TRIGGERnometry - The Real Reason Putin Invaded Ukraine — Sir Bill Browder

Episode Date: July 4, 2026

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Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 volt and 26 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details. Putin said real simple, 50% for Vladimir Putin. And that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world. And that was the moment that my life changed forever. I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia. guy named Sergei Magnitsky. They chain him to a bed and eight riot guards with rubber batons

beat Sergei Magnitsky until he died. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia? And why not take away their ability to use their money in the West? And that became known as the Magnitsky Act. The reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money

that he's afraid of his own people. And so the best way to, have your own people not get mad at you is to create somebody else for them to be mad at. It's Machiavelli 101, create a foreign enemy, start a war. So Bill Brader, welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be here. It's great to have you. You have one of the most fascinating stories to tell, having gone from growing up in the United States, being the grandson of a communist, a labor organizer,

going to Russia as a capitalist at this point. and then getting into very big trouble with the Putin government over some terrible events. And then, of course, some of the work you've done after that as an activist as well. So tell us the story. Well, it's a long story. So I guess we should start at the very beginning. You mentioned my grandfather. His name was Earl Browder, and he was a labor union and organizer from Wichita, Kansas.

He was so good at organizing the union, he was spotted by the communists. And they said, if you like labor unionism, you're going to love communism. Why don't you come and check it out? He went from Wichita to Moscow. He did what many other young American men do when they get to Moscow. He met a young Russian girl who became my grandmother. My father was born there. And then five years later, he returned to America and became the general secretary of the American Communist Party.

He ran for president twice against Roosevelt in 1936, 1940. obviously didn't get that many votes. He was imprisoned by Roosevelt in 1941, pardoned in 42. At the end of the Second World War, when there was no longer any kind of relationship or need for a relationship between Russia and the United States, Stalin kicked him out of the Communist Party and started,

in fact, he started murdering. My grandfather, Earl Browder, he had something called Browderism, and they started murdering his followers in Eastern Europe. The 1950s start, the McCarthy era, he gets persecuted, obviously, for being a communist. So this is my family legacy. I was born in 1964. I'm 62 years old.

When I was going through my teenage rebellion, I was trying to figure out how do you rebel from a family of communists? And I grew my hair long and it grew into an afro. you can't tell now, but that didn't seem to upset my family. I follow the Grateful Dead around the country. That also didn't upset my family. But when I put on a suit in time became a capitalist, that really pissed them off. Good and proper. I became a capitalist. I went to Stanford Business School. I graduated business school in 1989, which was a very auspicious year because that was the year that the Berlin Wall came down. And as I was trying to figure out what to do post-business school, I had this epiphany, which is that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America

and the Berlin Wall has just come down, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that's what I set out to do. And I couldn't get quite all the way to Eastern Europe at the time. I moved to London in 89. And I had several jobs, but the job that defined me was a job at Solomon Brothers, which doesn't exist anymore, but it's a very famous American financial institution that was immortalized in Michael Lewis's book Liars Poker. I got a job at Solomon Brothers as an investment banker on the East European Investment Banking team. And my first assignment was to advise a fishing fleet located in Murmansk, Russia, on their privatization. So I fly from London.

to Murmansk, I get picked up at the airport by the head of the fishing fleet. He takes me down to the docks. He shows me one of their vessels, which was an enormous, this enormously long, high, big ship. I asked him, how much is one of these things cost? And he said, $20 million new. How many do you have in your fleet?

100. So $2 billion with the ships. How old is your fleet? I didn't know anything about ships or fleets, but he said seven years old, and so I figure maybe that's a billion dollars with the ships. And I had been hired, or I said Solomon Brothers had been hired by the management of this company to advise them on whether to buy 51% of the fleet, which had been offered by the government in the privatization program of Russia.

And so I said, at what price is the government selling 51%? They said, $2.5 million. So you don't have to be a Stanford MBA or a financial wizard to know that if there's a billion dollars with the ships and you can buy 51% for $2.5 million, that's got to be a pretty good deal. And so then I said to myself, I'm in the wrong business. I shouldn't be advising on this stuff. I should be investing in this stuff. And is this just like some kind of anomaly with the fishing fleet or is this something going on more widespread? So I flew from remandum. to Moscow and sort of poked around Moscow for a week,

and I realized that this was the whole country. They were basically just giving the whole country away for free in what they called the mass privatization program. Boris Yeltsin, who was the president at the time, said, I want to go from communism to capitalism. How do we create a country of capitalists? Let's give all the property away for free. And so it didn't work out that way in the end.

22 oligarchs ended up with 40% of the country. But little crumbs were falling off the table in terms of this privatization. And off the back of that, I left Solomon Brothers. I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund, and I started investing in the privatization of Russia. And it was really a very spectacular time to be an investor in Russia. I was all of 31 years old when I started this fund. And there's this expression, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

And nobody knew more than me, just because nobody knew more than anybody about anything back then. And I started investing, and I was, my fund was the best performing fund in the world in 1997. I went from zero to a billion dollars of assets under management, which these days doesn't sound like a lot of money because there's trillionaires running around. But back then, that was an enormous amount of money. Back then, a billion was real money. Yeah, exactly. And it was just the most glorious time ever, and I thought my billion was going to turn into 10 billion, and it turned out that it was all the success coming so quickly in the hands

of a 31-year-old was the biggest cell signal there ever was. Of course, I was 31 years old, and I didn't really understand that. The Russian government in August of 1998 devalued their currency and defaulted on their bonds. And my portfolio went from a billion to 100 million. I lost 900 million of my client's money. I was ashamed. I was humiliated. And I was determined to try to get from the 100 million back up to a billion and then some.

And in theory, it shouldn't have been all that hard an exercise in theory. I owned oil companies. The oil companies sold their oil and dollars. They paid for their costs in roubles. The ruble has just gone down by 75%. And so if your revenues are staying the same or are growing and your costs are going down by 75%, that means your profits should be exploding. in theory.

