big oil companies, and I brought into it, and this guy,
Vladimer Britanon owned and I can't remember the exact numbers,
but but I am. I think I paid twelve million
dollars for my two percent, and about a year later,

(42:21):
Vladimir Britannon sold ten percent of his to British Petroleum
at a price that would have valued my hat like
a twenty million. So I had made like ten times
my money, and I was feeling just like the best

(42:41):
guy in the world. I mean that was I was.
I would think I was barely even thirty years old,
and I just made this enormous fortune for my clients.
Remember I got of that myself, and so I'm feeling
just the king of the world. And then Batanon comes along,
and this is a really interesting Russian phenomenon where he

(43:02):
wasn't celebrating the fact that he owned forty times more
shares of Sedanco and he was immensely rich based on
this BP transaction. Somehow it bothered him. It really bothered him.
That that I made money on this deal, Like, why
was I allowed to make the money? Somehow, he felt
like that was just wrong, and so he organized a

(43:26):
machination where he would sell himself in his cronies more
shares of the company at a huge discount to the
normal price and not allow me to invest, which meant
meant basically that they were going to steal. I think
they were gonna try to steal the equivalent of seventy

(43:46):
million dollars from me in terms of this machination. And
so at this point I had a lot to lose,
and so uh, I decided to fight him. And nobody
had ever fought an oligarch before in Russia. It's certainly
not some guy from the south side of Chicago. And

(44:07):
so I fight him. And the way that I fought
with him was first, first I went to him, it's
just asked him to stop it. Of course he laughed
at me. I didn't go to him personally. I went
to one of his representatives. Uh. Then I went to
all the other Western investors who had done business with
him and showed them what they did, what he had done.

(44:27):
Then I went to the newspapers and went public with
the whole thing. And then I eventually went to an
obscure government official was involved in securities regulation and immense
amazingly and this has rarely ever happened in Russia before
or after this regulator canceled this this financial uh uh

(44:53):
scam that he was organizing, and I was brought back
to normal. And and my success in this for crisis,
this first approach and first stealing thing, um gave me
such confidence that I decided to do it again. And

(45:13):
I did it at the national gas company gas BROM
and then I did it again at the National Savings
Bank Spare Bank, and and then at one of the
oil company is called Circo deft to Gas. And I
was just doing this over and over and over again
and and and the thing about it is sort of
it's all incremental. You start these fights and then you

(45:35):
do another one, and and so you ask like, why
was I doing it? Wasn't it was it wasn't crazy.
And I had just gotten such a sense of confidence
and somehow I could get away with it that I
just kept on doing it. And of course anyone who
google's my name will know that that didn't turn out
so well. So what was the triggered exile. Well, that's

(46:05):
a good question, one that there's no definitive answer. It
was either going after gas Prom, which is the largest
company in Russia, or going after this company called Sir
good neft to gas which is a very murky and
criminalized oil company. Either way. Um, In November of two
thousand five, as I was flying back to Russia from

(46:26):
a business trip abroad from London, I was stopped at
the border. I was arrested, I was put in the
airport detention center. I was kept there for fifteen hours,
and then I was deported back to London and declared
a threat to national security. Okay, if you read the
second book, especially Freezing Order, which is relatively new book

(46:49):
came out two months ago, the case is made that
Putin literally knows who you are, and it's after you
as an individual. You know that doesn't happen in America
to that degree. What's going on? Hey? Is that true?
Would be? What's the backstory? It's true? Um? And UM?
I can prove it by by showing you a clip
of the Putin Trump summit in Helsinki where you can

(47:13):
hear Putin uttering my name and asking Trump to hand
me over and in response, you can hear Trump saying,
I think that's a great idea. But the backstory to
that is that after I was expelled ah from Russia, UM,
my offices were rated and the police seized all of

(47:37):
my documents corporate documents for investment holding companies, and those
documents UM were then used to fraudulently reregister our investment
holding companies out of our name into the name of
a guy who had been convicted of manslaughter and let
out of jail. Early at this point I hired the

(48:01):
smartest lawyer I knew in Russia, a young man named
Sergey Magnitsky. I asked Sergey to investigate. Serge went and investigated,
and he came back and he said, the reason that
they stole your companies was to steal twoty million dollars
of taxes that you paid to the Russian government in

