Russia Insider Issues Dire Warning on Putin

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Russia is in the news every day for its support, overt or covert, of Donald Trump.

But Bill Browder — who knows Russian President Vladimir Putin up close and personal — warns of a far darker side to the Kremlin strongman. Browder is the CEO of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management and spent years doing business in Russia, until he ran into legal trouble under the Putin administration. You might have seen Browder on television commenting on some of the recent stories out of Russia. Now, in his conversation with Jeff Schechtman on Radio WhoWhatWhy, he goes deeper into the internal problems that Putin is facing.

Browder, having witnessed the anger of the Russian people over the deteriorating conditions in their country, wonders whether Putin might be ousted by some kind of internal resistance. At the same time, he notes that Putin adheres to an old Stalinist-era saying, “No people, no problems.” So far, the Russian strongman has successfully dispatched his enemies through exile, arrest or murder.

Browder also explains why no amount of wealth will ever be enough for the rapacious Putin, and why he is so intent on sowing chaos throughout the world.

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has Russia been so front and center in the American consciousness. One wonders if this is the result of just the current president and his Russia-centric view of the world or if the Russians have actually done something beyond just hacking that is making us and the world sit up and take notice. Certainly, Russian diplomats and citizens turning up dead all over the world and a kleptocracy producing great wealth for Putin and his oligarchs has also contributed. But beyond that, what’s really going on? Few understand today’s Russia better than my guest Bill Browder. Once one of Russia’s largest foreign investors, he was forced to leave the country after which his lawyer was jailed and murdered. He wrote about this in his book Red Notice. Today, Browder joins us once again to talk Russia and all that’s happened in the past couple of years. Bill Browder, thanks so much for joining us.

Bill Browder: Thank you.

Jeff Schechtman: Have we all gone a little crazy with our obsession with Russia of late or are there really things happening that we should genuinely be concerned about?

Bill Browder: Well, there’s been stuff that we should’ve been genuinely concerned about for the last 15 years while Vladimir Putin has been running Russia and it’s been a slow catchup from perception to reality. Putin is a different type of leader than any other head of state in that Putin has been stealing money hand over fist to the tune of 200 billion dollars for himself in his presidency. Russia is effectively a mafia organization in which he’s the capo and the only difference between this mafia organization and the Colombian mafia or the Italian mafia is that Vladimir Putin controls thousands of nuclear warheads.

Jeff Schechtman: Is this all about the money for Putin? Is there a grander foreign policy vision? Is there a grander plan for greater Russia or is it really just about the money?

Bill Browder: Well, it replays with itself. Putin started out just for the money. So, when he first came into power, he wanted to get as much money as he could as quickly as he could. To do so, he had to put a lot of people in jail, he had a lot of people arrested, he had a lot of people killed. Over the course of time, he created a lot of enemies and one thing he also did was, while he was stealing money for himself and the people around him, the top people in Russia were stealing money as well, the average Russian was basically getting nothing. If you were a regular middle class Russian, they don’t have medicine in the hospitals, the teachers aren’t being paid at the schools, there’s huge holes in the roads because they’re not filling them. The country was basically crumbling while Putin and his cronies and his oligarchs were sailing around on superyachts or flying around on Boeing business jets and so on and so forth. After a while, people started to get upset and Putin said to himself, what am I going to do to make sure these people don’t overthrow me? And so that’s when he started this whole idea of creating foreign enemies, invading foreign countries and creating this false scenario that Russia is being surrounded and potentially invaded so they need to fight all these enemies.  

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