Frontline special - financier and Putin critic Sir Bill Browder
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Alex Dibble and I executive produce the podcast. The World in 10 is partnered with Frontline, the interview series from Times Radio, available on YouTube, with expert analysis of the world's conflicts. At the weekend, we bring you Frontline interviews in full. Here's one from this week. I hope you find it interesting.

Hello and welcome to Frontline with me, Philip Ingram. Now today we're talking to Sir William Browder. Sir William is CEO of Hermitage Capital.

the head of the global Magnitsky justice campaign and author of Red Notice and Freezing Order. I think that was back in 2022. So, William, Bill, welcome back to Frontline. Great to be here. Things are getting interesting when it comes to commentary that's not just coming out of the White House, but coming out of NATO and Mark Rota. We had Mark Rota in London yesterday.

and Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General in London on Monday. And he said, if countries don't step up and start spending 5% of their GDP on defence, and he says NATO is going to sign up to this or agree to this at their end of June, I think 24th, 25th of June conference. But he says, if we don't sign up to this, then we better start to learn to speak Russian.

Is he right? Well, I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but he's not wrong in that in his sentiment. What you have going on in the world is that Vladimir Putin is a dictator. He's a dictator who only knows one way of staying in power, which is to instead of having his own people be mad at him, have them mad at a foreign enemy.

And the best way to keep them mad at a foreign enemy is to be at war with somebody. And of course, Ukraine is his current conquest, but he's made it very clear and many other people in the Russian apparatus have made it clear that they have their eyes on other countries, the Baltics, Poland.

And of course, they're constantly wagging their finger at the UK and various other countries that are providing support for Ukraine and saying that we're in the line of fire. And so I don't think that we should be under any illusion that Putin is going to somehow stop and mind his own business.

Now, to say that we are going to learn Russian if we don't spend 5% of our GDP on defense, I think that that's a little bit of an exaggeration. I think that we're currently at a little bit more than 2%. That's way too little. There are plans to go up higher than that, but I think it's

It's a bit crazy to say that we're going to lose a war to Russia unless we get up to 5% because Putin, of course, is also struggling with his own problems. But I don't disagree with his sentiment and his urging, which is we need to defend ourselves. And particularly the UK, which has let the military kind of hang out to dry and focus on other issues over the last 20 years. And we're now in a position where

where in the UK we really are vulnerable and particularly vulnerable if we don't have the collective action of a lot of other countries to be on our side. Well, I'll explore that in a minute. But I think what you're saying here is Vladimir Putin has no intention for ceasefire or stopping the war on Ukraine. And

At the same time, we heard from the head of the Bundesnachrichtdienst, the German intelligence services, that he was predicting that Putin would start to test NATO's Article 5 in the coming weeks, months, years. Do you think Putin has an intention of or any desire at all to stop the war? And do you think he will try and test NATO Article 5? Well, Putin definitely has no intention of stopping the war.

And Putin has every intention of seeing whether NATO is a functional defense organization. And of course, Putin has been given a great incentive to test Article 5 from Donald Trump. Donald Trump has made various statements a while ago and more recently that he doesn't necessarily intend to defend us if we're attacked by Russia.

And that's what Article 5 is. Article 5 says all for one and one for all in NATO. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is saying there is not one for all or all for one in NATO. It all depends on conditions. And all of a sudden, when there's conditions,

the whole concept of a collective defense apparatus goes right out the window. And so Putin has a lot of incentive to test Article 5. I don't think that he particularly wants to go to war with the West. I don't think he's got a lot of resources at this particular moment in time to go to war with the West. But he does have one particular strength that we don't have, which is that he just doesn't care how many soldiers he loses.