(48:23):
the previous year. They came up with a very complicated
machination to do that. And when we discovered this, Serge
was particularly shocked because he thought that Putin was a
nationalist and that he wouldn't have allowed nearly a quarter

(48:45):
of a billion dollars of government money to be stolen,
and he figured, if we just wrote complaints to the
highest level of the Russian government, then the good guys
will get the bad guys and that would be the
end of the story. And so Serge wrote criminal complaints
to every different branch of Russian law enforcement. I went

(49:07):
to the TV radio newspapers highlighted the story, and then
Surge gave swegn testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee,
which is their version of the FBI. And then we
sat back and we waited for the good guys to
get the bad guys. Well, it turns out, then Vladimir
Putin's Russia, there's no good guys about uh. Five weeks

(49:33):
after Surge testified, the same police officers he testified against
came to his home on November two eight and they
arrested him. They put him in pre trial detention and
then they tortured him to get him to withdraw his testimony.
They put him in cells with fourteen inmates and eight beds,

(49:56):
left lights on twenty four hours a day to impose
sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat
and no window panes. In December and Moscow, so he
newly froze to death. They put him in cells with
no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the
sewage would bubble up. They moved him from cell to
cell to cell in the middle of the night. And

(50:17):
the purpose of all this was to get him to
withdraw his testimony against the corrupt police officers and again
him to sign his false confession, to say that he's
told the two thirty million dollars. And he did so
on my instruction. And Sergey was a man of such
incredible integrity and principle that for him the idea of
perjuring himself and bearing false witness it was more awful

(50:41):
than the physical pain they were subjecting him to. And
he refused, and in retaliation they then up to the
torture and went after him even further. And after about
six months of this, his health started to digterior. He
got terrible pains in his stomach. He lost forty pounds,

(51:05):
and he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones and
needing an operation, which was scheduled for the first of
August two thousand nine. A week before the operation, they
came to him again again uh asked him again. He

(51:26):
refused to do the false confession, and in response, they
moved him to a maximum security prison called Boutyrka, which
is considered to be one of the most horrible prisons
in Russia, and most significantly for Sergey, there was no
medical facilities there. At Boucherka's health completely broke down. He

(51:48):
went into constant, agonizing, ear piercing pain. He and his
lawyers wrote twenty different desperate requests for medical attention to
every different branch of the criminal justice system, and every
one of those letters was either ignored or denied in writing,
and on the night of November six thousand nine, Sergey
Magnisky went into critical condition. On that night, the Butcherka

(52:12):
authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore. They
put him in an ambulance sent him to a different
prison across town that had a medical wing. When he
arrived there, instead of putting him in the emergency room,
they put him in an isolation cell. They changed him
to a bed, and eight riot guards with rubber baton's
beat him until he died. He was thirty seven years old.

(52:36):
He left a wife and two children. Since that moment,
I've been on a mission to go after the people
who killed him. To make sure they faced justice. And
for the last twelve years, that's what I've been doing.
And it's that mission of getting justice for Surgey, which
is what's caused Putin to get so mad at me. Okay,
let's stay with Putin, Let's pull the lens back. Is
Putent the strong man anomaly? Or is he a harben

(53:00):
jur for what's going to happen in the rest of
the world. I don't think anyone could be as horrible
as Vladimir Putin's. He sits in a class by himself
of depravity, of evil, of of he's really as he's
a psycho psycho killer. And you have a lot of

(53:20):
people that are authoritarians in different parts of the world,
a lot of people that ignore a rule of law,
but nobody is as sort of sadistic and unbelievably mass
murdering as Putin is right now. Um, And so I
would I would like to think that he's special and
that we don't have a lot of other Vladimir Putin's

(53:41):
percolating and and get gathering their strength to do what
he's doing. I think that he's he's unique. What do
you believe his motivation for the invasion of Ukraine was well.
A lot of learned political scientists and others have all
sorts of fancy h and analysis which which where they

(54:01):
suggest that he wants to recreate the Russian Empire or
the Soviet Union. UH. Some people say that Putin was
humiliated by the by the fact that we added other
countries to NATO. UM. There's some people that are saying
that he's mad because Ukraine want to join the European Union.

