Frontline special - 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 Times Radio's interview series about the war in Ukraine and global security. I'm James Hansen and today I'm delighted to be joined by Sir Bill Browder, the financier and political activist. Sir Bill is also the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005 when he was banned from the country for exposing corruption and

He now campaigns to impose sanctions against corrupt people linked to the Putin regime and to free political activists who have been imprisoned by it. So, Bill, it's always a pleasure. Welcome back to Frontline. Great to be here. First of all, I wonder if you can speak to what we've been seeing from the Trump administration in recent days.

weeks with this increasingly hostile rhetoric towards Ukraine, culminating in the pausing of US military aid to Ukraine. Is there a strategy that the Trump administration is pursuing? Or is this Donald Trump acting on a whim? Well, I'm not sitting in the Oval Office. And I don't know Donald Trump personally, but

Looking at it from a distance, I wouldn't say that there's a strategy, but what I would say is that there's a very strong sort of emotional preference. I think that what we've seen and we can't, you know, there are some people out there that are trying to find some sense in this whole thing. But from what I can see, you know, Trump really doesn't like Vladimir Zelensky. He doesn't like him

I think it all started with the whole Hunter Biden thing where Trump tried to use the withholding of U.S. military aid to Ukraine back in

in exchange for Zelensky coming up with dirt on Hunter Biden. Zelensky didn't do that. The phone call was monitored and that was the basis for his first impeachment. And I think that we shouldn't underestimate, you know, Trump is a guy who likes, who has grudges, who likes to get revenge. And I would imagine that that's probably where the whole thing started.

And of course,

you know, at the same time, we've seen over a long period of time, I would say, that he has a sort of a sense of affinity and warmth towards Vladimir Putin. He defended Vladimir Putin when various journalists called him a murderer. He sided with Vladimir Putin over the US intelligence services when they were investigating Russian interference.

um, in us politics. And so, you know, you've got this grudge that he's got and you've got this affinity that he has. And, um,

And I think that that's kind of where that's kind of what makes it all happen from from my vantage point. And again, I'm not sitting inside his head and I don't know him personally. And that's all I can deduce from this. But it doesn't make sense. It certainly is not in the U.S. national interest to be doing what he's doing. If you would ask the average person in the U.S., you know, who's the bad guy? They would say Putin. They say who's if you ask him who's the hero, they would say Vladimir Zelenskyy.

If you ask anybody in the Republican Party in the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate that question, that's the answer you would get.

And so it's not as if he's acting in some way, feeling like he's riding off the coattails of public opinion. No, he's got his own views. His views are contrary to what the US views are, and he's running with it. It is perplexing. There is clearly something, whatever it is, that explains Donald Trump's affinity for Vladimir Putin. Maybe it's an admiration for his sheer machismo.

But I mean, we had a serving Conservative MP this week, Bill, come out, the former Energy Minister Graham Stewart, posting on X yesterday, and I quote, saying, we have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset. If so, Trump's acquisition is the crowning achievement of Putin's FSB career. Now, a lot of people would come out and say, look, that's baseless speculation. That's not helpful.

But is that potentially a question we should be asking? Well, it's a question that already was asked. There was a major investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians in the 2016 election.

That was called the Mueller investigation. And he wrote a many hundred page report. And in his report, he found all sorts of involvement between his campaign, Trump's campaign and the Russians and the Russians campaign, Russians and his campaign. And a number of people were found to be involved.

doing things that they shouldn't have been doing and prosecuted and sentenced to prison, including Paul Manafort, who was his campaign director, George Papadopoulos, who had worked as a foreign policy aid for him, and various others. Mike Flynn, he was his national security advisor very briefly.

And so there was all sorts of stuff going on. Why were they working with the Russians? Why were they found guilty? Who gave them instructions to do that? You know, that has never been proven. But, you know, I mean, you know, every time anyone talked about all that stuff after Mueller decided not to investigate, he referred to it as the Russian hoax.

And anyone who kept on talking about it suffered from Trump derangement syndrome. And so everyone kept their mouth shut. And here we are with him basically siding with the dictator over the democratically elected victim. And is it a Russian hoax still?