Every day he loses between 1,000 and 1,500 soldiers. If we lost 10 days worth of 1,000 soldiers, there would be a collapse of the government. And so he can do a lot of things, even with military resources that are far inferior to us or collectively us, when I say NATO. And he can do stuff which, you know, he can tolerate the pain because he's a dictator. He doesn't have to be reelected. He doesn't run a

pluralistic democratic regime where people argue about whether what's the right thing and the wrong thing to be doing. And so, you know, he's a very dangerous man. He can tolerate enormous losses compared to us.

And he needs to be at war in order to stay in power. And so that's a pretty dangerous mix. Well, you talk about losses. I was going to come on to that in a minute, but I'll touch it now. Yesterday, according to Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, and it's been backed up by UK Defense Intelligence in their assessments today, we hit the milestone of one million Russian dead people.

or wounded soldiers. And I was reading a report on Russian medical, frontline medical capability, which described that most Russian soldiers that get severely wounded will die a few days later because there aren't the medical treatments to treat them at the frontline and to deal with the infections and everything else. So that 1 million is more dead than wounded.

Given the shockingly bad medical support, given the information that's getting back out to families again, in reality, how significant is this milestone, A, to the Russian people? Are they aware of it? B, Vladimir Putin? And C, Donald Trump? Well, so first of all, I think it's an accurate figure. I think that the numbers are

are quite extraordinary as well. I mean, if you look at the number of people killed in Afghanistan over a 10-year period, it was like 15,000. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable. I mean, you know, 15,000 and you had mothers and wives and children, you know, up in arms, and you've got a million and everyone's keeping their mouth shut. Now,

Of course, in a country of 141 million people, if a million people are died or severely injured,

injured, surely they have wives and sisters and sons and mothers and fathers and so on. And so I can imagine that probably, you know, 15% of the population is personally affected by the death and destruction of this. And so then the question is, why aren't those people rising up? Why aren't they then like, you know, protesting and defying the government?

And the answer is that anybody who raises their voice in Russia right now goes to jail. You don't have to do anything other than tweet about it and you get locked up for seven or eight years. You can just call the war a war. If you don't call it a special military operation, you get a seven-year jail sentence. And as long as Putin is effective at running what I describe as a totalitarian regime,

A million dead, five million dead doesn't affect his standing because everyone is just so scared. Now, that may not always be the case. There may be a moment when people say, you know what, there's nothing to lose anymore. Let's let's stand up. And if that moment were to come and you have a million people marching on Red Square,

He can't kill another million people because at that point, you know, the people who are doing the killing may say, you know, we're going to turn our arms on him. And so it's a fragile, brittle situation. But Russia has had a lot of history with dictators. You know, 25 million people, dictatorships.

died under Stalin in wars and so on. And many more people died in famine. And I mean, it's, you know, the amount of suffering that Russia has historically suffered. I mean, the terrible things that they've, they've, uh,

experienced means that they have a lot more capacity for pain than we could ever imagine in our sort of developed, comfortable Western society. Yeah, well, it is. The Russians seem to be able to absorb lots of pain from a national perspective. But Donald Trump keeps talking about the casualties and reducing it. And that's why he's trying to push for peace and everything else rather than it being the Nobel Peace Prize. I was being cynical. What do you think he's going to make of this

one million milestone because we haven't heard anything out of the White House when we're recording this. It may come later. Well, I think he's got his he's pretty busy right now sending out his own military to Los Angeles to supposedly quell the riots about the

immigration enforcement. So he's not really paying attention to all the dead bodies in the Russian military. The one thing that I would say is that if he does, you know, he said in the past, he's very upset by all the killing that's going on, all the young men that are dying.

First of all, I don't believe that, but let's just take him at face value. If he is so upset, then the last thing he should be doing is withdrawing Patriot missile defense. Apparently they've...

The United States, under Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has said that they're no longer going to provide military aid. They've just rerouted a bunch of drone defense that was supposed to be sent to Ukraine, 20,000 weapons from Ukraine to the Middle East.

