The Paikin Podcast - Bill Browder: Is Russia Losing the Ukraine War?

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

“I’ve fought Putin for 17 years.” Bill Browder, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice campaign, joins Steve to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine, how Russia is now incurring eight men killed or seriously wounded for every one lost by Ukraine, whether Russia is losing the war, Putin’s recent statement that he wants to negotiate, and why Browder thinks Putin would rather watch Russia burn than admit he can’t win the war. They also discuss how Putin may become a “drowning man,” how he could react if cornered, how Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries are shifting support for the war in Russia, whether Trump’s new world order is a win for Putin and Russia, European security, the Global Magnitsky Act, and Russia’s recent sanctions on Browder’s teenage son. Articles mentioned in the podcast: Foreign Policy: As the Tide Turns Against Putin, Beware the Drowning Man by Peter Frankopan Foreign Affairs: The Next Russia Threat by Micheal Kofman Support us: patreon.com/thepaikinpodcast Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastSPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OhwznCIUEA11lZGcNIM4h?si=b5d73bc7c3a041b7X: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social Email us at: [e-mail] 

According to Russian military bloggers, the average life expectancy of a new Russian recruit, from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone, lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks. Once sent onto the battlefield, Russian soldiers survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes. By some accounts, Russia is now incurring eight men killed or seriously wounded for every one lost by Ukraine. According to a British intelligence agency, Russian war deaths have likely reached almost half a million, and various Western sources put total Russian casualties that's killed and wounded at significantly more than a million.

Is Russia, population 140 million, actually losing the war to Ukraine, population 40 million? That's coming up next on the Paken podcast. I am very happy to welcome to the Paken podcast in London, UK, Bill Browder, he is the CEO of Hermitage Capital, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, and the author of two great books that I interviewed him about on the old show I used to host the agenda on TVO.

They're called Red Notice and Freezing Order. I would recommend both of them to you. And Bill Browder, it's great to see you again. How are we doing today? I'm doing very well, particularly well, since we're watching Ukraine, scoring all these points on the battlefield, which I think is kind of unexplicated.

Well, let me follow up on that. We gave some stats off the top about how badly this war is going for Russia at the moment. How would you characterize the state of the war today? Well, I think that to put it in really simple terms, if you remember that shocking meeting at the Oval Office where Donald Trump shouted at Vladimir Zelensky and said, you don't have any cards. Well, I think that Ukraine right now has got a full house. And they're doing a really solid job of beating the Russians in a lot of very important areas, both on the battlefield and in terms of Russia's economy. And I think that that is changing the whole direction of this war. Tell me more about that. Where is Russia losing? Where is Ukraine winning this war? Well, first and foremost, as Putin announced at the very beginning,

he wanted to take over Ukraine. He is now sending in, and you quoted a figure of half a million deaths. I've heard numbers higher than that. I think there's one estimate that says one to, I should say, one and a half million dead and wounded Russian soldiers. So there's been enormous casualties that the Ukrainians have inflicted on Russian troops. And these casualties don't come with any territorial gains. Russia is basically in a static position, which is really a tremendous accomplishment. How has Ukraine done that? Ukraine has done that by mastering the art of drone warfare. They've created what they call a drone kill zone on the front line, which means that any Russian soldier who tries to cross the front line basically dies. And the kill zone is very interesting because

it doesn't require one drone per operator. You can have one operator and many, many dozens of drones that are all seeking out bodies of warm bodies of Russian soldiers to kill. And so the Russians are not making any progress on the front line. And so historically, what the Russians had done was they had started to, in addition to not making any progress, they would start bombing Ukrainians in big cities, bombing civilians. And that was really painful to watch because the Ukrainians were just getting bombed and they were doing their best to try to shoot down the bombs that were coming in, shoot down the drones that were coming in, but it was still causing lots of civilian casualties. Now, that hasn't disappeared, but what has appeared is that the Ukrainians,

who had for the longest time kind of held their positions, but not done in. anything back to the Russians, have started sending their own drones and their own missiles into Russia. And they're not trying to kill civilians, but they're trying to disable the Russian economic war machine. And what that means is that these drones are blowing up oil refineries, they're blowing up oil export terminals, they're blowing up ammunition depots, they're blowing up trucks that are transporting fuel to the front line. And in doing so, they're causing. economic damage that it was unimaginable six months or a year ago. And so now we have what I would call an equality of arms situation where, yes, the Ukrainians are getting hit hard from a civilian