The reality was that all these companies were majority owned by these people known as the Russian oligarchs. And the Russian oligarchs said to themselves, well, before all this crash, they thought they could get money from Wall Street. They had all these bankers with fancy suits showing up in Moscow saying, if you behave yourself, we can get you some money from Wall Street. And after the default and devaluation, they called up their bankers, said, you know, we can really use some of that money right now. And the guys who picked up the phone, said, Vladimir who, and put the phone down because

they didn't want to be, and nobody wanted to have any association with Russia after that. It was like toxic waste being connected to Russia. And so the oligarch said, well, wait a second, And there's no incentive to behave. And in Russia, there's never been any disincentive against misbehavior. They said to themselves, why don't we just steal everything that's not nailed down? And even stuff that is nailed down. And so the oligarchs embarked on an orgy of stealing, which has been unprecedented in the history of business.

They were doing asset stripping, transfer pricing, embezzlements, dilution. They were doing it on an industrial. scale. And I was sitting there with my last 10 cents on the dollar, hoping that I was somehow going to get from, you know, 10 cents up to a dollar or 100 million back up to a billion, and they were going to try to steal the last 10 cents on the dollar that I had. And so, not as an investment strategy, but as a matter of desperation or survival, I said, I need to try to stop the stealing that's going on in these companies. Well, how do you stop stealing in Russian companies.

There was no class taught on that at Stanford Business School. And it's not as if there's any institutions in Russia that are going to be there to help out some foreign minority shareholder that's unhappy about the stealing. You can't go to the police and say,

I've just discovered stealing at gas prom. What are they going to do? Nor could I go to the courts, the judges were bribed, the parliament was on the payroll, the government, the regulator, there was nothing except for one thing, which is that I had a really good team of Russian people analysts working for me who were really smart, who could research how the stealing was going on, and I would go to all the same bars and restaurants as the foreign correspondence.

And so what we decided to do was to research who was doing the stealing, how they were stealing, where the money was going. And these guys were so brazen, they weren't even covering it up. And in Russia, there's no such thing as data protection. Every piece of data is available for a price. And so we would gather all the information, put it together, and then share it with these journalists that I was hanging out at the bars with. and they were loving me because I was saving them a lot of time and effort.

And we would publish all the scams that were going on. And you might say, well, why did you expect anything good to happen? And the answer is we didn't know what was going to happen. But when we first started doing this, this was the moment that Vladimir Putin had just come to power. And Vladimir Putin back then, he might have been the same. same person, but he wasn't, he was faced with a whole different set of constraints back then. And the oligarchs were more powerful than him. And he wanted to take away the power from the oligarchs. And so there's an expression in the world that your enemy's enemy is your

friend. And I've never met Vladimir Putin. I haven't met him then and I haven't met him since then. But I was busy exposing the oligarchs who were stealing money from me. And he was hating the oligarchs because they were stealing power from him. And so what did he do? He stepped into the fights. So we exposed the corruption of the management of gas prom. And the state owned 51%. They fired the management of gas prom.

And the share price rose spectacularly. We went after spare bank. We went after Sergold Naftagas. These are all big Russian companies. And he would step in on a regular basis and do stuff. And every time he would step in, the share price would go up. And so I was feeling pretty good about him. I thought, this is great.

You know, I was making money, making Russia a better place. This Putin guy was like helping out. You know, what could be better than that? The problem was that he wasn't helping out because he wanted to make Russia a better place. He wanted to clean up Russian companies. He was helping out because he didn't like these oligarchs. And one day, he decided that he was going to win his war with the oligarchs. How was he going to do that?

He was going to arrest the richest oligarch in the country. A man named Mikhail Hortikovsky. He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos. He arrests him off his private jet in Siberia. They bring him back to Moscow. They put him in a cage in a courtroom. In Russia, there's a 99.7% conviction rate in criminal cases, so they just keep you in the cage

because that's where you're going to be afterwards. They allow the television cameras to come into the courtroom to film the richest man in Russia sitting in a cage. They eventually sentenced him to 10 years in prison. And the other oligarchs in Russia are just going to just going out of their minds. One by one by one after Hortikovsky was sentenced, they go to Putin and said, you know, Vladimir, what do we have to do so that doesn't happen to us? Putin said, real simple, 50 percent. Not for the Russian government, not for the presidential administration of Russia,

50 percent for Vladimir Putin. And that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world. and that was the moment that my life changed forever. And that was the moment that things really started turning bad for me. Most businesses don't have a communication problem. They have a visibility problem. Calls come in, techs come in, and nobody knows who's handled what. That's not a staffing issue. That's a systems issue.

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I've heard you say before about the 50%. I'm curious how we know that that's what happened between him and I remember seeing him dressing down various oligarchs in a public meeting, but how do we know that he personally is taking that money from them, like that kind of deal? Because they told me. Various people told me that that was the deal.

And, you know, one could say, well, how, you know, maybe they were not correct or exaggerating. But I think we've now seen enough anecdotal information to support what I was told that it becomes pretty, I mean, so for example, there's Putin's house on the Black Sea. I'm sure you know about that or may, well, I don't know if your reader or listeners know about that, but, Lexi Navalny made a great video that's been watched by 25 million people about Putin's.

It's a billion-dollar house in the Black Sea. Nice place? Not really. I mean, it's really a crude place. They've got stripper poles and bowling out. I mean, I'm not sure that any of us would actually want to live there. But a billion dollars for that. He's got an 800 or maybe 9.

million dollar super yacht. And where does he get this stuff from? All the all the all the money trails lead back to the oligarchs. When his daughter got married, the son got a dowry, which was the gift of like 30% of a major multi-billion dollar petrochemical firm. When he cheated on his daughter and they got divorced, the son-in-law gave it back to the oligarch. I mean, it's, it's, You know, there's a million of these stories. See, that is a testament to the power of the male libido. Like, you marry Putin's daughter and then cheat on her. That is not a wealth-fought-through move, is it?

