The Current - As Trump turns to Russia, how should other countries support Ukraine?

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged $5 billion in aid for Ukraine, funded by Russian assets seized by Canada. Long-time Kremlin critic Bill Browder discusses what this promise means for Ukraine���s future — and what he makes of U.S. President Donald Trump seeming to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Have you ever been curious about your favorite artists? Like how they really are? What inspires them? My name is Tom Power. I host the podcast Cue with Tom Power. I'm pretty lucky because I get to chat with actors, musicians, writers, artists of all kinds. Now, some of these folks are legends like Dolly Parton and Denzel Washington, but some

are more emerging like Lioness Core, a rapper from Mississauga who told me about rapping about being bullied for having acne when she was a kid. Anyway, you can find new episodes of Q with Tom Power every day, weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current, wherever you're getting this podcast.

Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you, if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using. There is a lot of news that's out there these days. We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some of that news too. So if you already follow the program, thank you.

And if you have done that, maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well. The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information that's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that. Appreciate it and on to today's show. We are one of the first countries to bring in specific legislation that allows us not just to ground this plane but to actually seize it. That's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking about a plane belonging

to a sanctioned Russian airline. The government seized the plane and its cargo back in 2022. And now three years later, that plane is still parked at Toronto's Pearson Airport. You can see it from the highway as you enter the airport. It is a very large aircraft, but that plane is just a small part

of the billions of dollars in Russian assets that have been seized and frozen by Ukraine's allies since the war in Ukraine began. What happens to these assets and how to use them has been up for debate, but what to do with the profits they've generated seems more clear. Yesterday, while at a peace and security summit in Kyiv, Trudeau reiterated a pledge to send five billion dollars to Ukraine using the revenue from these assets. Bill Browder is the head of the global Magnitsky justice campaign. He's a long time advocate against Russian human

rights abuses and a thorn in the side of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Bill Browder, good morning. Good morning. This $5 billion in aid to Ukraine, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau announced yesterday is part of a larger $68 billion aid package coming from G7 countries.

Can you explain as you understand it where exactly this money is coming from? Well, so what happened was about a week after the war started, all the allies got together and froze about $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves. This is Russian government money that was held offshore. So that money is frozen. And as the war dragged on and as more and more damage destruction

was reaped upon Ukraine, the conversation started to gravitate towards how about using some of that money to pay back the Ukrainians for the damage. And a lot of people resisted for different reasons, but in the end, a compromise was come to where the Western allies wouldn't confiscate that frozen money, but they could take the interest on that money and give it to the Ukrainians. Now, in my opinion, the war has gone on for so long and Russia's done so much damage and there's such a crisis now that we should be not just talking about the interest on that money, but we should be talking about the total amount of that money

because Ukraine needs it in order to live to fight another day. So you think those assets themselves, like the plane that's sitting in Toronto, those assets should be liquidated? Well, I don't know about the plane in Toronto because that may be belonging to a private company, but what I think is that the Russian government's assets should be taken and given to Ukraine and used for the funding of Ukraine's defense so that if the United States cuts off Ukraine, which looks almost certain based on recent statements from President Trump, that Ukraine is still able

to carry on in their defense. And there is a political dimension to this in part because, and you've hinted at this, there are some people in Canada, also in the United States, also in Europe, who are beginning to feel frustrated with their governments putting billions of dollars toward this war, which continues to grind on. So what has stopped those governments at this point from confiscating those frozen Russian

funds saying, you know what, we aren't going to use our tax base to help fund this resistance. We will use to your point, the profits or the assets to give to Ukraine. Exactly right. Why should the Canadian taxpayers pay when Putin can can pay which is this is his money? And so why hasn't that happened yet? Well, the problem is that there's so many different people involved in this conversation It's not just canada who has frozen money. It's you know, 27 members of the european union. It's the united states It's australia. It's japan seven members of the European Union, it's the United States, it's Australia, it's Japan. And to get everybody together to make a unified decision has been very, very difficult. Having

said that, I think the world has changed 180 degrees in the last two weeks. And by having the United States not only sort of withdrawing from the process in this strange America first thing, they've actually switched sides. America has effectively come back on the side of Putin. And so I think that what happens going forward is going to be completely, the amount of money available to Ukraine has basically been cut in half by the US doing that. And it means that there's even that much more financial pressure on the remaining countries, all the remaining countries to support Ukraine. And therefore, even if we are dipping into our own pockets, you know, to give money to Ukraine,

with the withdrawal of United States, we need to get more money to Ukraine to just keep them even. And where's that money gonna come from? Do we wanna increase our tax rates? The answer is no. And so the easy answer is, and the right political answer is,

let's just take Putin's money. Is that the right legal answer? I mean, are there legal ramifications and perhaps a precedent that's set for other nations? Well, of course there's legal ramifications, but there's also legal ramifications for invading a sovereign country, your neighbor, Ukraine, and destroying it. And Russia owes a lot of money to Ukraine, and at the same time we have a lot of Russia's

money. And so we need to thread that needle. There's plenty of best lawyers in the world who have advised all the governments on a way to do it legally, and that's what needs to be done now. The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, was at the White House yesterday talking about this with US President Donald Trump. Have a listen to this. We have 230 billion frozen assets in Europe.