And so there are, you know, I could list on a piece of paper all the different things that they're doing to create more death, not less death in Ukraine and in Russia. And so I think it's I don't think that we can take it at face value that Donald Trump is in his heart very sad and concerned about the number of young men dying in battle.

Do you think Vladimir Putin is part of the reason why the people aren't rising up is he's buying their silence because a lot of the casualties are coming from the extremely poor parts of Russia and the monies that are being given and other things that have been given to the families as compensation for those that get formally declared as killed in action. There's a lot of action to try and stop.

Lots of people being declared as that is massive for people. And that in its way is it's initially buying silence, but it's building up a problem that Putin is going to have to deal with at some stage in the future from a from an economic perspective.

Well, there's all sorts of different issues with that. First of all, they don't have an unlimited amount of money in Russia. The oil revenues are down. Gas revenues have dried up completely because they're not exporting gas to Europe. The reserve, the central bank reserves are frozen. There's all sorts of economic problems. It's not like they have money to just slosh around. They do have money, but not not that kind of money.

The second thing is that the reason why a lot of people have gone to war is because they were paid money. They were paid enormous sign on bonuses to effectively go to war and die. And doing that kind of recruiting, they've effectively emptied out the provinces, the poor provinces, right?

If you go to Moscow and you look at the number of people who have been killed in this war versus Boratria or Ingushetia, which are very poor provinces, the numbers are like 10 or 15 times higher in the poor provinces. And that works for a while until all the people who you could sign up in the poor provinces have already signed up and died. And then where do you get the next round of soldiers from?

And and that's going to be a problem, because when you bring this war closer to the elite, to the to the middle class, to the people in in the wealthier cities, those people have more political power than than people who are destitute, who are living in far, far off regions that are very poor. And so that creates a problem.

The one thing I can say is that Putin has been so, so careful about, first of all, calling this a war. He calls it a special military operation and, of course, imprisons people who call it a war. And the reason he is that way is because if it's called a war and then he starts recruiting soldiers or demanding, conscripting soldiers in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then it really is a war.

And then the general population has to say, are we ready to be at war? Why are we at war? What's this war about? What do we get from it? And then they see, well, actually, we're not getting a whole lot from it. All we're getting is a lot of death.

a lot of economic pain. And why are we fighting these people in Ukraine? They're practically like our brothers and sisters over there. What's this about? How is it that they're our enemies? And I think that that's what he's afraid of, which is why he doesn't want to do a general conscription. And that's why he pays poor people in the regions who, by the way, are of a totally different ethnicity. These are not the sort of brothers and sisters, people intermarried, et cetera. These are people with different ethnic backgrounds entirely.

And, um, uh, but he's got a problem because at some point he's got to then ratchet it up. And, and, um, and how does he, how does he do that in a way that, um, doesn't end up having the Russian population eventually question him. And that, that's his, that's his challenge. Yeah. But, but the war is coming home. You're Donald Trump. Um,

Whenever J.D. Vance ambushed Zelensky in the Oval Office and Donald Trump then picked up that ambush and drove it home, turning around and saying to President Zelensky, you don't have any cards to play. Well, I think we've seen a few aces recently with the Operation Spider's Web attacking Russian strategic bombers.

the Kirsch Bridge being attacked again, daily attacks on Russian defence industry and a number of other audacious attacks including the assassination of generals in Moscow.

They can't keep that from the people in the same way, especially as it's being discussed all over Russian telegram channels. What sort of effect do you think that that's having on, again, the Russian people and more personally to Vladimir Putin? Well, I think it's a total shock and humiliation to Vladimir Putin.

I mean, he doesn't have a very good military. He never has. Remember, they launched this three-day war and then all of their tanks got stuck in the mud and all the soldiers were killed. And of course, they have had a huge advantage for a long time during this war, actually because of Biden, not because of Trump, who said, you can fight back and use the weapons that we provide you as long as you don't use them inside Russian territory.