You know, I mean, I guess he just couldn't control himself. Either that or he just backed himself. Yeah, I don't think that's a smart move. He's still alive, though, as far as I'm aware. Really? Yeah. But he's the son of one of Putin's best friends. You know, they're not killing each other.

I mean, you would think? I mean, I, anyways. It's a dispute within the family sort of thing. We're joking around, of course, but I was just very curious to hear that. So you had oligarchs who personally told you this is what Putin said to us. And why did this begin to interfere with your business and what you were doing? Because I was busy carrying on with my naming and shaming campaigns. So it wasn't, so you'd think it's pretty ridiculous.

for some guy from Chicago to be outing the oligarchs and doing all this kind of stuff. And the answer is it was ridiculous. I had kind of shaved off the risk sensors in my brain because you couldn't go out there with like a full set of risk reward and take that and do that. And so I was just plowing forward even after Hortikovsky was imprisoned. exposing more malfeasance, but I wasn't exposing the enemies of Putin anymore. I was exposing his 50% interest. But I wasn't thinking about that. And I was going to ask you about that because I remember growing up in Russia in the 1990s,

and objectively, it was a wild and crazy time. What did you think when you arrived in Russia in the early 90s? and just you must have, you know, with your American background, I visit America all the time. The mindsets are so different. You must have found it a huge shock but also probably a thrill, right? Well, I mean, so first of all, I wasn't, in Russia, they really, over generations, they've kind of destroyed initiative, idealism, public concern, philanthropy. They've just destroyed all of that. But in America, you know, that was all that kind of stuff

was in our DNA and brought up and pounded into you that and probably, you know, can do attitude, optimism, everything could be better in the future than it is today. That was my thinking. So I show up in this country, which is completely chaos. And when communism ended, they didn't have a system, you know, they called it capitalism, but nobody had created anything, really.

It was just total chaos. But I showed up there and I said to myself, my bet is that it's going to go from chaos or to something less chaotic, horrible to bad. I called it the Nigeria to Brazil trade. And so I showed up there and I thought, you know, I wanted to be part of this process. And by the way, you're going to make a lot of money if it goes from horrible to bad. That was my thinking. And it started to go from horrible to bad.

And Putin's first few years, he wasn't this monstrous guy that he is right now. And he was like, you know, he was kind of like a nameless, faceless technocrat. That's how we thought of him in those first few years. And, you know, he was like reforming the tax system and, you know, doing all sorts of stuff that you could honestly say were economic reforms. And so the thought was that we were going to be in this transition. And so it was kind of cool to be there when. when it was all total chaos and watching the little green sprouts of like, you know,

civil society start to form. And so I thought, you know, this is great. And I wanted to be part of it. And I wanted to profit off of it as well. So, Bill, going back to the story, Putin is going around asking for 50% here, 50% there. How did that change? And how was your life completely different after those events? Well, so I was now going after him. I mean, his interest and I became very inconvenient. You know, here I was. I wasn't talking to him. I wasn't, you know, they were, I wasn't giving him 50% of anything.

I was not part of that thing. I was just running my fund, getting mad about different companies doing bad stuff, exposing them, working with the journalists. And they had to figure out what to do with me. And, you know, they're, you know, they're, you know, they're, If I'd been Russian, they would have killed me. But because I was a foreigner, and not just a foreigner, I was the largest foreign investor in the country at this point. I was managing $4.5 billion at the top of the market.

And so I think, and by the way, I'd be killed this minute if I was anywhere near Russia or anywhere within their grasp. So it's not like Putin, I mean, he's become more brazen. Back then, he was a bit scared. He was still sort of feeling his way around the world. So they didn't want to kill me. But one day I was flying back. I'd been living there for 10 years. I was flying from London.

I was here in London for the weekend. I was flying back to Moscow. And I was at Cherametivo Airport at the VIP lounge. And I was sitting there waiting for my passport to be processed. And four heavily armed border guards burst into the lounge, grab me, and then take me down to the detention center of the airport. And I stayed there overnight. not sure whether I was being, and there was two things that could have happened.

They could have sent me to Siberia, like Hortikovsky, or they could have deported me. I didn't know what was going to happen that night when I was sitting in that airport detention cell. And I had a lot of hard questions for myself about life choices and how I'd gotten here, and maybe I should have been a little bit more careful and all this kind of stuff. And the next morning, I wasn't sure what's going to happen. and then finally they come from me and they put me back onto an air flight and deport me. And then when I land in London, I get a letter from the foreign ministry saying I've been expelled because I'm a threat to national security.

So good news. I'm not dead. I'm not in a Russian prison. I'm just deported. But when the Russians go after you, they don't do it. You know, it doesn't happen. That was a mild sanction. When they go after you, they usually do some really nasty stuff.

And I said to myself, this is not the end of the story. This is the beginning of something really bad. And so what did I do? I had a bunch of people working for me in Moscow. And so I say to myself, these people could be victims. victimized. We need to get them out. And I evacuated my team and their family members. Once I got everyone out, I said, well, we have a lot of money over there. These guys are probably going to go after the money. We should get our money out. And we quickly and quietly

sold every last share we held in Russia, got all of our money out. So I kind of dust it off my hands. I said, phew, people's safe, money safe. you know, time to move on to other stuff. Set up a new investment fund investing in other places, start investing in other places. I'm at a board meeting in Paris. June 4th, 2007. I get a frantic call from the only last remaining person I have in Russia, which was a secretary, sitting in our empty office.

And she says, there's 25 police officers, you know, breaking down the door. What should I do? I don't know. Let me call up my lawyer. I've got an American lawyer in Moscow. I say there's 25 police officers breaking down my door, and he said, we got 25 police officers in our office looking for your documents.

50 police officers doing simultaneous raid of my office and my law firm's office looking for our official documents for our investment holding companies, all the stamp seals and certificates. They find them at the law firm's office. They take these documents away. away. And the next thing we know, we no longer own our investment holding companies. They had been fraudulently re-registered into the name of a man who had been convicted of

manslaughter and led out of jail early, presumably to put his name on these documents. So I'm sitting there thinking, okay, so the police have raided my office, seized the documents, use the documents to steal my empty, the companies were empty now, because remember we got everything out to steal these empty investment holding companies. I'm not worried about the money, the money is already safe, it's offshore.