casualty standpoint, but the Russians were getting hit hard, very hard from an economic capacity standpoint. And I believe that this potentially could lead to, I wouldn't say peace, but I think it could lead to a subtle unspoken agreement that the Russians stop bombing Ukrainian cities in return for the Ukrainians to stop bombing Russian oil refineries. Well, in fact, Putin said over the weekend, this past weekend, we are ready to continue negotiations. What do you read into that? I don't read anything to do that. Putin is not going to – Putin – I know Putin. I know him very well.

I've been in a man-to-man fight with him over 17 years. he doesn't negotiate. Any discussion of negotiations is purely tactical. It's anything that he agrees to can't be relied on. And Putin knows better than anybody that if he negotiate something, if he says, we've made an agreement with Ukraine, that he will be perceived in Russia as being weak. If he's perceived as being weak, then he potentially will be overthrown. And if he's overthrown, then he understands that the best case is jail, the worst case is death. And so he's not going to negotiate. I don't believe that for a minute.

But I do believe that he may be put in a position where he really can't afford to lose any more oil refineries. And so there may be some unspoken treaty, no hands shaken, no contracts signed in which they subtly decide not to bomb each other at a distance. and the war then contracts to just the front line. Well, let me ask a follow up about that, because I think there was a time many months ago when essentially the American administration told Zelensky

no more lobbing bombs into Moscow. You can defend yourselves, but you can't take the attack to Moscow. That pretty clearly appears not to be the case anymore. Did something happen there that suddenly Zelensky has the green light to take the war to Russia more? Well, the main thing that happened there was that the Americans stopped a long time ago supplying Ukraine with weapons and stopped supplying Ukraine with any financial aid. And so the Americans don't really are, they're not in position to tell Ukrainians what to do. Why should the Ukrainians be bombarded by Russian bombs without fighting back for the Americans when the Americans aren't giving them anything? I mean, interestingly and ironically, when when Biden was, was, was, providing weapons, he was telling the Ukrainians don't hit any targets inside of Russia. And because those weapons were so valuable to the Ukrainians, Ukrainians abided by what President Biden was

saying. Trump comes in with all of his MAGA stuff and says the Ukrainians are just stealing from us and taking our money and he stopped supplying the Ukrainians with any money or any weapons. And so he lost both the financial leverage and any moral authority to tell the Ukrainians what to do. and they're taking care of themselves now. I want to read you a quote. This is from Peter Franco Pan, who is a professor of global history at Oxford, and he writes this in Foreign Policy Magazine.

As things get worse for Russia on the battlefield, in the economy, and for Putin personally, there is the risk that the flailing Russian leader will succumb to what he calls drowning man's syndrome when a swimmer in difficulty pushes others under the water in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. Do you see that happening? Well, so the one thing I can absolutely be sure of is that when Putin finds himself losing a battle, the only thing he knows how to do is escalate. And so what does escalation mean in this war on Ukraine? Escalation means, at least in the short term, more missiles directed at civilian targets in Ukraine. And escalation means, in my mind, some type of mass mobilization of Russian soldiers. So they're going to be in my, in my mind, some type of mass mobilization of Russian soldiers.

can replace all the ones who have been killed. And so I think you can pretty much count on, first of all, no negotiation. Second, you can count on many more soldiers being drafted and sent to be meat on the front line and being killed. And then, of course, some people are worried about some type of nuclear attack. And I would argue that that is not going to happen. I can't say with certainty that's not going to happen. But the reason I don't believe that a nuclear attack is not going to happen is that a nuclear attack doesn't actually solve any military objectives. So if Putin were to say, drop a nuclear bomb on a major Ukrainian city, which leads to massive loss of life, it doesn't end the war. Ukraine is a very, very large country. The military is very dispersed. All these drone operators and

generals and sergeants and majors are all spread out well. all over the place, they're going to carry on fighting the war. And so what does Russia accomplish? They haven't won the war with a military attack. However, all the countries that were on their side, the Chinese, the Indians, the global South, I think would probably abandon Putin at that point. I think NATO would probably get involved in some way. And Putin would probably find himself losing the war in the end if he were to do a nuclear attack. And I think he understands that. And so I don't believe that that's where this thing is going. But I do believe with all certainty that Putin will escalate.