(54:24):
I actually don't believe any of those theories. I think
the main theory of why he's done what he's done
is that he's stolen a trillion dollars he and the
people around him in the last twenty two years. And
Russia's supposed to be a democracy, and at some point

(54:45):
people start getting angry that they have bad lives and
a few, very small number of people have really good lives,
and that's all taken from the from the other, from
the population, and so I believe that this is a
war of distraction. I think the war is purely to
be at war so he can get all the people
rebbed up into a flurry of of UH nationalism and

(55:10):
patriotic fervor, and by the way, you know, whatever disasters
are going on in Ukraine right now for the Russian military,
the one big success for Putin is that his approval
rating skyrocketed. To what degree do you believe those rating
skyrocketed because of a crackdown on contrary news. I think

(55:32):
that the crackdown on contrary news actually came after the skyrocketing,
not before. I think that Scott rocketed literally the day
he went in. And of course he's always delivering misinformation
and fake news and all this kind of stuff. But
but I believe that that this is kind of a
genuine feeling. Of course, you're right and your question that

(55:55):
you imply that if people knew the truth, they wouldn't
be so supportive, and I think that's true. But there's
something weird going on there where where people almost stopped
stop ignoring, start they start to ignore the facts, stop
paying attention to what's true, and they kind of just become, uh,

(56:16):
you know, sort of their guy is Putin and the
enemy is the other guy. It almost doesn't matter what
their guy did anymore. Okay, But on the other side,
you have Navalni, you have his YouTube videos. Is he
just appealing to a minority or a growing minority. Alexei
Navolney started out by appealing to just the young group

(56:38):
of YouTube users and instagrammers and and Twitter followers and
so on. But and he did so by by exposing
corruption of Putin and his cronies, which was very interesting
and very attractive. But it's it's one of these interesting
things that that Navalny has risen well beyond that. And

(57:00):
and the way he rose well beyond that was by
getting by by basically being victimized when Putin tried to
kill him with with Nova Chalk in Siberia. All of
a sudden, the whole world and all people in Russia
were paying attention and the fact that he survived, and

(57:20):
everyone loves an underdog, and so he survived the killing attempt.
He's an a coma for a month, he comes out
of a coma, he rehabilitates himself back to life, and
then he returns to Russia, even though they told him
he would be arrested if he returned to Russia, and
that elevated him to a presidential level. That the fact

(57:43):
that a guy would risk his life and his freedom
for his country put him on par with Putin. And
so there's a chance. I wouldn't put it too high
a chance, but there's a chance that if Putin missteps
badly enough and the whole thing goes up in flames
and everyone is looking for who should lead Russia next,

(58:04):
Alexie volney Is is the perfect person who has the profile,
who could do it. He's like the Russian version of
Nelson Mandela. Forget the war. If the war wasn't happening,
would Putin's government ultimately implode or would ultimately pass the
baton to someone else in the cleptocracy would continue? Well,
of course, the main objective of everybody who is part

(58:27):
of the cleptocracy the status quo, to keep it going.
And that's their game plan. If Putin were to die
of a stroke tonight, uh, they'd want to get the
head of the KGB or the head of the g
r U or some other sort of strong man to
step in and do the same thing. That's there perfect plan.

(58:51):
But the trouble with with a place like Russia, it's
a big country, there's a lot of people, a lot
of different things can happen. It's very difficult to control.
And that's one of the reasons that that Putin has
been so successful as he's figured out the levers of control.
When it is a successful I means successful and staying
in power, And so nobody really knows what's going to happen.