But if the police are doing all this stuff working with killers, I'm going to be walking through Frankfurt Airport one day and someone's going to arrest me on a Russian Interpol warrant. And I say myself, we've got to figure out how to how to stop whatever is happening here.

And so I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, a guy named Sergei Magnitsky. He worked for an American law firm. He was one of these people that could just literally run circles around everybody else with the law. He just knew exactly what he was doing. And I say him, and once you figure this out, figure out who's doing what, what are they doing,

why are they doing it, how are they doing it, when you stop it. And so he goes out. He researches everything and he's super smart guy and he figures it out. He said, he said, this is the most cynical thing I've ever seen. So when we were, when I was expelled and after I sold everything, we had a billion dollars of profits on the securities that we sold. And off that billion dollars of profits,

I paid $230 million of capital gains tax to the Russian government. What Sergei had figured out was that this group of crooks that stole our companies with the police documents, they stole our companies. And then they went to the tax authorities and they said there was a mistake made in the previous years tax filings. These companies didn't earn a billion dollars. They earned zero. They came up with a complicated way of explaining it. Therefore, the $230 million that was paid in taxes in the previous year was paid in error. And we'd like that money back.

They applied for this illegal $230 million tax refund on the 23rd December 2007, and was approved and paid out the next day, Christmas Eve. It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia paid out in one day on a fraud. I mean, if I had genuinely overpaid $10,000 of taxes in 2007, I'd still be waiting for the tax refund today. But an illegal $230 million tax refund was refunded in one day on a fraud. On Christmas Eve. They actually celebrate Christmas, whatever, 13 days later. Anyways.

No one's working at this time anyway, that's the point. Right. So people at the very highest level of government have clearly been involved in making this happen. So Sergei and I looked at this and we said to ourselves, obviously this is a rogue operation, an inside job, corruption at the highest level. But we also said to ourselves that this couldn't have been authorized by Putin because he's a patriot and a nationalist, right? off talking about how the greater good of Russia, this must be something, you know, he must be

getting, and by the way, this wasn't our money. This was the Russian government's money that was being stolen. So Sergei and I were convinced, wrongly, but we were convinced that this was a rogue operation, and we brought it to the attention at the highest levels in the Russian government, then the good guys would get the bad guys. So we wrote criminal complaints to the head of the all the different law enforcement agencies. I went on television, radio, newspapers explaining the whole scam and putting it out there.

Sergei went to the Russian State Investigative Committee, which is their version of the FBI, testified against the police officers who were involved in the fraud, and then we sat back and waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Turns out, in Putin's Russia, there are no good guys. Five weeks after Sergei testified against the police, officers, the same police officers came to his home on the 24th of November 2008 and arrested Sergei.

They put him in pretrial detention and they started to really like put the screws to him. They put him in a cell in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds, kept the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. And they put him in cells with no heat and no window panes. in December in Moscow, so he really froze to death. They'd move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night. They had to put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. And they figured, this is a guy who wears a blue suit and a red tie.

He works in a fancy American law firm buys Starbucks in the morning on his way into work. They figure they put the screws to him. you know, he'll he'll do whatever they they want him to do. And they wanted him to withdraw his testimony and they wanted him to sign a false confession

to say that he stole the $230 million. And they wanted him to say that he did so on my instructions. So, you know, here's this guy that doesn't look so powerful, but he had a will of steel. And for him, the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more awful.

than whatever they were subjecting him to. And he just refused. And so the pressure and the torture and the pain and the unpleasantness just got worse and worse and worse over a long period of time. And he started getting pains in his stomach. He started losing weight. He lost 20 kilos.

He went to the prison infirmary and they diagnosed him as having pancreas. Prietitis and gallstones, and they said he needed to have an operation. The operation was scheduled for the 1st of August 2009. About a week before the operation, the same people who were torturing him before came to him and said, listen, you know, if you sign this false confession, everything will be good. He refused again. In a retaliation, they moved him from the prison that had a hospital where he was scheduled. to have an operation to a maximum security prison called Boutirka, which is considered to be one of the

most awful prisons in Russia. And at Boutirka, there were no medical facilities for his operation, and they refused him all subsequent medical treatment. He went into a terrible downward spiral. He was in constant, agonizing pain. He and his lawyers wrote desperate requests to every different branch of the criminal justice system begging for medical attention. every one of their requests was either ignored or denied in writing. On November 16, 2009, he went into critical condition. On that night, the Boutirka authorities didn't want to have responsibility from any more, so they put him in an ambulance and sent him across town to a different prison that had a medical wing.

They don't put him in the emergency room. They put him in an isolation cell, they chain him to a bed, and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergei Magnitsky until he died. This was November 16th, 2009. He was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children.

I got the news the next morning and it was the most horrifying, traumatizing, life-changing news I could have ever gotten. I assume that the worst-case scenario for him was like a long prison sentence from trumped-up charges. I couldn't have ever imagined that they would kill him.

And when I was finally able to kind of clear my head and think about what I was going to do with this, I made a decision, I made a vow, which is that I was going to put aside my life as a businessman. And I was going to devote all of my time, energy, and resources going after the people who killed him, make sure they face justice. And that's what I've been doing for the last 17 years. It's such a powerful story, Bill, because it's obviously about many things, but it's also about the nature of terrorism. And we think about heroes looking a particular way or sounding a particular way, but Sergei

was a hero in the truest sense of the word. He really was. He really was. And the thing about it is that he was like an unexpected hero, I mean, in the sense that he was, you know, he was a tax lawyer. You know, he was not a human rights lawyer. He was not a political activist. He's not a Lexi Navalny or, you know, a journalist.

