this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour as newsday continues straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. as the russian war machine tries to inject momentum into its ukraine offensive, could it be crippled by the west's economic countermeasures? ten weeks of sanctions have seen foreign currency reserves frozen, oligarch assets seized, and international businesses quit russia. but putin can still count

on his oil and gas income and there's no sign of economic pain forcing a rethink. well, my guest is bill browder, a former big—time investor in russia turned anti—putin crusader. why haven't the wheels yet come off the russian economy? bill browder, welcome to hardtalk. great to be back. it's great to have you here. just a few weeks ago, you seemed almost euphoric about the scale of western sanctions you were seeing being imposed on vladimir putin.

i wonder, with a few weeks more knowledge of the way the war is going and the way the russian economy is going, whether you're a little less euphoric. well, euphoric is probably the wrong sentiment to in any way attribute to this terrible tragedy that's going on with putin and ukraine. what i would say is that the sanctions that have been imposed on putin are more devastating and more unbelievable than any sanctions that have ever been imposed on any country ever. but that's not enough. and as you said in your introduction, we've sanctioned the central bank reserves, we've sanctioned the oligarchs, we've even cut off a number of russian banks from swift. that's sort of the savings of putin. but every day, he earns $1 billion from the sale of oil and gas to germany,

italy, austria, etc, and every day his invasion costs him $1 billion. and so, from an income perspective, he continues to have the money to do this. and so, if we really want to cut him off, we need to stop paying him money to kill ukrainians, which is what's going on right now. i'll get to the oil and gas question, because it's such a big one, injust a moment. but just to stick with the sanctions as they currently exist, you did write this a few weeks ago. you did write, "they're more extreme than i ever imagined, even more than perhaps i would have asked for based on what i thought the west was capable of." and you seem there to be particularly focused on the measures taken against a host of so—called oligarchs, these huge multibillionaire businessmen who have had long association with vladimir putin. do you think you overestimated the impact the sanctions on the oligarchs would have? well, so, first of all, why are oligarchs important? the oligarchs are important because they are the people who hold putin's money for him. so, if you want to sanction

putin, if you want to penalise him financially, you've got to sanction the oligarchs. can you prove that, by the way? well, you can't prove it to a court standard for one simple reason, because the reason putin doesn't hold money in his own name is he doesn't want anyone to be able to prove that he's rich. and so, he has what i call armshake or handshake agreements with these individuals who are basically trustees holding this money on trust for him. but as you, bill browder, are not in the room when these armshake and handshakes take place, how do you know that they do indeed result in vast amounts of putin money being held in the name of other people? well, a lot of different lea ks have come out since all these agreements were made. so, for example, there's a famous anti—corruption activist in russia, alexei navalny. he did an investigation into putin's $1.1; billion villa on the black sea. and he has the receipts that show various oligarchs were sending money in to pay for that villa. similarly, in the panama papers

that came out, there is a very famous russian cellist who was paid $2 billion by russian state banks and russian oligarchs. why would russian state banks and oligarchs pay a cellist $2 billion? the next richest cellist is yo—yo ma, who's worth like 15 million. the reason is because he's putin's best friend from childhood, the godfather of putin's daughter, and the person who introduced putin to his wife. he's a person who holds money for vladimir putin. so that's supposition based on evidence and intuition, that's not entirely fact—based. it's notjust my evidence and intuition. it's the evidence and intuition of the united states government who sanctioned him. and i believe the european union did the same. this is the mafia we're talking about. they don't have, you know, corporate records like we do where you can go in and prove things. you have to... there's a law in the united states called

the rico law which says when all these people start intermixing with each other, you can sue them for racketeering and you don't have to have the same level of evidence. same thing is true here. so, then, the question isjust how far do these sanctions on individuals need to go before you are, in effect, truly punishing vladimir putin and capturing the vast web of financial associations he has? cos, you know, we know of the big names that have been sanctioned thus far — abramovich, deripaska, sechin, a few others as well. is it your contention that governments in the west need to go much further, need to find many, many more individuals? yeah, so, there's two issues. one is that if you look at the list of oligarchs, there's 118 people on the forbes list. only 35 of them have been sanctioned by either of the us, uk, eu or canada. so, there's a whole bunch more that need to be sanctioned. within the 35, some of them have been sanctioned by one place and not the other. and so, you need to conform the lists. and most importantly, the oligarchs also have people who are nominees

and trustees for them. they have friends, wives, daughters, sons, parents who they register the assets in the names of. and so, when you sanction an oligarch, you have to do the whole constellation around them. there's a whole cat—and—mouse game that goes on, that has to go on. so, it'sjust, i'm fascinated by the way you see this playing out. for example, in recent days, sanctions have been expanded to capture family members of key associates of putin. one i can think of immediately is lavrov�*s stepdaughter in london, who happens to have a kensington residence and other assets. she's now being sanctioned. does that kind of personal sanction really make a difference, do you think? oh, it makes a total difference. i mean, this is exactly what they never expected to happen. this hits them where it counts. you hit them with theirfamily members, and you also have to go after their trustees and nominees themselves. and so, for example, abramovich, he has a whole bunch of people around him who have, like, become very

