Browder: “Putin is fighting this war because he’s worried about being overthrown in Russia”

In an interview on CBC last week, financier and political activist Bill Browder tried to explain the mindset of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. He specifically addressed Putin’s motivation for invading Ukraine, and how he could conceivably be beaten.

“Vladimir Putin is very frustrated, whether we do anything or not. He’s a nasty man, he’s got all sorts of complexes. He’s not fighting this war because he hates NATO or he hates Ukraine. He’s fighting this war because he’s worried about being overthrown in Russia. That is his motivation for doing it.

“He’s got a character where you can’t show weakness, you can’t show defeat. But it’s not our business to be pussyfooting around him and try to make him feel good about himself. It’s our business to set up a barrier so he doesn’t end up at the Estonian, Lithuanian or Latvian border having a direct confrontation with NATO. We should be extremely grateful to the Ukrainians for fighting him and fending him off because he’s coming for us next.”

Browder was then asked how you win against someone like Vladimir Putin.

“Basically, you have to be bigger, tougher and more direct than him. You have to stand in his way, and say ‘We’re not going to let you go any further,’ and the way to do that is by saying that you don’t have the money to do that. We have money, we have resources. We have military, you don’t. And if he doesn’t have it, there’s nothing he can do. It doesn’t matter what he thinks.”

Browder, who has been described as Putin’s “nemesis,” lays the blame for the invasion on the west, which has been appeasing and enabling Putin for far too long.

“It’s my opinion that if we would’ve done this properly beforehand, if we would’ve sanctioned Vladimir Putin‘s oligarchs before the invasion, he would’ve seen that we were serious and he might have done a different calculation. But this is our fault. We have all been trying to appease this man. I was screaming from the rooftops for the last six weeks before the invasion, sanction the oligarchs, because if he sees we’re serious, he might do something different.

“Vladimir Putin has spent the last 10 years seeing that we’re not serious, that we don’t do anything, that we have all these different disagreements among the allies, and everyone is so afraid of provoking him that we put him in a position to think that we wouldn’t do anything. But we can’t keep worrying about how he feels about himself. We have to put up an absolute steel barrier, and that steel barrier is complete economic isolation. And to do that, we have to go after the oligarchs, all of the Russian banks, and we probably have to start cutting off the consumption of oil and other national resources from Russia.”

Browder is an American based in the U.K. He’s the CEO of Hermitage Capital, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice campaign and author of Red Notice and Freezing Order.

Most importantly, here’s the list of companies that continue to do business with Russia. They need to withdraw as soon as possible. If not, they should be boycotted in the West. Profits over national security is unacceptable pic.twitter.com/7uhVvXtkCI

— Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) March 8, 2022

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