He was just a tax lawyer working for rich guys helping them with their taxes. But when he got thrown into this horrible situation, he did exactly the, I mean, I wish he hadn't been a hero. I wish he had been a flawed individual and would have, he could have testified against me for anything and it would have been fine. He'd still be alive. But he was truly, he had principles, and when he was faced with this kind of duress, he did the most heroic thing. And, you know, the one thing I've learned a lot over the last 20 years is that sometimes the people you expect to be heroic aren't. And sometimes the people you have no idea are heroes turn out to be, and Sergey turned out to be an amazing hero. Because that is, you know, I don't think we can actually comprehend this.

the West, what that's like to experience, what that's like to have the weight of a government come down on you and the knowledge that there is literally nothing that you can do. Yeah. And whatever path that you take, however you attempt to redress it fairly by legal means, you know it's not going to go anywhere. Well, this is the interesting thing about Sergey, was that up until the very end, he was an idealist. He actually believed that if he filed, he filed a complaint or he made a legal, you know, application that somewhere in the system that the law would protect him. You know, I asked him

before he was arrested, I asked him to leave. And he said, you know, Bill, this is not 1937. This is not Stalin's Russia. The law will protect me. And he believed it. And he believed it so much in a true lawyer's lawyer way, in his 358 days in detention, he filed 450 complaints documenting all this mistreatment and abuse and all this terrible stuff. Because he believed until the end, probably until they were beating him,

that somehow it was going to come out all right. So he was a hero and an idealist, and I guess a naive idealist, list. And if he had been more cynical like everybody else in Russia, he would have written, he would have signed what they wanted him to sign and then he'd still be alive. But also the part of the story, the subsequent part of the story shows that, you know, you say he was a naive idealist. But with your help, he did enact some change. He did. He changed the world. His sacrifice. So for me, the idea that he would die

and there would be a meaningless death, I just couldn't, I just couldn't live with that. I could not live with this thought that it would be a meaningless death. And so I made it in my life's work to make sure that there was some meaning to this tragedy. And the way, so the way that we got some meaning for this tragedy is that I wanted to, first of all, I wanted to get justice. I mean, and I wanted to make sure that the people that did this, Tim, just couldn't laugh it off and enjoy their money. And we'd first, I mean, I guess me naively, at first, I thought, maybe we could get justice in Russia. It had become very, very well-known this whole story. It was not, it didn't get, you know, swept under the carpet.

I made sure of that. And because Sergey had written all these complaints, we had all this documentary evidence of what had happened to him. Not on the last night of his life, that we got later, but all these complaints. And so I gave them to the newspapers. There was a Russian opposition newspaper called Noviah Gazeta. They published one of his letters, with a long letter, in its entirety, on the front page and like eight pages in, for everyone to read. And so it became a national cause celebra. And I thought at first that we'd be able to get some kind of justice inside of Russia.

And a lot of people were talking about it, and a lot of people were upset. about it. But the authorities completely circled the wagons, completely and absolutely circled the wagons. And so, and they, and Putin got involved. Putin personally got involved. He got involved and he personally exonerated every single official played any role top to bottom in this whole thing. Everybody. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia? Going into this year, I told myself I was finally going to stop guessing about my health. Like most people, I want more energy, better focus, and to be still strong and sharp years from now.

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$199 and for a limited time you can get an additional $20 off with our code Trigger. Head to superpower.com and use code Trigger at checkout for $20 of your membership. After you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about them, so make sure to mention Trigonometry to support the show. Once again, head to superpower.com and use our code trigger at checkout. And so it became clear there was no chance of getting justice inside of Russia. So I said, how do we get justice outside of Russia? And the answer is that these people killed Sergey because they stole $230 million.

And the $230 million that they stole, they don't keep in Russia. Because as easily as they stole it, it could be stolen from them. So what do they do with the money? They take it outside the country. And by the way, it's not like a mystery that that's what the Russians do. We see them everywhere all over London and the south of France and Korsheval and Sardinia. I mean, they're everywhere with their money. And Russia is a poor country, but if you see Russians in Europe, you think it's a rich country because they're all spending all this stolen money.

And so I came up with this idea, which is that if they killed Sergey for this money and they're traveling with this money and doing all this kind of stuff, why not take away their ability to travel to the West and why not take away their ability to use their money in the West? And I took this idea to Washington and I shared it with a Democratic senator named Benjamin Cardin and Republican Senator John McCain. And I told them the same story that I've just shared with you and your audience today. and I say, can we freeze their assets and ban their travel? And these two senators said yes. And that became known as the Magnitsky Act. And it really took off. It really took off in Washington.

And by the time it came for a vote, it passed the Senate 92 to 4. It passed the House of Representatives with 89%. And it became a federal law on December 14th, 2012. And Putin went. out of his mind. This was probably the first time that anyone pushed back. I mean, you know, we were living in a world of total appeasement of Putin. Everybody just wanted to appease him. People wanted Russian money. They wanted Russian gas in Germany. And this is the first time that, like, something happened to him that wasn't his liking. He couldn't bluster his way out of this.

Was he named in the act? He wasn't named in the act, but this was like, so the act basically said, Russia is such a corrupt country full of such nasty human rights abuse and dirty business among corrupt officials and they have such impunity that we have to punish them because they can't control themselves.

There's such a bunch of dirty barbarians that they can't control their own countries that we need to impose. And so, I mean, it was really the ultimate, ultimate insult to Putin and the ultimate recognition of what's going on in Russia. And so as officials started getting sanctioned,

he got so mad, he got so mad that he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families in retaliation. And the orphans that are being adopted are the sick ones that are being brought back to the West for, you know, medical, I mean, they're adopted, they get medical treatment,

they end up, you know, having normal lives in Russia, they die in the orphans. So he's basically sentencing his own orphans to death as a political gesture. He made repealing the Magnitsky Act his single largest foreign policy priority. And then he started going after me. Death threats, kidnapping threats, interpol red notices. I've been on the Interpol red notice list eight times. What does that mean, Bill?