wealthy very quickly. they've all been sanctioned as well by the uk. so, you say that these people matter because they're holding a lot of putin money. but even if putin finds that that money has, in effect, been completely frozen and he's not half as wealthy as you claim he was, and your claim is somewhat astounding. you've said in the past you think he's worth up to $200 billion us. i said that back in 2017. i think it's much bigger than that now. the world's richest man? by far. even elon musk, by the way, admits that he's no longer the world's richest man, that vladimir putin is. right. well, we're never going to be able to prove that with pieces of paper. but nonetheless, even if we accept your contention that that's the truth and that if you get your way with the expansion of the targeted sanctions, putin's wealth will, in effect, be frozen and taken from him. what difference would that make? i spoke very recently to a man you know well, mikhail khodorkovsky, former head of yukos energy company in russia. now a long—term anti—putin campaigner, just like yourself.

and he says that, in the end, hitting the oligarchs doesn't make much difference. they are, to quote him, "putin's footmen. so even if you freeze that money, freeze putin's money, too, the war machine can rumble on." well, first of all, khodorkovsky is exactly right. the oligarchs are total subordinates to vladimir putin. they'll have no effect on him. but the purpose of sanctioning them and in effect vladimir putin himself is not to change his mind. he's not going to change his mind. he might have, by the way, if we had done it in advance, if we had done it ten years ago. but he's not going to change his mind right now. the purpose of sanctioning him is to say, we don't want you to have the money either in russia, with the central bank reserves, outside of russia with your own savings, to be able to pay for this war. but as you just said to me at the beginning of this conversation, the key money, the money that really matters is going in day after day, week after week,

from the energy resources that russia sells, not least to europe and other western allies. and it amounts to, you said, up to $1 billion a day. now that's going to go into russia whether putin is personally sanctioned or not. exactly. so, you have to do two things. one is you've got to cut, you've got to freeze his savings so he can't dip into those savings to get the money. and the second, and as you say, and it's totally correct and it's the elephant in the room, we've got to stop sending him money every day. and there's a talk right now about an oil embargo, a european oil embargo, which would touch some of that money. which even germany, by the way, which you managed to criticise early on in this conversation, germany is now saying it is ready to contemplate. but then we still have the gas. and the gas is huge, and gas is much harder to replace. there's pipes that come in. the infrastructure is not... you can'tjust say, "we're going to go from russian gas to norwegian gas,

and, um, see you later, putin." that's going to be a harder thing to do. but even if we whittle down that billion dollars a day to half a billion dollars a day or whatever the number is, that's significant. and vladimir putin, it's not just the army and the war he's got to support, he's got a whole country to support. and so, the key is just to grind him down, wear him out, and make sure he doesn't have enough money to do all the things that he wants to do. do you think your financial and economic analysis of putin and his vulnerabilities is somewhat western—centric? cos outside of your analysis is another reality. the reality that countries like china, for example, or even powerful economies in the arabian gulf, they are not interested in joining the western sanctions against russia. and i dare say they're not interested injoining any commitment not to buy russian energy, oil and gas. so, you seem to be saying the west holds the key to putin's economic future and his ability to continue to fight the war.

and i'm suggesting to you that maybe there are factors at work here — looking toward beijing, toward asia, india, the gulf — that you're not counting on. oh, i'm counting on them, for sure. so, china is the lender of last resort to russia, but china's got its own problem, which is china is a major, major export economy. and they're sitting there watching this mess that putin has got himself into. they're watching our reaction to the mess. they're watching the massacres and our reaction to the massacres. and they're saying to themselves, do we really want to be publicly endorsing putin? because sometimes, some americans, some british, some europeans are going to then start looking at the labels on their clothes and say, "you know what? i don't want to buy stuff made in china." china's an incredibly mercantilistic country, and if they're going to support russia, they're going to do it quietly and not be seen to be doing it, because they don't want to pay the price that they would ultimately pay even if the governments don't get involved, just the consumers. right.

but listening to you, it still sounds like a world entirely dominated by the western economies, led by the united states. you listen to sergei lavrov and he says what they don't understand in the west is this what is happening right now is part of a huge strategic picture in which power and influence and resource is shifting to the east. "we in russia see the future. the future is china, india and powers which will not be cowed by the united states of america and their economic power." well, in his dreams. so, the united states and the european union are the important, most major economic powers in the world. nobody wants to be without access to our markets. we hold the keys to this whole thing. do we? we absolutely do. china doesn't want to mess up their export markets. and for india, india gets, like, a tiny bit of russian oil right now. they're never going to be able to fill in the gap. if we can stop buying russian oil, the chinese will buy

a little bit of the oil on the ot. the indians will buy a little bit of the oil. russia's going to be in deep trouble. your message, bill browder, has become louder and clearer since the russian invasion of ukraine. but you've been at this, you've been at the campaign to isolate putin and his regime economically, for much more than a decade. you've, as it happens, just got a new book out, freezing order, which is about some of your experiences taking on putin. but this goes back to a decision you took in the late 1990s to get involved with russia. you saw massive economic opportunity as an investor in russia, and you rode the tiger in the sense that you saw vladimir putin as a guy, not only that you could do business with, but you believed would deliver riches for you and your investment company, hermitage capital. do you now deeply regret that? well, so, i went out there and i thought first that russia was in a total state of chaos. i went there before putin.