But escalation may not accomplish anything more than it's already accomplished. He's already escalated on many occasions, and it doesn't achieve anything for him. Well, how would you gauge the support among the average Russian for this war right now? Well, it's very interesting. Russian people are quite narrow in their... thinking. And it's a comment on generations of people who have been destroyed by a terrible government. The average Russian understands that if they behave in any kind of idealistic way, they end up going to jail, they end up losing their job, they might even get killed by the

government. And so most Russians have been very blinkered. They only look at, you know, how is my life? And when Putin first started this war, the average Russian didn't feel like this was affecting their lives. Those who were going to die in the war were going for money. They were basically poor people from the far reaches of Russia going for money. And the average Russian could go about in Moscow, go to the nightclubs, go to restaurants, have good lives. And they didn't care. They really didn't care. And they certainly didn't care about the deaths and destruction of Ukraine or even of their own fellow citizens. However, the recent attacks on Moscow and on St. Petersburg, and the oil industry has made it so every Russian

knows about this. So flights are being canceled on a daily basis out of the main airports in Moscow and St. Petersburg as drone swarms come from Ukraine. Drivers can no longer get gasoline. Russia is one of the major oil and gas producers of the world, and they have gasoline shortages because of these attacks on the oil refineries. You have these. You have these, absolutely devastating images coming out of like smoke billowing into the air in major cities where people can't ignore it. And so you now have a situation where these people with these blinkers on who said, well, I don't care as long as it doesn't affect me, all of a sudden it affects them very profoundly. And they are getting angry. And they're getting upset. And now,

will this lead to a coup d'etat? I doubt it. I think Putin is really good at avoiding coup d'etat. he's very good at running a totalitarian state. He's really good at having secret policemen root out disloyalty. But people are definitely a lot angrier and a lot more affected than they were before. Well, let me follow up on that because, well, I'm not sure you're old enough to remember, but I'm old enough to remember back in the 1960s when an American president was hounded from office because of an unpopular war that had millions of people protesting on the streets and they just didn't want to, they didn't want to sanction it anymore. And Lyndon Johnson was hounded from office. Do you think it's possible that that could happen in Russia?

Well, I think anything is possible, but I don't think it's probable. So Putin, so Lyndon Johnson was operating in a democratic system with the freedom of the press, with the democracy, with freedom of speech. Russia and Putin is it's about totalitarian dictatorship where you can't say anything, you can't do anything, you can't write about anything, you can't criticize without getting into deep trouble. And so as long as the system of repression works in Russia, then Putin has got nothing to worry about. And there's no elections that he's got to be running for re-election and so on. Having said that, it is possible that something breaks in his... stranglehold on the country. That's the hope that we should all have is that he does something which just upsets people to such an extent that their fear of being repressed is overwhelmed by

their anger and they all storm the Kremlin or something to that effect. That's possible. But again, not probable. I have heard, though, from many experts many times over the years that we cannot underestimate the amount of suffering the Russian people are prepared to take when one of their czars decides to do something crazy, as is the case here. So he does have that going for him, doesn't he? He absolutely does. And the Russian people can tolerate a lot of pain, not because they enjoy pain any more than anybody else, but it's a much harder place to express yourself in. It's not as much harder place to change anything in. And so they just are, you know, looking at their own realities and saying, well, there's not much I can do about this, so I might as well

just, you know, suffer through it, which has happened through many, many decades and centuries in Russia long before this kleptocratic dictatorship, long before the communist dictatorship, and even during the Tsars dictatorship. And we'll be back right after this. Let me get, get you to sort of weigh in in a more geopolitical way here. And by that, I mean, you know, Putin has always seen Russia as a great power that should have its own sphere of influence. And coincidentally enough, President Trump pretty much also believes in that as well. He has planted his flag pretty strongly for the return to great power rivalries and spheres of influence and that kind of thing.