And the Ukrainians really needed the weapons because there's a lot of stuff coming at them from all different directions. And they use the weapons and we're grateful for the weapons. But we're basically fighting with one hand tied behind their backs because they you know, how do you fight a war against an enemy if you can't hit them in their own territory when they're amassing, you know, large movements of troops on the other side of the border and and so on and so forth?

And so the irony here is that even though Biden was providing weapons, he provided this or he put on this terrible constraint on the Ukrainians. So Trump is not providing weapons. But in doing so, he doesn't have the moral authority to tell them don't, you know,

If you do something that we tell you you shouldn't do by hitting them inside their own territory, we're going to withhold weapons because they've already withheld weapons. And so so the Ukrainians were able to do some audacious things. This this Operation Spider Web of taking out a third of the strategic bombers of Russia.

$7 billion worth of weapons using a bunch of $500 drones, I mean, is a historic act of military genius that they couldn't have done if we had told them to stop or not hit targets inside of Russian territory. And so the Ukrainians have really shown that they have cards.

I don't think Trump is happy with that because Trump seems to want to have the Ukrainians surrender and, you know, have a new joint military economic alliance with Russia.

But that doesn't seem to be, you know, it's not going his way in the same way as it didn't go Putin's way with the war ending in three days. You know Vladimir Putin personally better than many of us. How will this sort of thing be affecting him personally? You know, is he someone that's going to be secretly fuming? We know the head of the Russian Air Force was sacked very quickly. I'm surprised he hasn't taken up window cleaning. Or if he has, that hasn't been reported yet. But what...

How will Putin be dealing with this as an individual? Really badly. So Putin rules Russia as a strong man. And the analogy that I like to use is that Russia is like a prison yard. And, you know, in Putin's first day in the prison yard, even though he's a small guy, he goes out with a shank in his hand.

sock, goes to the biggest guy in the yard and then repeatedly stabs him in front of everybody to show what a brutal and terrible guy he is. And so everybody respects him in the prison yard. That's Putin's style of governing.

And so and it works. Everyone's scared of him. And like, you know, Bogosian, the guy from Wagner who defied him, he went down in a in a plane crash that was obviously orchestrated by the Kremlin. So so Putin doesn't do humiliation well because humiliation shows that he's not as strong. He's not this brutal guy in the prison yard that with his shank that he can be really humiliated. And so.

And that is not good at all. And so but the one thing I've seen Putin do many times over is he doesn't react immediately to humiliation. He always calculates and tries to figure out his best way of hitting back.

And so I don't think that there has been a retaliation yet. I mean, there's been lots of bombs hitting the Ukrainians as it happens every day. But I'm sure he's cooking up something really awful, something unimaginable, unforgivable that he's going to do at some point in time in the future in reaction to that. And I don't know what it's going to be. And I would imagine that the best way for the Ukrainians to deal with this

is just to continue to humiliate him just over and over again. That's the best way because at some point they may actually set off a chain reaction in Russia where everyone says, well, this guy is just a weakling. And if they can get to him, if they can incite the Russian people to get to him before Putin does something really awful,

That's their best defense. Oh, when you've wrestled the initiative in military terms, you always try and maintain that initiative and keep going. So, you know, Operation Spider's Web, then we had the same thing coming out of grain trucks on a train that attacked the train that was carrying...

Russian armour and derailed it and destroyed a lot of the armour. Then we had the Kersh Bridge and then we're getting lots more. So if President Zelensky or the head of the SBU or the head of the HUR, General Bodanov, is listening, keep the momentum going, I think, is the advice that we're giving you. But, you know...

Every time we get into this position and Donald Trump is backed into yet another statement where he's given Putin an ultimatum to come up with his terms for ceasefire terms of agreement, he then seems to ignore it and throw yet another lifeline to Putin and tends to accuse Zelensky again of being the perpetrator or the bad guy in the room.