(59:15):
There's some chance that it could be a you know,
a widespread popular uprising and then navalny comes in. There's
some chance that it could be a palace coup um
and some new KGB guy comes in. Um. The most
likely thing I think is more of the same, as

(59:36):
that Vladimir Putin doesn't leave power and that he sticks
around for a very long time. Let's go back to
the war. How does the war end? If it ends, well,
there's three ways the work and end well, I mean,
I know there's two ways to work and end and
one much more probable outcome, so that they're either Ukraine

(59:58):
wins the war and that you know, if we had
talked about this eight weeks ago, nine weeks ago, um,
nobody everyone would have laughed at that idea. But I
think there's a not insignificant chance that Ukraine could win
this war. How do they win the war? Because they
have now very good equipment coming from the West, Stinger

(01:00:22):
Javelin missiles, they've got drones, Turkish drones. Um, they've got
surface to air missiles, they've got all sorts of interesting
stuff to help them win the war, and and they're
doing pretty well. They're killing a lot of Russian soldiers,
and they're driving Russia back from a lot of places
that Russia thought they had absolutely nailed down. If for

(01:00:46):
some reason, Ukraine succeeds and wins the war, that's the
one scenario where I think Putin wouldn't last. The Russians,
I don't think, have a great deal of sympathy for
human rights victims and in all the terrible things that
we respond to so so emotionally. But the Russians really

(01:01:09):
don't like a loser. They don't like a weak loser.
And if Putin were to lose this war, one that
he should absolutely should have won in his mind and
the mind of the Russian people, they would get rid
of him. The problem is that even though this this
scenario um as a chance, it's not a huge chance.

(01:01:30):
It's like the other way this war could end is
something really horrible and unthinkable, which is that Putin wins
in Ukraine and then he moves on to Moldova or
more likely Estonia, lat Via, Poland, and he goes to

(01:01:53):
these countries and he points his guns at the countries,
and he points a couple of nukes at Washington and
Lynn in London and he says, Okay, do you really
want to have a war with me? And and then
all of a sudden, the pundits on MSNBC and Fox

(01:02:15):
News are all saying, wait a second, why would we
risk losing twenty million people for the sake of a
country that most people can't locate on a map. And
and even worse, um uh, why why do we even
care about this whole NATO thing? And if Putin were

(01:02:35):
to achieve that feeling, then he ends up getting some
huge peace treaty with a whole bunch of countries that
never were part of the you know that that have
been free for the last thirty years, and all of
a sudden they come under Russia's orbit. That's the that's
his sort of good case scenario. I put a fift

(01:02:56):
chance on that one. So that's that's rough to so far,
the most likely thing. The scenario. It's just more of
the same. You know, the Russians don't back down, and
the Ukrainians don't back down, and they just keep at it.
But theoretically, could Putin say oh I took part of
Ukraine and declare victory and in the war. Theoretically yes,

(01:03:19):
but probably no, because the remember Putin is at war
because he wants his approval ratings to be high. If
he does peace, his approval ratings go back down. I
think that the whole purpose of this war is for
him to stay in power. So in terms of the
death rate the economic cost, you believe that the public

(01:03:41):
is so behind Putin that those are ultimately irrelevant. I
think I think that's that's the case. What do Tucker
Carlson and the other people on the right not understand
that they're either supportive of Putin or they say it's
not our battle to fight. Well, I have no idea
what's in the head of Tucker Carlson. Um. I think

(01:04:03):
that sometimes people say stuff, outrageous stuff, just so they
get noticed. And I have no idea why Tucker Carlson
would say these things. And um uh, you know, it's
it's very offensive to hear him saying it. But but
there's absolutely no basis for any anybody in America who

(01:04:25):
knows the facts to support Vladimir Putin. So needless to say, misinformation, disinformation.
It's hard to get the truth and people facts are fungible.
Could this happen in America? Could we have a strong
man in America? How closer far we away from this?
We had a strong man from two thousands sixteen to
two thousand twenty in the form of Donald Trump, and

(01:04:47):
he tried to do a whole bunch of stuff. But
in America, the institutions held. And that's the difference between
American and Russia's. We have institutions, we have courts that
still function, we have a free press, we have a
democratic process. And when when that stuff was challenged, it
didn't it didn't break. However, in the ensuing four years

(01:05:08):
and the loss of Donald Trump at the Supreme court level,
the judge level, the right side agitation, it's unclear whether
those institutions would hold in the future. That's true. But
at the same time, there wasn't a single journalist arrested
for challenging Trump. Nobody, no political opponents were killed, Um,

(01:05:29):
nobody was poisoned. Uh. You know, and you know, there's
a long way to go before we have a world
like the one that I know in Russia. Is there
a tipping point? Where are people boiled in hot water
like a lobster or frog? I don't know the answer
to that question. I don't think anyone knows the answer
to that question. UM. I think that it's uh. We've

