STRONG WORDS
Author Bill Browder doesn't hold back when it comes to Russian leader Vladimir Putin
Readers need to understand that everything happening in Russia right now is driven by kleptocracy. So now there is no difference between organized crime and the Russian government. Bill Browder
Vladimir Putin is a serial killer. Bill Browder doesn't mince words. This bestselling chronicler of Putin's criminality has good reason for considering Russia's president a murderous, money-grubbing thug.
After all, Putin wants him dead. That's because Browder, a respected figure in international finance, has been relentless in seeking justice for his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was beaten to death in a Moscow prison in 2008 after exposing fiscal misconduct in high places.
Indeed, in his determination to silence Browder, Putin even came close to persuading Donald Trump to hand him over to Russian authorities.
“Putin's entire presidency started with a mass murder,” says Browder, whose explosive new book, Freezing Order, makes it clear why he's on Putin's hit list. “In order to get elected, he planted bombs on a number of apartments in Moscow and other cities in an act of domestic terrorism — and then blamed it on the Chechens.”
That gave Putin justification for his brutal suppression of the breakaway republic of Chechnya — “he could rise to power on the back of nationalistic fervour.” And that was only the beginning. “Since then he's been involved in many murders of business people and foreign citizens in different countries surrounding Russia. And of course he has embarked on military invasions.”
The latest of these invasions, against Ukraine, might have been averted were it not been for the timidity of Western nations, Browder charges.
“Basically the West has given Putin every reason to believe he could get away with this. He's done so many similar things without consequence. There's Chechnya and the invasion of Georgia. There's Crimea. He's been carpet-bombing civilians in Syria, creating millions of refugees. He's been shooting down passenger planes and poisoning dissidents abroad ... He's doing all this stuff and he's got more and more emboldened. Had we created an environment for strong consequences, he might not have invaded Ukraine.”
In fact, Browder suggests, the West's inaction was worse than mere dithering.
“Vladimir Putin unleashed chemical nerve agents in Salisbury, England, and they had to shut down the town for a week. Yet six weeks later British people were travelling en masse to attend the World Cup in Russia. The absurdity of that says everything.”
There was a time when Browder was the largest foreign investor in Russia. “I always thought Russia was a dishonest place,” he says by phone from New York. But he believed the corruption would lessen. “I thought that as time went on it would go from horrible to bad, that it would go from deeply dishonest to something more in line with what we see in the rest of the world.”
Browder's management of a $4.5 billion Russian hedge fund ended abruptly when Putin expelled him in 2005, claiming he was a threat to national security. In reality, however, Browder was getting to know too much about a dirty money trail involving a powerful, Putin-enabled criminal oligarchy and highlighted by what he sees as the Russian leader's relentless campaign to steal and launder hundreds of billions of dollars and kill anyone who stood in his way.
Browder began telling this story in an earlier bestseller, Red Notice, and continues it in Freezing Order, a book that adds further sinew to its documentation of international criminality. And he wonders whether either of these books would have happened had his 37-year-old lawyer, Magnitsky, not been “taken hostage by corrupt Russian officials and ultimately killed in jail.”
Magnitsky's offence was to have unearthed a $230-million tax fraud scheme, and this new book details the investigative path that would reveal Putin as the ultimate beneficiary.
Browder's emotions over his young lawyer's death are still evident today.
“I'll never forget the moment when I got the call. It was shock, disbelief, horror, heartbreak — and just wishing and wishing that it wasn't true.”
Thanks to Browder's campaigning, the murdered Magnitsky's name is now enshrined in legislation passed in 34 countries, including Canada — legislation enabling Western governments to freeze ill-gotten Russian assets.
Among other things, Freezing Order examines Putin's role in the largest money-laundering scandal Europe has ever seen and zeros in on the Russian president's decision to interfere in the 2016 American presidential campaign in order to ensure Donald Trump's election.
Indeed, Browder has his own blunt explanation for Trump's adoration of Putin.
“My theory is that Trump is in thrall to anyone with a lot of money,” he says now. “Putin has the most money of anyone in the world, and Trump thought he should treat him with great deference and respect because some of that money might come his way.”
Browder concedes that there's always been a huge amount of criminality in Russia but that Putin has taken it to a new level in creating a criminal state. “Readers need to understand that everything happening in Russia right now is driven by kleptocracy. So now there is no difference between organized crime and the Russian government. And the Russian government has all the tools of a sovereign state.”
Putin sees Browder as an enemy of that state.
“Vladimir Putin wants me dead.” Browder, who now lives in London with his family, is quietly blunt in saying this. “I've been threatened with death on numerous occasions directly by the Russian government and also in anonymous emails and text messages. Russia has now issued 18 warrants for my arrest.”
Although Freezing Order is non-fiction, many pages take on the momentum of a thriller as Browder recounts the forces mounted against him — international mobsters, pricey American lawyers and corrupt politicians, process servers, even a vampish seductress who tried to lure Browder into a “honey trap” during a business trip to Monaco.
At times he has felt genuine fear. One incident, described in the opening chapter of his latest book, deals with his arrest under a Russian warrant when he was on a business trip to Spain in 2018. He remembers sitting frightened in the back of a police car and making a snap decision to tweet his arrest to the world along with a photo of him in the vehicle. He would later be freed after an Interpol official advised the Spanish police not to honour the arrest warrant.
“And I was terrified when Donald Trump offered to turn me over to Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki summit.” That was when Trump responded positively to Putin's proposal that the U.S. trade Browder in exchange for 12 Russian intelligence officers suspected of hacking into the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Trump publicly called this an incredible offer, and Browder firmly believes that the U.S. president would have accepted had he thought he could get away with it. “The only reason he didn't proceed was that he was still under investigation by Robert Mueller for collusion with Russia.”
As for Putin's strongman persona: “Putin is extremely vulnerable because if he ever looks weak, the Russian people will take him out. He always has to look strong but Ukraine has made him look weak. The Russian people haven't figured this out yet because there's a total information blockade. But if they were ever to see what we see on TV here, he'd be gone within a month.”