Yeah. And I mean, there are various different theories as to if there is some kind of collusion still, what it might be. The most outlandish suggests that maybe they're not outlandish. Who knows that he was recruited as a Russian agent maybe back in the 1980s. Other theories that there is some compromise on him that Moscow is able to leverage over Trump or even just that there are financial ties between Trump's property empire potentially in Russia. Do you think all of those or any of those are credible, Bill?

I'm sure there's compromise on him. And I'm sure that doesn't create any leverage for the Russians because he's proven to be uncompromisable. He does create stuff that's so outrageous that that would end anyone's career in a day. And he carries on and is the president of the United States. And so I think that that the whole compromise theory should be thrown out completely.

And then there's the theory that Russians had lent him a bunch of money and therefore he was being dutiful to the people who lend him money. But if you look at his history, he's a multiple bankrupt who has defaulted on everyone's loans everywhere. I mean, I come from the world of finance and Trump was considered a no-fly zone when it came to any kind of lending. Nobody would touch him.

And so I don't think that he would be any more deferential to a Russian lending him money than a bunch of bondholders lending him money. He would default on anyone who lends him money if he chose to. And he has. And so I think to the extent that there's some kind of incentive, it would be a new incentive. You know, maybe someone has promised to buy his Trump coin cryptocurrency or or DJT media his his money.

Or, you know, who knows? I don't know. I'm just I'm not I can't I'm not making any allegations. I'm just theorizing about what kind of hold or incentives they might have created. And and and, you know, he's not a guy who who turns away from a conflict of interest. He usually goes towards it. And the Russians are also people who who are very conservative.

sort of enthusiastic about putting incentives out there to see who goes for them. So, you know, that could be.

Or it could just be that, I mean, I saw another theory being thrown around out there that if you remember, Trump was very disparaging towards people from, quote, shithole countries. And that's his words, not mine. And maybe he considers Ukraine to be a, quote, shithole country. And Russia is a big power and that he wants to be deferential towards the power and not towards this, you know, sort of desperate, weak little country.

You know, it could be any of those things or none. And are you of the view, Bill, that what we've seen in the last week in particular is not just the U.S. abandoning Ukraine, but switching sides so that Trump is now actively pro-Russia in this conflict? That's what's happened. I mean, it's no question. So he has done everything possible.

That Vladimir Putin would want. Well, not everything. There's still a few more things that he could do that he probably will do. But so far, he's voted with Russia at the UN against the resolution calling Russia the aggressor alongside Russia, Iran, North Korea.

He has brought Putin in from the cold and sort of created open diplomatic relations. He has made public suggestions of bringing Russia into the G7.

Um, he's humiliated, um, uh, Russia's adversary, Vladimir Zelensky in, in, in the most horrible way. Um, and, and then the most materially he has cut off military aid for Ukraine, which is, you know, this is like a whole, every, every one of these things that would be on Putin's wishlist. Now there's two more things, um, that, that could really, um, be very helpful to Putin is if, um,

If Trump withdraws from or actually pulls out U.S. troops from Eastern Europe and then basically says or indicates that he's not going to honor Article 5 of NATO, the provision of the NATO treaty that says all for one and one for all, that could be really dangerous.

I think it's likely. And then the second thing is that he lifts all U.S. sanctions on on Russia. Those are the two things that he hasn't done that are on Putin's wish list. And and I think we should probably predict that they will happen. What I find remarkable is that Donald Trump has always tried to project himself as a strong man. But by giving in to all of Vladimir Putin's demands,

He is projecting American weakness, is he not? Does he see it in that light? I mean, were he to, as you say, agree to the withdrawal of US troops from Europe and undermine NATO further, he would essentially have given Vladimir Putin what the Soviet Union and the Russians have been trying to achieve since the days of Joseph Stalin. Does he see it in those terms? He doesn't see it in any terms. All he sees is what he wants to do for whatever his own reasons are for wanting and

We don't know those reasons. We've speculated. And then he'll create a narrative around that. And, you know, look, on January 6th, a bunch of people, you know, attacked police officers, stormed the Capitol, tried to take over the government. And he created a narrative that that was all fine. He's good at creating narratives. He's one of the most brilliant sort of people.