Interpol, international police organization. But the red notice. Yeah, so international police organization. It's like if someone is a fugitive from the, let's say someone like burns your house down in Britain, everyone knows it. If they flee to another country, Britain can put them on the Interpol, notice the red notice system, and then France will pick them up and return them to. So this is what Russia did to me. They said, you're a criminal. We want you arrested. We want you sent to Russia so that they could do the same thing to me

that they did to Sergei Magnitsky. They applied to the British government. a dozen times to have me extradited. They were making movies about me. There were smear campaigns. There was lawsuits. I mean, there was probably 200 people working in the Russian government trying to ruin my life because they were so angry with me about the Magnitsky Act.

And they thought that with all this intensity and all this danger and all this threats, that I would back down. And they thought that all these threats to America with the adoptions that these senators would back down. But it had just the opposite effect. The senators decided to make a global Magnitsky Act. So to sanction anybody who does this stuff anywhere,

then name it Magnitsky, which was the ultimate insult to Putin. And I started going to other countries. And I started getting Magnitsky Acts in other countries. And we got the Magnitsky Act in Canada in 2017. in the here in the UK in 2018, in the European Union in 2020, Australia, 2021, various other Iceland, Norway, Montenegro, Kosovo, 35 countries now have Magnitsky Acts. And coming back to Sergei's, you know, how he's changed the world, is that now if you're a victim of human rights abuse anywhere in the world, you can go to the U.S. or

to UK or to Canada and get those people sanctioned. And it scares the hell out of people bad guys if they can't travel, if they can't spend their money, if their money is not safe, if their money is going to be frozen. It scares them really profoundly. And so I think, I don't know for sure, but I think that there are probably people who are asked to do terrible things that don't do terrible things because they don't want their money frozen.

They don't want to become international pariahs. So I think that Sergei's death saves lives. And it certainly gives victims something to some measure of justice. Bill, and while Sergei was in pretrial detention, I imagine you were doing everything in your power to try and help him get him released. Did you ever have contact through intermediaries with the Russian government or other people who you thought, well, if I concede on something, if I pay them a bribe, I don't know, the Russian way at the time. time would have been something like that. Did you ever have any attempts like that?

We had a million people approaching us with a million different proposals, but you don't know who was real and who was not. And what became very clear very quickly was that, you know, there's all these entrepreneurial sort of criminal justice entrepreneurs. They weren't part of the system. They were all, if you do this, you do that. And none of it sounded incredible. And everything that we were seeing was that there was like no chance of anything happening. And of course, we would have done any, you know, I would have done any, you know, I would have done to get him out if there was anything that we could have done to get him out. I mean, it was just, you know, just, I mean, and by the way, I didn't, I didn't know he was going to get killed.

I was just feeling terrible because he was in prison and he was in prison because of me. Of course. No, I totally understand. I guess what I'm getting at is, did you ever have a message through the grapevine from the people who were actually doing this to him saying, do this and then we'll leave him alone? No. We never got, we never got a credible message. And the reason is, because they wanted to blame us for stealing the $230 million. So the whole scam was to steal the $230 million, arrest Sergey, and blame me for stealing the $230

million. That was their scam. And they needed the end part so that they could wrap it up in a nice little bow and keep their money. That makes sense. And do you think that in, you know, I don't want to call it a mistake, obviously, but do you think that the fact you mentioned Sergei was naive and you both thought this was corruption that was below the level of Vladimir Putin, he thought it's not 1937, people, I'm not going

to get put in a gulag, I'm not going to get killed, etc. Do you think effectively that misunderstanding, let's call it, of Vladimir Putin and his regime, is what was. we have seen since from pretty much every government around the world when it came to understanding his intentions in relation to foreign policy, to Ukraine, to Georgia, etc. Do you think, I mean, I remember, I used to, before I did this, I used to work as a translator. And in the 2000s, Russian oligarchs were suing each other in British courts. There was hundreds of thousands and millions of pounds sloshing around for British. British lawyers, British tax advisors, all kinds.

And the city of London was awash with Russian money. And because of that, people and the government seemed very reluctant. If you remember, people of both parties, you know, Boris Johnson playing tennis with the wife of some oligarch, Peter Mandelson on Alec Deripaska's yacht. There was just absolutely no willingness to recognize the Russian regime for what it was. You couldn't be more right. It was absolutely, this kind of... country was bought and paid for by Russian oligarchs. And this country would do nothing. I mean,

it was, I could, I could barely get a meeting in the foreign and Commonwealth office to complain about this or to fight for this or that during most of this time, because everybody was just so enjoying feeding at the trough. And same thing in Germany with the Russian gas and France. Nobody wanted to do anything. Nobody wanted to have anything, anything against. against Russia. And coming back to the naivete that we experienced, it's going on today. There are people that believe that Putin is ready to negotiate the end of this war. You know, let's give diplomacy a chance. It's kind of like thinking that they're going to let Sergei out of prison. There's no diplomacy. Putin has no, they don't do diplomacy in Russia. It's all win-lose,

you know, zero-sum, there's the, you know, the dictator and the dictator and the dictator, and that's how it works. And there's no, there's no compromise. No one ever compromises in Russia. And so when I, when I hear about all these ideas that, let's, you know, right now the European Union that's fighting among themselves, who should negotiate with Putin? Nobody should negotiate with Putin because the only way that Putin is going to stop, is if he's stopped. That is not going to be by agreement that this happens. And by the way, the reason that he's doing this war is that he stole so much money

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That's B-U-B-S-Natrals.com code trig. And when they ask where you heard about them, tell them trigonometry sent you. Once more for 20% off, use code trig at bubsnaturels.com. Why do you think his leadership has changed as much as it has? Because when he first came in, as you mentioned, he was a kind of faceless technocrat,

Then he cracked down on the oligarchs. And, you know, there will be a lot of people who pay his regime, who nonetheless will objectively say you couldn't have a country run by what was called seven bankers. I was one of them. I was cheering when he took down Hortikovsky. I thought one down, 21 to go. And then he paid Roman Abramovich $13 billion for his oil company and made him the governor of Chukoka region, which is like some state of Russia.