So in some respects, is the new world order that is emerging a win for Vladimir Putin? Well, there's one huge assumption in that question, which is, that great powers are still great powers. And one of the things which I've seen very recently is that the things that define great powers no longer work. So Russia was supposedly a great power and what defined them as a great power was a great military. It certainly wasn't a great economy because their economy is the size of Italy. But what we've seen now is that they're not a great power because their great military is ineffective, ineffective. Why is it ineffective? Because all the tools of a great military, of a great power, no longer work in the same way.

You know, tanks, you know, which cost $5 million each, are a liability. You can send in a $20,000 missile into a $5 million tank and destroy it. Same thing with, you know, $500 or $5,000 drones. And it's not just Russia. We saw the United States with the most powerful military in the world get humiliated by Iran, which is one of the poorest countries, poorest dictatorships in the world because Iran had drones and they could close the Strait of Hormuz. And no matter how many bombs were dropped on Iran and how many ships were sunk into the Persian Gulf, the Iranians had enough drones. flying out of strange locations to blow up a ship or two and close down the economic artery of the world. And so I think that we're in a different world than we've ever been in before. And I think that it will redefine what power is and how different countries can express that power and how people work together and how people conflict with each other.

I want to send another quote from this summer's edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine to you and get you to react to this. Here's the quote, even if Ukraine with Western help decisively defeats Russia, Washington and its NATO allies should not dismiss the future Russian military threat or eschew necessary investments in rearmament. They need to start now to make forward-looking preparations for the challenge that a reconstituted Russian force will pose. You agree with that? I completely agree with that. I think that we're in a world now where if you have a dictator who wants to stay in power and that dictator is having an economic problem at home, what do they do? They start a war to distract people from that problem. This is straight out

of Machiavelli 101, create a foreign enemy, start a war. This is why Russia went into Ukraine because Putin didn't want people to be mad at him at home, and so he created a foreign enemy. In fact, the Ukrainians and the Russians, I would say, fundamentally, fundamentally didn't really have a beef with each other before. It was completely manufactured. The Russians created this whole narrative that Ukrainians were Nazis and fascists and needed to be defeated. And so the Ukrainian war was a war for Putin to stay in power. No matter what happens in Ukraine, Putin still needs an enemy. And if it's not Ukraine, then it'll be the Baltics, who happened to be members of NATO or Poland. That's also a NATO member. And so as long as Putin is suffering from a bad

economy, and of course it gets worse, the more he engages in this war, the more he has an incentive to be at war with somebody, and therefore we're all at risk, and we'll continue to be at risk. And Putin doesn't just fight wars out in the open on the battlefield. He fights wars with assassinations, with sabotage, with all sorts of other things. And so, unfortunately, we're now in a situation, whether we like it or not, where we're going to be in conflict with Vladimir Putin and Russia. And probably, if not just Vladimir Putin, if he were to lose his place for whatever reason, then perhaps the next guy coming in would do the same thing. And the peace dividend, which we all enjoyed for most of our lives, is no longer there. We're going to have to take money from other productive activities

and allocated towards defending ourselves. And unfortunately, we were living in a blip for a very long time where we could live thinking that there were not going to be any more wars and that everything was going to be fine when it's not the case anymore. I'm not going to be the first person to observe this, but you could make a very strong argument that Volodymyr Zelensky is really the number one democratic leader in the world today. He has demonstrated abilities and just,

remarkable resilience in the face of incredible odds. And yet he did something this past week that received a lot of attention and not necessarily for good reason. And I'd like you to weigh in on this. I am sketchy on the details here, so you may need to fill in some of the blanks. But I gather that he named, that he honored a previous World War II era unit in some fashion, and this was a unit, of course, that would have been aligned with the Nazis during World War II. And that just feels like a bit of a misstep to someone who has really got things mostly right so far. How did you read it? Well, if I'm not mistaken, he's having a conflict with the

polls right now over this individual, and they have withdrawn, the polls withdrew some award that they gave to him and various and one other person. You know, You know, nobody is going to be, there's no such thing as black and white and nobody is going to be lining up perfectly in every box as far as we're concerned. You know, we can spend our time analyzing whether that's, whether that was a smart move or a stupid move. But at the end, Russia is the enemy, not just of Ukraine, Russia is the enemy of all European and civilized countries in the world.