public narrative creators I've ever seen. And he doesn't care what the truth is. He just cares what he wants. And then he sort of bends public opinion to what he wants to do. And I mean, of course, that's the sign of a powerful leader, but he's a powerful leader doing stuff that doesn't serve the U.S. national interest. And it certainly doesn't serve

interests of people here in the UK and elsewhere. A lot has been made of how the Republican Party really has become the Trump Party now. But you would have thought there are still some Republicans who are very nervous about this idea that the US is just rolling over to the whims of a Russian dictator like Putin. And I was struck by the body language of Marco Rubio sitting in the Oval Office on Friday when J.D. Vance and Trump were haranguing Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Do you think we may see fractures within the Trump administration over their approach to Russia? Well, I think this is probably a threshold issue for a lot of people. I mean, I know Marco Rubio. He was actually one of the one of the strongest people in the U.S. Senate when it came to dictators and Russia and Putin. I mean, he was you know, he he has, you know, firsthand knowledge of all this stuff. And and

And he was like one of the people we would always go to when we needed help in the Senate. And so, I mean, I can't imagine how painful it is for him to be, you know, he signed up to be Secretary of State. And so his job is to, you know, work for the president and follow the policies of the president. I can't imagine the cognitive dissonance sitting in that room when J.D. Vance and Trump were beating up on Zelensky. I mean, I can't imagine how uncomfortable that must have been for him.

What I can say is that he's not going to he's either going to quit or carry on doing what he's doing and supporting Trump, because that's those are the only two options as a member of the cabinet.

But there's a lot of people elected politicians in the Republican Party that have a much tougher situation on their hands, which is that if they go on all the talk shows supporting Trump in two years time in the in the next elections, they may lose because of this.

And so they may decide to, to, and, and, and by the way, Trump and his, uh, he has a very, very thin majority to get any legislation passed. I think it's only two, two members of the house of representatives and I think two people in the Senate. And so, um,

he's got, you know, that's a potential place where the opposition can come in. But I should point out that that doesn't help us and that doesn't help Ukraine because the U.S. Congress is a co-equal branch of government to the executive branch when it comes to domestic policy. But on foreign policy, Trump can do anything he wants.

I wanted to get your take, Bill, on this proposed minerals deal between the US and Ukraine. We've spoken about it a lot in recent days on Frontline, and I suppose there are two ways of looking at it from a Ukrainian perspective. One is this is just the mercantilist exploitation of Ukraine's natural resources, plundering them at their hour of greatest need, trying to extract more GDP from Ukraine than was extracted from Germany after they lost the First World War.

On the other hand, you could make the argument, which indeed Trump himself has, that by having American workers on the ground tapping into those natural resources, you offer a form of security against future Russian aggression. How do you see it?

Well, I don't buy that at all. I mean, there were Americans on the ground. There's American companies on the ground in Ukraine all throughout this whole ordeal, and that hasn't stopped Putin from doing what he's doing. I mean, I think the whole thing is really distasteful that you have a president

an ally who's on its knees because of an invasion, an unprovoked invasion, a war of aggression, and then try to extort the ally for nothing. America wasn't going to offer any security guarantees. This was supposed to be a payback for money that America had given to Ukraine as a grant. And so the whole thing looks really awful and distasteful.

um but there is one sort of saving grace for those people who care about ukraine which is that ukrainians have restructured the language of this into a nothing so that the the minerals deal is a framework agreement so they sign this they sign a framework agreement to come to a further agreement about what ukraine and what america puts into into a possible investment in rare earth minerals

And for what it's worth, before I was a political activist fighting for sanctions on Russia, my main job was as an investor in the former Soviet Union. I ran the largest foreign investment fund in that part of the world.

And I looked at anything and everything where you could potentially make money. And never in the, and all the time that I did that, was there ever a discussion about rare earth minerals in Ukraine? I'm not even sure they have any rare earth minerals or if they do, um,

I mean, I think everybody has rare earth minerals. It's just a question of how much it costs to get out of the ground. And it was never sort of an economic opportunity in my time there. And so I think this whole thing is sort of a big fantasy that's been created and everyone's sort of jumping around talking about this. And if this is what it takes to keep Trump

You know, supplying military aid Ukraine. Great. You know, send over this framework agreement and sign it up and have a big festival around it. But otherwise, it just looks like, you know, it has it's distasteful to start out with. And it's not it's not clear to me that it is anything that anyone's being offered. Anyone's offering anyone else in this situation. Yeah.