Why is Trump doing this? What do you think his motivations are? Well, Trump, I don't know what his motivations are. And I could speculate all day long, but it wouldn't be very helpful. All I can say is that Trump is on Putin's side. Let's just, you know, call a spade a spade. It's obvious.

You know, he instructed today Marco Rubio to congratulate Russia on some national holiday. I can't remember what the day, what their, but, you know, it's absurd the way in which Trump has sided with Putin. The United States voted with Russia, North Korea and Iran on resolutions of the United Nations yesterday.

Trump continuously makes all sorts of excuses for Putin. And then he continues to not support Ukraine. And so, you know, it's you don't have to be imaginative here. This is not Trump derangement syndrome. It's just looking at the facts. And the facts are that that Trump.

for whatever reason, and I don't know his motivations, but for whatever reason, has decided that he wants to side with Russia, side with Putin against Ukraine. And we should just get used to that. We should figure out what our plan B is without the United States supporting Ukraine.

Ukraine needs to figure out their plan B. And by the way, their plan B is to fight back no matter what, even if they had never gotten any military support. The babushkas, the old ladies, were filling up bottles of Molotov cocktails when the invasion first happened. The Ukrainians will defend themselves until the final death because they'll be killed if Russia occupies. And so from their perspective, this is a war of survival either way.

From our perspective, as in the United Kingdom, in the European Union, it's our war, too, because as Mark Rutte from NATO said, you know, if we don't fight them, we're going to be speaking Russian, whether it's 5% or 3% of our budget on military aid. You know, we have to contain them as well, which means we should do whatever we can to help the Ukrainians while they're the ones on the front line.

You mentioned NATO and you mentioned Mark Rota again. There's the upcoming NATO conference that's happening. And Bloomberg have managed to get their hands on an early agreed statement coming out from NATO. And all the diplomats agree it beforehand so that the main leaders sitting around the table don't have to argue about things. But it seems as if they're getting away from...

overtly supporting Ukraine. They're still putting Russia out as the greatest threat to NATO at the moment, but they're not linking Russia and Ukraine, and there's not going to be a lot of discussion around Ukraine, certainly in the overt bit and what's going to be in the final statement. What do you think Putin will make of that? Well, I think Putin will be licking his lips. This is like his dream come true. I mean, he couldn't have imagined such a bonanza, such a windfall

as this. I mean, it completely comes out of left field. I mean, he was really isolated and beleaguered and fighting all the most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world. And all of a sudden, the single most powerful, wealthiest country in the world, the United States of America,

has switched sides. NATO is not making that decision. This is a United States decision, and they're just trying to come up with something to keep some cohesion within NATO. It's an absolute 100% bonanza for Vladimir Putin to have NATO weakened like that in a way that

he could have never hoped for. There was no amount of dead soldiers or money spent that could have gotten that type of strategic military success as that statement. But at the same time, when we listen to a lot of the Russian rhetoric that's coming out, they're blaming the UK in particular for its support to Ukraine. And I think...

I can't remember if it was Lavrov or Petrov that blamed the UK for its support for Operation Spider's Web. Why do you think...

your Russians seem to be carrying out this deliberate tactic of, you know, every time something goes wrong for them, they pick on the UK and they use the UK as their battering ram. Well, two reasons. First of all, they can't give full credit to Ukraine because that would be humiliating to say that their weak little neighbor was able to inflict such pain on them. And so they have to, they say, this is a big conspiracy involving a lot of other countries.

And the UK has been the most upfront, strident supporter of Ukraine, you know, starting with Boris Johnson and then with every prime minister right through Keir Starmer.

And when the United States started to pull out of supporting Ukraine, it was Keir Starmer hosting a conference of the Coalition of the Willing. It was Keir Starmer who is inviting all the foreign leaders together. And so the UK is sort of an obvious target. I mean, the fortunate thing for us is that we're physically further away from Russia than a lot of other countries that they have easier access to.