And you have one guy, Vladimir Zelensky, who's figured out through a lot of blood, sweat and tears, how to humiliate this enemy and effectively doing it on our behalf. And we may believe in 95% of what he's doing and not believe in 5% of what he's doing, but I don't think that we really have the luxury of dissecting right now every move he's making and everything we agree with and disagree with, you know, we're all effectively in this war. It may not be a hot war for us, but it is a cold war for us.

Let me get you back on this issue of asymmetric warfare that you've referenced and how well it has been working for Ukraine so far. I wonder, though, if we can look at the other side of the coin, which is to say Russia theoretically has so many more advantages when it comes to numbers of soldiers when it comes to their ability to wage war, the length of time in which they can wage war. I mean, ultimately, ultimately, does this thing not have to come out in Russia's favor just by virtue of the numbers and the size of the military? Well, so coming back to the situation on the battlefield, if Ukraine has figured out the technology to destroy Russian's economic capacity, and they have.

If the Ukrainians have figured out how to prevent the Russians from moving forward using drones, and they have, Russia really doesn't have time on their side at all. In fact, the more that Ukraine destroys the economic capacity, the less money Russia has to execute this war. And that does create a problem for Putin. In my prediction, this war doesn't actually ever end. What will happen is this war will be like the Korean War. The Korean War has never been declared over.

There's a demilitarized zone, and eventually it's calmed down. And that's kind of how I would view this war going forward. I can imagine a scenario where, as I said before, that the Ukrainians and the Russians have some unspoken agreement not to bomb each other's cities. And then it comes down to the front line, and eventually the front line just stops where the violence on the front line just stops. And there'll never be a treaty. It'll continue to be a declaration of war.

And the front line will be heavily reinforced. And as time goes on, perhaps some Western allies will join Ukraine in reinforcing their border. I can imagine a scenario where Ukraine is welcomed into the European Union early for the very fact that Ukraine has got such a good military that Europe will need the Ukrainian. military to help fend off the Russians. I could easily imagine that that will be their trade at some point going forward. But I don't think that Russia, in this new world of drones and asymmetric warfare and technology has to win this war by any means. I can imagine it just grinds down to a halt at some point. That's a fascinating scenario, but I wonder, again, if we're going to use the Korean example, whether or not it requires America to play a role in bringing this thing to a,

to some kind of end and demonstrating a kind of world leadership that right now they just don't seem all that interested in providing. What do you think? Well, I think that America could play a very constructive role in this, in this situation, if using the economic powers that America has. If America were to get involved right now and say, we're sick and tired of this war, we want this to end. How do we end it? We end it because Russia continues to get money from oil. How do we stop them from getting money from oil? We tell the major buyers of the oil, which happened to be just eight oil refineries in the world, two in China, foreign India, and two in Turkey. If the Americans said to those refineries, we're going to sanction you if you buy any more Russian oil,

they would stop buying the Russian oil. If they stopped buying the Russian oil, it would still float out there somewhere at a 75 or 80 percent discount. And then eventually Russia would just simply run out of money. That's what America could do right now. They could do that this minute if they wanted to. Donald Trump could do that this minute if he wanted to end this war. He hasn't shown any proclivities to doing that. Well, in fact, he famously came into office saying, I can end this war in one day.

And clearly he was not able to do that. Have you had meetings with members of this administration and put that forward to them as a possible scenario for involvement? I've met with many senators on both sides of the political aisle on my proposal for how we take the money out of Russia's pockets with these oil sanctions. And they're all saying that's a great idea. And in fact, I met with, I think, 12 European foreign ministers at the Munich Security Conference making the same pitch. And nobody said it was a bad idea. They all said, well, why haven't we done it yet? And it was starting to get momentum on both sides of the Atlantic.

and then the Iran war started, oil dried up, the Strait of Hormuz and so on, and nobody wanted to be messing around with oil. But perhaps if there's ever an end to this whole Iranian Strait of Hormuz situation, and I don't think it's, I think it's not really over yet. But when it is over and oil prices were to drop significantly more, then we're in a position where this could happen. So you are, you're not giving up on the idea. It could be revisited once the Middle East calms down. although that's a region of the world that never seems to calm down, but it's still an option out there, you think? I think it's not so much the Middle East calming down is oil prices going down below 60, and then I think we can talk about this seriously. Gotcha. Could you give us an update on your Magnitsky campaign and perhaps for the benefit of those who, you know, don't know all of the details behind your efforts? remind us all about who Mr. Magnitsky was, why he was so important to you and your efforts on his behalf.