You mentioned sanctions a moment ago. I wonder if you feel this has got to be the time now where we look seriously at seizing those frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine's defense. Well, here we are in a situation where America supplies about 40 percent of the necessary money for Ukraine to fight this war. We, together with Europe and a few other allies, supply 60 percent. The person supplying the 40 percent has now announced they're no longer supplying it.

Ukraine needs 100% in order to keep on defending themselves. And so the question is, is the British taxpayer going to pay for that? Or is Vladimir Putin going to pay for that? Because we have Vladimir Putin's money here. And I don't know how Rachel Reeves can stand up in front of Parliament and say anything other than that money should be confiscated and that money will be spent on defending Ukraine to fill in for the American shortfall because anything else would be political suicide.

How quickly could it be done? How quickly could you seize those assets and start using them to fund Ukraine's defense? Today. It could be done today. We've already made the legal decision that we can seize the interest on those assets. And there's no difference between the interest and the principal from a legal standpoint. Now, money could be seized today and it should be seized today. And then we should put in orders for whatever equipment Ukraine needs

ideally from European manufacturers, but from wherever, so that Ukraine can continue to fight this war and defend themselves and that the front lines don't collapse. And how fundamentally, if we did make that decision today, how fundamentally do you think it would shift the momentum of this war? Well, I don't think it'll, I mean, I think the momentum is shifting very radically against Ukraine, because even with the money,

you know, what happens when Elon Musk turns off Starlink? You know, we need to come up with an alternative for that.

What about the long range missiles that the US provided that they won't provide? Is there an alternative to that? What about the Patriot missile batteries that are used for air defense that come from America? Where is the alternative going to come from that? And so even with the money, there's still a lot of practical things that the US has done that they're going to stop doing.

that we need to figure out an alternative. Now, I don't think it's a doomed situation. Ukrainians have proven, you know, when Russia invaded that even though things look bad, they could push back hard and they care about it and they will push back hard. But this definitely is a major, major body blow to Ukraine and many more people will die because of this decision.

So seizing those frozen Russian assets immediately. What else would you like to see, Bill? What else could Ukraine's European allies in particular be doing right now to help? Well, I think the main thing that needs to be done in addition to that is for us to form a

A modified defense pact, which is that without America in NATO, we need to now look at what that, you know, I'm sure they're doing it, but we need to come up with a plan, which is what if Putin moves on Estonia? What are we going to do? How do we stop him? How do we scare him from doing that?

And again, we're not doomed. We have a lot of resources compared to Putin, and Putin is also exhausted. But if we don't get up on that real quick, Putin will do a lot of stuff that makes

everything he's done so far look like child's play. I mean, we are in for a really very difficult time going forward if we don't become a proper deterrent, proper military deterrent to Vladimir Putin. Do you think the past week or so has been the moment that those European leaders have woken up fully to the threat posed by Putin? Because a lot of people have said we've had wake up calls for years and yet we've hit the snooze button every time we've deferred the problem.

Do you think given the rhetoric coming out of the White House in the past week or so, this is now the moment that Europe gets it? Yeah, I think I do think so. And you can see that in the language of the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who has basically come out and said that. And he said it and he said, you know, we're going to have to create an 800 billion euro fund to fund our defense.

And by the way, there's one fringe benefit which nobody's been talking about, which is that the German economy has been in a real state of desperation because of cheap Russian gas no longer being available and the Chinese market no longer being so robust.

But this massive investment in defense will create all sorts of economic activity in Germany that they hadn't counted on. And it might very well in other parts, you know, the Russian economy has done well off of their defense spending. Well, we're going to start spending on defense probably from borrowed money and borrowing from the future, which is unfortunate. But that might give us an economic fill up as well.

Just finally, Bill, if you are Vladimir Putin, what is the one thing you don't want to see the Europeans doing? What is it that the Europeans could do that would strike fear in the Kremlin? Is it just getting serious in defence, ramping up our defence budgets? Is it providing, for example, Germany giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine? Is it the seizing of those assets or is it something else? What would most worry Putin at this point? I think if we seize the 300 billion, that's a major body blow to him. At that point,

Ukraine can live to fight another day. And, you know, whatever Donald Trump is doing to try to bully Europe and Ukraine, that money goes a long way. So, Bill Browder, we always appreciate your insights and your analysis. Thank you for joining us again on Frontline. Thank you. Thank you.

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