So on one hand, you take down one oligarch, another one, you give him $13 billion. billion, how is that taking down the oligarchs? So it's, it's, so. But what I was going to ask you, Bill, sorry, just to, I hear you about the oligarchs, and in fact, we know that now an oligarch in Russia has become a government-appointed position effectively, right? It always was, it always was. Yeah, well, no, in the 90s, there was a period when they were self-made.

When Putin came in, that was the moment that they became, there's no, there's such thing as independently wealthy oligarchs. They're all dependently wealthy, and they're the, and, and by the way, people say, how How come they're not rising up right now because the business is so bad and so on? These guys are the most cowardly beta cuck people ever when it comes to Putin. You should see them in his presence. They're just like these little, you know, they're all pounding their chests when they're by themselves.

But the moment they're in Putin's presence, they're all just scared to death of him, cowardly people. And so why do you think his leadership evolved? Because my understanding is the reason that he was, I mean, objectively successful is Russian president for a long time and popular, is that the price of oil went up massively from like $9 a barrel to over 100 at one point. And so Russia, which generates almost all of its revenues by exporting oil and gas, was very rich all of a sudden. And he could spend money on, you know, doing up Moscow, making it nice and all sorts of other things, public services, et cetera.

Why would a leader of a country that's flourishing in this way go and start a war that would get the country sanctioned, all of his people sanctioned, cause all sorts of economic turbulence, etc. Because he's stole too much money. So he's been a crook since before he started. He was in the mayor's office in St. Petersburg, you know, taking skimming. He's been, and, by the way, nobody in Russia goes into public service to serve the public. If you're a traffic cop, you stop cars and extract bribes. If you're, you know, a planning, a regional planning person, you know, you want to get a planning permission for a building, you extract a bribe. And the bribes get bigger and bigger as the, as the, and so Putin stole an absolute enormous amount of money, like more money

than you can imagine. And, and by the way, it wasn't just him. All the people around him stole a lot of money. My guess, my estimate, is that over the course of 22 years up until the start of the war that a thousand individuals, Putin and a thousand or nine hundred ninety-nine individuals had stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian government, a trillion dollars. And by the way, that is the estimate of capital flight from Russia. And so that's money that should have been spent on schools and hospitals and roads and public services. Instead, it was spent on private jets and yachts and houses in the south of France.

and you could probably do this on a smaller scale or a shorter period of time and get away with it. But they just stole too much money. I mean, there's 141 million Russians living in destitute poverty and a thousand people living in the most lavish life you can ever imagine. And I believe that Putin saw that all it would take was someone lighting a match somewhere and the whole thing could come, you know, there could be a million people storming the Kremlin. And nobody knows what that match would be. You know, like in Tunisia, a fruit seller

sent himself on fire, and that led to the Tunisian government falling, and that led to the Egyptian and Syria and so on and so forth. Nobody knows how these things work. But what Putin knew was that he didn't want to be sitting in the Kremlin just waiting for the day that people came for him. And he's a very careful, he's a very smart guy in terms of understanding all this. And so he said, I'm not going to wait for people to get mad at me. And so let's manufacture an enemy. And the Ukrainians, by almost any definition, before all this stuff happened, weren't enemies. There was no beef between them.

It was completely manufactured. They started calling the Ukrainians Nazis and fascists. It has some historical resonance because of the Second World War, and people still think about that in Russia. And they call them Nazis and fascists. They said that they were doing all these terrible things that they weren't doing. they made up this whole thing in order to have an enemy. And then they went and took Crimea. And by the way, Crimea was a bloodless capture.

There was a bunch of soldiers already there. Almost nobody died. And the approval ratings went through the roof, and he was sitting there very pretty. But he needed to keep that up there, and he needed to keep this enemy going. And so then they went into eastern Ukraine. In my estimation, why did they launch a full-scale invasion in February of 2022? too, this was right after COVID. A lot of leaders in different countries were losing their place because of COVID.

People were pretty angry at all. Everyone was angry at their governments. And Putin understood the value of war. They already had a self-proclaimed enemy, which is the Ukrainians, based on this thing. And at this point, it was all about saving his own ass, saving his own skin, not wanting to have the Russian people turn on his. him after COVID. And I think that's why he went in. And I think that, you know, it used to be profit maximization when him and all these guys were stealing a trillion dollars. And then they stole too much

money and then it was purely about survival. And by the way, if Putin ever loses power, what happens to him? He goes to jail. All the money gets taken away. And one day he'll be hanging from the rafters. Well, this is what I don't actually understand about the rationale we're doing this because once he started this war, the possibility that he's going to enjoy his billions outside of Russia goes to zero. He will not be able to do that, objectively. But also, he knows, of course, that, you know, he might be able to do a deal like Yelton did, but it's hard to imagine. And so I guess what I'm saying is he's ended any possibility of him surviving comfortably outside of Russia and inside of Russia, which I guess now that I'm saying,

Adlaude means he will not leave power ever. There you go. He can't leave power, and so he can never give up. And by the way, if he ends this war, he won't be in power anymore. And I think that's the most important recognition that anyone can make, which is that all this talk about negotiation isn't going to go anywhere because he needs. the war, stay in power, he needs power, he needs to be in power to stay alive. And that's what he's going to do. And even if it's going to cost another 5 million Russian young men, if it's going to

cost another half a trillion dollars of resources, he will burn through everything in order to stay in power. But Bill, he can't do this indefinitely. There has to be an end at some point, surely. Well, I mean, look at North Korea. You know, North Korea has been going on for a very long time. I mean, he can really, really take Russia down a terrible dark road. He already has, but it can get a lot darker. Because he doesn't care about anything other than himself. He has no sense of responsibility, no sense of empathy, no sense of national interest whatsoever. It's purely about himself. And I think that's the big misunderstanding in the West is that, that we have a guy who, I mean, almost nobody else is like that. I mean, Hitler was like that. Stalin was like that. You know, Pol Pot was like that. But it's kind of hard for us to imagine in our own heads, someone being like that in the modern day. And I think that's part of the problem, isn't it, in that we look at Putin through a Western lens. And we think, oh, you know, he's a leader of the country. He must think like us. He must, in that, because he thinks like us,