So Sergei Magnitsky was my lawyer in Russia when I ran a large investment fund there. He discovered a massive corruption scheme involving the theft of $230 million of taxes that we paid to the Russian government, which were stolen from the Russian government by corrupt officials. He exposed those officials. And in retaliation, they had him arrested, tortured for 358 days. and killed in police custody on November 16, 2009. I gave up my life as a businessman and have, for the last 17 years,

been pursuing justice for Sergei Magnitsky. And that's resulted in a law named after him called the Magnitsky Act. The Magnitsky Act freezes the assets and bans the travel of Russian and other, I should say, not just Russian, but Chinese and other human rights violators and kleptocrats.

And because many of these human rights violators and kleptocrats love their money, this is a very, very powerful tool to prevent them from, or I should say, to punish them, in some cases, prevent them from doing terrible things. It's also the law which has been replicated in all the sanctions on oligarchs and government officials in Ukraine, I mean in Russia on behalf of Ukraine. And it's really turned into a very powerful global movement where, we're now in the process of, I say, fine-tuning the Magnitsky Act and in Canada, where you are, with the help of a conservative parliamentarian named James Bazan and some liberal backbenchers,

we have a new revised Magnitsky Act, which fills some of the loopholes that the bad guys were able to exploit in Canada, and we're doing the same thing around the world, as we've now had many years of experience with the Magnitsky Act. we can see what needs to be fixed, and we're fixing things in Canada and various other countries with amendments to the Magnitsky Act. How many countries have signed on? So far we have 35 countries, which is pretty remarkable, and it causes great heartburn for anybody who finds themselves subject to the Magnitsky Act. And it's really a remarkable, it's an unbelievable story that Sergei Magnitsky's murder has led to this overall

global movement with his name on it. What have you learned about either how easy or difficult it is to get laws passed in democracies, even if you have truth and justice on your side? Well, so what I've learned is that it's incredibly hard, very, very hard. Most governments want to do nothing all the time. It's much easier to do nothing than to do something. But I've also learned that if you're stubborn enough, and I think that my super, power is how stubborn I am, and I've been doing this for 17 years, 17 years. Eventually, the people

who are against you either quit, get fired, get promoted, get transferred, give up. And if I just keep on it, persistence is the most unbelievably powerful tool you could ever have. And I've been very, very persistent. Most people would have given up long before any of these things had ever come to fruition, but I just kept at it. And so, you know, I was a young man when this whole thing started. I'm no longer a young man, but I just keep at it and I hammer away. And we've made unbelievable. I mean, to get a law passed in any country is probably less likely than winning the lottery. And to get it done in 35 countries, I think, is unprecedented.

What more do you still want to see done on this front? Well, the main value of the Magnitsky Act is that it really punishes the bad guys, the people, the individuals who do terrible things, but it doesn't punish the overall populations of the countries where the people doing terrible things. And in a lot of countries, you have terrible governments, and then you have people who are subjected to these terrible governments. And the old style of sanctioning was to just sanction whole countries,

but the bad guys would just fly their own champagne and caviar into the country, while the poor people would all suffer. But now we've just turned this thing on its head, and we're saying, let's just go after the bad guys and leave everyone else alone. And it's just so satisfying when some senior attorney general or prosecutor or finance minister gets sanctioned and to watch them flapping around like the world is so unjust and no one else cares about them in their own country because they're getting punished for doing bad things that everyone understands they've done. Now, given your longstanding business ties to the United Kingdom and given Canada's current prime

ministers economic ties to Great Britain, he was after all the governor of the Bank of England, do you two know each other? We do. I think he's a great man. I have great respect for him and great admiration, and I think he's doing a good job, and I'm really pleased that he's someone I can work with and I'm pleased that Canada is being led by him. Have you communicated with him on this subject? I have, absolutely. And he's been very generous towards me in terms of making sure that the issues that I care about in relation to Russia

and in relation to the Magnitsky Act get a proper hearing in Canada. So you're hopeful that something will emerge from the current government of Canada on this? I think something will. There's this legislation which is currently going through, which will. fix all the loopholes on the Magnitsky Act. And it has just passed the Foreign Affairs Committee with the support of the, which was sponsored by the opposition, but with the support now of the government, the Liberal Party.