But it doesn't make life any more comfortable for us as we sit there and listen to these threats and know that Putin is a guy who wants to keep on going. And so why wouldn't he do something terrible to us? He probably will. I don't think he's going to start a war with us because even if the United States doesn't defend us, we still have a lot of allies in NATO who would defend us.

But it's still pretty awful what's going on, which is why we need to continue defending Ukraine, because if it's not Ukraine fighting, then it will be us fighting. So we have to push America away, or they're pushing themselves away, and Europe has to take over. But...

Within that, we have to understand how we can then properly influence and take control of the initiative around Vladimir Putin. How do we get that political initiative over Putin? Well, I think that the most important thing that we need to do in order to create some

A real deterrence is that we need to go out, go and confiscate the 300 billion dollars of frozen Russian assets that sit in in EU and UK bank accounts that we have frozen. We should confiscate that money and that money should be the defense assets.

fund for defending Ukraine. And then that money should be used to fund the purchase of highly lethal weapons that the Ukrainians can use to fire on Russia to push them back. And then beyond that, we should, instead of doing these incremental sanctions, which we've done, we should just make it illegal for any of our trading partners to buy Russian oil.

Just say, if you buy Russian oil, we're not going to trade with you anymore. And you choose. And I think a lot of people will say, you know what, it's great to have some cheap Russian oil, but we don't want to lose the European markets and the UK market, etc. And if they did that, then Putin would be pretty quickly out of business.

And, and, and, and we could do that without the United States and the United States is very important we need the United States. It's much more expensive and painful and deadly if the United States is not involved but the United States is not the only game in town, the economies of the UK plus Europe.

are nearly the size of the U.S. economy. The amount of military equipment that we have collectively is way, way more than what Russia has. And so it's an absurdity to think that we can't fight back. We can't help Ukraine. We can't create problems for Vladimir Putin. But we do have this one issue, which is that there's so many different countries in this

block of neighbors. You know, there's 27 member states. There are some who are on Putin's side. It's a very difficult coalition to cobble together. But there's a few very important members of the coalition, Germany in particular,

with a new chancellor who's just approved a trillion dollar budget, defense budget to rearm, who make up a very powerful ally. And of course, the French who have their own nuclear weapons that are independent of the United States and so on and so forth. And so I don't think this is an impossibility, but it's all, you know, a totally new

a new game, a new expensive game that we have to play because of Donald Trump pulling out of this Western alliance. Okay, so finally, you've got your crystal ball sitting in front of you. How do you see the rest of this year playing out and what's coming in the next couple of years? I see this year playing out that the US will formally pull out of funding Ukraine, military aid for Ukraine,

I see the U.S. will be perhaps withdrawing troops from NATO bases in Europe.

I see that the expense of this war will be borne by Europe and the United Kingdom. I see the money being frozen by Russia, frozen by the West of Russia, the $300 billion that we start to confiscate that money. And I see the war being as hot and as unpleasant at the end of the year as it is today. I don't think the war is going to come to an end anytime soon.

And, you know, the one thing that I can't predict, though, is, you know, how does it all work for the Russians? How does it work for Vladimir Putin? He doesn't have an endless supply of money and an endless supply of people.

And and these things, when they when they do come undone, they come undone very quickly. If you remember, we all thought that, you know, Assad was going to be running Syria for the next 30 years. And then all of a sudden in one week, a group of rebels, you know.

took over the country. And so, you know, I can't predict that in my crystal ball, but, you know, in a situation where this war carries on, you know, Putin doesn't have indefinite resources to do this. And so we'll see. Bill, Sir William, many thanks for talking to me once again on Frontline. And please keep that crystal ball polished because we'll keep looking into it when we get you back on again. But thank you for talking to me today. Thank you. Thank you.

Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year.

But there is a solution. A new proposal before Congress would close this loophole and ensure these foreign investors pay taxes, just like the actual plaintiffs have to.

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