Therefore, we must be able to get around a table with him, have a negotiation, and give him what he wants, because it's kind of what we would want. And he's created a narrative about things that he's upset with. So he said, I'm upset with NATO, NATO, people joining, Eastern European countries joining NATO. I'm upset with these Nazis and fascists in Ukraine. I have a vision of a grander, of a bigger part of a map that I'm, you know, I have a vision of a grander, of a bigger part of the map that I'm, I want it from my, and he's created these narratives. And so we in the West say, well, maybe if we give him this or do that or give him a little more of Ukraine, then he'll calm down. But it has nothing to do with what he wants. All he wants is just to save his own skin. And to save his own skin, he needs to be in power and to be in power, he needs this war.

And so it's all this complete sort of, we're almost negotiating with ourselves based on this fake stuff he puts out there. And he has reason to put it out there. Why does he put out this NATO stuff and this Nazi stuff? He puts it out for public consumption because the Russian people need something to hang their hat on. They can't just say, we're having a war for no reason. We need a reason for the war. But it's not the reason why he's at war. It's just a reason for public consumption.

So how should the West deal with the situation? What we should do is just let the Ukrainians finish him off. They're actually, I mean, if we gave them, the resources that they need. And we've sort of drip-fed resources to them. We've given them, you know, enough so that they could not lose, but not so much that they could win. If we gave them the resources to win,

and by the way, they'd be doing us a great service, getting rid of this guy who's threatening us right now. You know, some Russian-sponsored guys tried to burn down the prime minister's house. I mean, that just came out in court. It's not like we're sort of sitting here all immune from this thing. So how could we deal with this? There's got to be either one side is going to win and the other side lose or vice versa.

So either Ukraine is going to win and Russia is going to lose or the other way around. And what we could do is give the Ukrainians the stuff so they shoot down the missiles coming into Ukraine. Give them the 220 billion euros that belongs to Russia sitting in Brussels so they can buy weapons. give them to cut off all Russian oil exports so that Russia has no more money. You know, we could help them a lot. We could help them win this war, but we are all just sort of, you know, wanting this negotiation, not wanting to push things too far. And while we're busy doing that, the Ukrainians are getting on with it as best they can

and doing a pretty good job even without what we're doing. I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. I have family in Ukraine, you know, people watching the show before. I don't want to repeat myself. But I'm also analyzing the logic of what you're saying, and I don't know that that works for me because if we give the Ukrainians what they need to win, whatever that means, surely Putin in the desperate straits that he's in will only continue to escalate as much as he can all the way up to using what tactical nuclear weapons?

Or like, where do we go? Well, so that is the exact reason, that sort of logic flow that you've just laid out, is the exact reason why Biden gave the Ukrainian. all the weapons they wanted, but he said, you can't use them hitting targets in Russia, which is the worst thing in the world. I mean, it's actually, you know, even though Trump has cut off Ukraine fully, for reasons of his own making, that means that Americans can't tell Ukraine not to hit Russia. And anyone who's been watching the news, you know, the images of these oil refineries in Moscow

and St. Petersburg blowing up are quite extraordinary. So that was the logic. It's all going to lead to nuclear Holocaust. We don't want to go there. Let's not even consider this. But let's just think about what happens if he uses a nuclear weapon. Does he win the war? So let's say he hits Kiev with a nuclear attack.

What happens the next day? Did the Ukrainians give up? Are they completely discombobulated and they can't? I don't think so. It's a highly dispersed country. It's a very big country. The Russians are the main problem they're having is they can't get across the front line. Are all the guys operating the drones all dead?

No, they're all over the place. They're not dead. And so all he's done is then all of a sudden, the Chinese are saying, well, we can't give you any more money. And the rest, I mean, to the extent that the global South is supporting Putin, they all step away. And so Putin becomes, you know, an absolute fully defined war criminal, having committed atrocities against civilians, and he hasn't won the war. And so he understands that probably the long.

of a nuclear weapon is the end of Putin. I mean, that's probably the logic. I mean, he would have already done it if he thought that that was gonna help him. I mean, five years into this war, longer than World War, one, I don't think so. And so, the answer is that the way this could all find itself over is that if the Ukrainians continue at this pace

and continue making life so difficult for the Russians, then I imagine it being like the Korean War. I mean, so my prediction is a Korean War type of thing, where the Korean War, by the way, is still going on. Nobody ever ended it. You have a front line. You have a demilitarized zone. And they're not lobbying stuff at each other anymore.

I imagine that at some point, it's going to become so painful for Putin, all these oil refinery attacks and all the attacks on his economy, that he's not going to then attack Ukrainian civilians anymore because that's going to be the quid pro. quo and then you have a front line and that's and then it eventually just sort of comes down nobody declares nobody negotiates anything nobody declares peace and it eventually just becomes reinforced on both sides and that's where that's how this war ends i think that's the the ultimate ending for this

whole thing i was going to say normally we finish by asking all i guess what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be and you should feel free to answer that but in addition to that one of the things i always wanted to ask you was what is it that you know about the Russian mindset and Vladimir Putin's mindset that most people don't understand? Well, I think the main thing I know about his mindset is that he is a total sociopath. I mean, that we can't negotiate with a sociopath, that everybody looks at him and says, he looks kind of like us, you know, we're all sort of, you know, he's a Christian, he's a Caucasian, you know, he's a European, they say, you know, we must be able to talk to him. And,

There is no talking to him. You know, it's, it's, he has, there's not, there's no similarity between him and us in any possible way. And as, as quickly as we can dispose of that, of that notion that he, that he's like us, I think the easier it'll be for us to, um, uh, come up with the policies we need to contain him. So Bill Browder, thank you so much for coming on the show. And of course, the story that you told us and Sergey's story is told very beautifully and in much more detail in your book, Red Notice. Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.