(01:05:52):
seen the frog scenario play. It's out out in Russia.
I mean it didn't start this way. It got worse
and worse and worse. The same thing in Hong Kong.
You know, the Chinese slowly turned up the temperature. And
so hard to say what's going to happen in America?
Now you live in London, which was certainly the European
financial at center, and Brexit happened. Many people believe online misinformation,

(01:06:19):
disinformation from Russia swung that election. Do you believe that
hogwash too or possible? Well? So what I what I
know for a fact is that Vladimir Putin, UM, he
didn't want this. Um. He doesn't like the European Union.
He doesn't like the European Union because he likes to
pick off one country versus another. And so when he

(01:06:42):
saw the British arguing UH to get rid of the
European to get out of the European Union, he loved
that and he loved that, and surely he participated using
trolls and bots and all that kind of stuff to
make this thing happened. Did was that enough to tip

(01:07:03):
the balance or was it just on the margin. I
don't know the answer. A number of people have called
for a Mueller type of investigation here, not that Mueller
actually succeeded in doing anything in America. Um, but that
never happened. And so to this day we have no
no definitive facts about whether, ah, whether it was the

(01:07:28):
Russians maturely affected the outcome of this, of this referendum.
And what I can say, and I know this very
clearly living here, is that there are some people that
are very passionate about wanting to leave that had nothing
to do with Russia. They just didn't like the European Union. Okay,
this is you know, there are all sorts of issue
just today with Northern Ireland and visas also related to

(01:07:53):
the Ukraine crisis. Does the UK ultimately find its feet
and clear sailing or is this the beginning of the
large decline? Well, I'm I don't write off any of
our great democracies. Um. I mean, there's all sorts of
problems in in the UK, there's problems in the United States,
problems in France, problems in all sorts of places. But um,

(01:08:16):
I'm so far away from writing off the idea that
we have. Um, you know that that are that are
systems are all gonna break down and implode. I think
that there's there's ugliness, but at the same time, UM,
a lot of stuff that still works pretty well. Now,
there are many commentators say that economically, despite the posing

(01:08:37):
of Putin, it is a very small country that ultimately
has problems paying bills. Now we have the sanctions. Will
these economic pressures affect Russia and possibly lead to the
downfall of Putin? Or is the fact that he has
such a grip on the government it could never happen. Well,

(01:08:58):
it becomes a much more brittle situation. And the way
he's managed in so I believe that that you know,
he's a specialist in avoiding coups, he's a specialist in
in repressing his society and more likely than not his
skills that staying in power will succeed. Having said that,

(01:09:21):
the situation that he's created with this invasion, with the sanctions,
with the economic collapse, it's like being in a in
a forest after a really hot summer, and there's all
sorts of dry leaves on the ground, and at any point,
you know, if if a match hits the right place,
the whole forest could go up in flames. And I

(01:09:43):
think that that's the situation he's facing right now, and
he's hoping that doesn't happen and taking all sorts of
precautions trying to prevent it from happening. But at the
end of the day, it's hard to predict. And he's created,
you know, a lot of a lot of fuel to
burn um with all this unhappiness and hardship that he's

(01:10:04):
that's coming from all that his his terrible behavior. They
just mentioned the economy and the rest of the world.
We think we know what's going on. The Thirteen Times
owns that this and that. What does the rest of
the world not understand about Russia and putin Well, the
main thing that people don't understand is that he is
a criminal. This is not the actions of a of

(01:10:26):
a leader of a sovereign state. Too many people treat
him like he's got some kind of national interests, that
he's he that he somehow is doing this for some
pride or legacy. He has no interest in pride or legacy.
All he is trying to do is keep his money,

(01:10:46):
stay out of jail, and stay alive. And the best
way to do that is by distracting people. And the
best way of distracting people is by being in war.
Not just starting a war, but being in a war.
You've listening to Bill Browder, author of Red Notice and
Freezing Order. I highly recommend those books. They're riveting in

(01:11:07):
their own right, never mind being so timely in light
of what's going on in Russia and Ukraine. Girl, I
want to thank you for taking the time speak to
my audience today. Thank you until next time. This is
Bob Leftstads