And so I think we'll make more progress in Canada in the near future on the Magnitsky. One thing we surely have to talk about is that being a bit of a burr under the saddle of the Russians seems to be a bit of a family business in your family these days. Your son Alexander was recently sanctioned by Russia. How come? Well, so about a year ago, he was, and I should say my son Alexander a year ago was 16 years old. And he came to me, and we've been tracing the money connected to the murder of Sergei Magnitsky for 17 years.

And I thought I'd gotten pretty good at tracing money and understand. how bad guys launder money. And he said to me, Dad, this stuff is, you're a dinosaur. They're not laundering money the way you think they are. I said, what do you mean? And he says, they're using cryptocurrency. They're not using the banks anymore. I said, what is that?

And he said, I'm going to show you. And he then spent every night, every weekend, when he wasn't in school, wasn't studying, searching online, going into databases, court records, indictments. And he put together something called the global cryptocurrency laundering database. And it's got 164 examples of every publicly open source example of cryptocurrency money laundering. And as he put this together, he realized there were patterns. This is how they did this. Here are the bad actors.

Here's what they did. Here's the methodology. And it became sort of an insight that he had that nobody else had. And so he wrote a report on it. And he presented this report in the British Parliament. And all sorts of parliamentarians were there. And they were like me. We're all dinosaurs.

And they were like, oh, my God, this is how they're doing it. And he figured out that the Russians were basically bypassing sanctions to the tune of $100 billion with a new cryptocurrency that they had invented and they started using. my son figured out how that was being used and how they're evading the sanctions and how they're evading further sanctions when governments were trying to stop this. He presented this to the parliamentarians. They said, this is outrageous. This shouldn't be happening. He presented this, or they presented it then to the British Foreign Secretary, who then closed down some more of the loopholes with more sanctions. And about a week after the British government closed down the loopholes that my son had identified,

the Russian government sanctioned him at the age of 17. He's the youngest person in the world ever sanctioned by Russia. It's quite a remarkable story. Just for what it's worth, I've got kids, and they call me a dinosaur on a regular basis. So this is something that people of our age need to probably get used to. But apparently your son said, Russia can add my name to whatever list they want.

It won't change the facts. It won't change my work and the pressure that we need to put them under. How proud is Papa of his kid? I couldn't be more proud. I'm beaming with pride. It really is a remarkable thing. And I'm, you know, this is what you could, this is the best thing you could hope for is to pass the baton to the next generation and to have them make a difference. And he is making a difference.

And I couldn't hope for anything more than that. And I think he's just getting started. And when we see the future of Alexander Browder, he's going to be. going to accomplish things that will make, make our heads spin. Well, one can't help but notice his first name. I mean, there wasn't Alexander the Great a long time ago. Maybe we've got another one now. Why did you name him that? Well, his mother comes from Russia, and all of our kids have names that come from Russia, but from the old Russia, not the kleptocratic Russia. I get you. It's been a great pleasure having you on our podcast this week. I just

just ask you to stand by for one second as I do a little business here, and that is to say that this is a free broadcast for people, and we're never going to charge for it. But we do have a Patreon page, and in case people want to support the work that we're doing here, we invite them to go to patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast. One of the nice things that we archive there, I guess you could say, is some web-exclusive videos that you won't see as part of this show. and to that end, I've just done an interview with the former deputy prime minister of Canada, a man by the name of John Manley, who interestingly enough was an industry minister, a foreign minister, and a finance minister for Canada, and after 9-11, was put in charge basically

of border security for Canada, has a lot of, as you might imagine, complicated thoughts about the United States as we lead up to this 250th anniversary of their birth. and in fact Mr. Manley has American-born grandchildren. So he has a lot of very interesting thoughts as we lead up to the 250th celebration for our neighbors to the south. And you can see that interview on our Patreon page.

That's patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast. All of our shows are archived, including the one you're watching right now at Steve Paken.com. Bill Browder, it's a great pleasure to see you again. You keep on, keep it on, okay? Thank you very much. And you too.

Thank you very much. Peace and love, everybody. We'll see you next time.