If at the end of the day in the negotiation we will have with Russia, they're ready to give it to us, super. It will be loaned at the end of the day and Russia will have paid for that. Based on what President Macron is saying, it seems that that money is going to remain frozen. Is there the possibility of negotiations where Russia would give up those assets, do you think? No, under no circumstances

will Russia give up those assets. The only way that we're gonna get them for Ukraine is by confiscating them. So this idea that there has been floated that maybe the assets could be used to help rebuild parts of Ukraine, but it's the parts of Ukraine that Russia has captured, you think that's a non-starter? Well, I mean, the point is, we're not going to be, you know, if Ukraine is the victim

of a war and Russia takes over that country, why should we be rewarding Russia for taking over that country? We should be doing everything we can to give the Ukrainians enough money so that they can prevent their country from being taken over by Russia. Let me ask you about what's going on more broadly and what's happened in the last couple of weeks. Yesterday at the UN General Assembly, the United States voted against a resolution specifically condemning Russia's aggression toward Ukraine.

And this comes, as you know, after Donald Trump called Vladimir Zelensky a dictator, accused Ukraine of starting the war. What does that tell you about what is to come when we're speaking about peace talks? Nothing good. It's clear, Trump has stated his opinion. My original fear was that America would just withdraw into isolationism, they would stop

supporting Ukraine and we'd have to find the money elsewhere. But this is far worse than that, my original fear, because not only is the United States withdrawing from supporting Ukraine, the United States is throwing their lot in with Vladimir Putin, which is unimaginable, something that I could have never in my worst nightmares thought to be possible. But that seems to be the policy of the United States right now. And what does that mean for Ukraine?

It means that we have a whole new world order where it used to be Russia was aligning with North Korea, Iran and China, now Russia is aligning with those countries and the United States. And I mean, it has all sorts of implications for everything, including Canada. Yesterday, Putin suggested to Trump that he could provide a whole bunch of aluminum to the United States as part of some business deal in this whole negotiation. This is at the same time when Trump wants to impose 25 percent tariffs on

Canadian aluminum. And so what's going to happen? You know, possibly, and who knows? I mean, this is all hypothetical, but could be that the United States replaces Russian aluminum, Canadian aluminum with Russian aluminum. I mean, all this stuff, I mean, it's impossible to even draw out all the implications of this switch in position, but there's going to be many and there are many negative ones for a lot of people around the world. Why is the US doing this, do you think? Why is Trump doing this?

God only knows. And I wouldn't say the US is doing this. I mean, every person I know in the US is on the side of Ukraine. The United States led by its administration, not just the president, but also comments made by the defense secretary and others. What do you think is going on here? Well, what I think is going on here is that you have, the American people don't like Putin.

The US Congress doesn't like Putin, but this small group of people who happen to be running the country like Putin. And I would actually even argue that those people don't particularly like Putin. Trump does. I mean, I know Marco Rubio. He's the Secretary of State. He used to be a senator. He was a senator who helped support the Magnitsky Act and many other anti-Putin things. He must, I mean, I can't imagine the cognitive dissonance that he's experiencing in his job

and how difficult it is for him to sleep at night. But Donald Trump, for whatever reason, and it's impossible for me to even know what reason he's doing this, has decided that he wants to rewrite history and completely ignore all norms and go with the bad guy. And unfortunately, nobody can stop him. As the president of the United States,

he can determine U.S. foreign policy without any interference from anybody, and that's what he's doing. Where does, just finally, where does this leave Ukraine? One of the things that you have said is that if the U.S. pulls its military support for Ukraine and that there are territorial gains made by Russia, that you said that there could be a refugee problem

like we have never seen before. What does this mean for Ukraine, for Ukrainians? Well, if Trump is successful, and actually, if they say Trump slash Putin are successful in forcing a surrender on Ukraine, which is sort of seems to be the direction it's going We hope we know what happens in occupied territory in Ukraine because we've seen it remember all those terrible images from Buccia and earpin where for a brief period of time Russia occupied those towns and

The women were gang raped the men were tortured tied up and killed and the children were kidnapped in any Ukrainian who's fortunate enough not to be in the occupied territories is not it's not gonna want to stick around to see how life Develops with Vladimir Putin in charge. They're gonna leave and where are they gonna leave to they're gonna leave to Europe and If you know people are complaining about Migrants and all these countries and everyone's upset about that Well,'re going to have a lot more coming from Ukraine if this thing falls apart. And I think they do understand that. And there's a lot of people,

a lot of European leaders right now, scrambling to try to adjust to the new world order. Bill, it's good to speak with you as always. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bill Browder is the head of the global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, a longtime advocate against human rights abuses in Russia.