total chaos. putin comes in... yeah, but you didn't, i mean, you made money out of the chaos, but then you began not to like the chaos and you said, we need a guy who can impose some order here on this chaotic capitalism. and you thought vladimir putin was the guy. you even wrote a rather well—known times article in which you said, you know, "this authoritarian figure is just what russia needs." well, i had hoped he was. we all put our hopes into this guy. he had this blank face. he seemed like an uncharismatic technocrat. and so... i'm talking about regret. how much of it do you have? i was totally wrong. we were all totally wrong. george bush was totally wrong. tony blair was totally wrong. everybody was totally wrong about vladimir putin. it took me a little less time than most people in the west to understand that he's truly evil and we need to fight him. but we were all totally wrong. he fooled us all. and for people who don't remember the story, you, from 2005 on, were regarded as something of an enemy

by putin, who'd been in power for five years or so, because you kept banging on about the need to root out corruption, and that didn't suit putin. by 2007, you were definitely persona non grata in the country. you were then facing legal action. you hired a lawyer, sergei magnitsky. he ended up, because of the digging he was doing into corruption, some of it on your behalf, he ended up in police detention and he ended up murdered, i believe, in 2009. how much of what you are doing to this very day is driven by the sentiment roused by the death of magnitsky, who was working for you? that's been the driving force for me. sergei magnitsky was my lawyer. he uncovered a $230 million government corruption scheme. he testified against the people involved. he was then arrested by the same people, tortured for 358 days and murdered on november 16th, 2009. and from the moment that i learned about his murder the next morning, my life

was changed forever. it basically has driven me from then until now to get justice for sergei magnitsky and eventuallyjustice for other victims. but it's been the primary driving force of my life. i mean, obviously, it's a statement of the complete obv. .. you can't getjustice for sergei magnitsky. i mean, he's gone. his family have to live with that. in retrospect, were there things you could have done differently that might have prevented the loss of his life? i think i could've not gone to russia in the first place. but once we were being victimised and persecuted by the putin regime, everything that happened happened on their terms, not on mine. having said that, we have gotten some justice for sergei magnitsky. there's something called the magnitsky act, which freezes the assets and bans the visas of the people who killed sergei magnitsky and the people who commit other human rights abuses like that. in the united states, it was passed, in great britain and 3a countries. more than 30 countries have passed something like the magnitsky act.

but i guess my point about that is that here we sit in 2022 with you telling me about the web of financial networks that putin has built, not least in the last ten yea rs. the magnitsky acts across the world have not succeeded in rooting out the putin money chain, have they? well, the magnitsky acts are the template or the tool that we're using now to freeze all the assets of all the oligarchs everywhere. so, did the magnitsky act prevent putin from being corrupt? no. did the magnitsky act prevent him from invading ukraine? no. but the magnitsky act is one of the principal tools for seeking redress, for tying up their financial affairs in a knot to stop them from having access to their money. it's a quite powerful tool, i think. well, do you, though? cos, i mean, there are other crusaders, if i can put it that way, against corruption in russia. those who analyse and try to understand what putin

and his associates are doing, who frankly believe that, in the end, there are too many ways in which money can still be hidden. there are, in many offshore centres, there are russians who've stored money in trusts which seem to be beyond the reach of even the most persistent investigators. do you think something has changed that now all of those hidden monies are somehow going to be found? i don't think they'll be found, butjust think about this for a second. the uk has the magnitsky act, the uk has a sanctions regime, and what happens when the uk imposes these sanctions? the island ofjersey, the island of gibraltar, the island of the cayman islands, all these people then mirror the sanctions. so, abramovich, he's sanctioned here, maybe he's got a couple of hundred million dollars of property. he's got $7 billion of assets in jersey that are frozen. in the cayman islands that have been frozen. you know, i would say that's not nothing. no, i guess the russians

would say that's not nothing either, because they are extraordinarily keen to get their hands on you, which i guess is a sign that they care about what you have campaigned for and, in a sense, delivered with the magnitsky act over the last decade. do you fear that the russians still have means to get at you? we know they have tentacles and the ability to strike at targets far from russian territory. they've been after me since the moment that the magnitsky act was passed. putin has been uttering my name everywhere he has a chance. he wanted to do a trade, actually, with donald trump, didn't he? he suggested that the americans might engineer somehow to swap you for people that the americans wanted to interview in connection with the election interference in 2016. and then donald trump said, i think that's an incredible offer, which was truly remarkable. i wasn't so surprised by putin's statement cos he's been saying this stuff all along, but to have the most important man in the free world, the president of the

united states, agreeing to that was absolutely horrifying. which comes back to, if the magnitsky act isn't effective, then why has putin been uttering my name, when he doesn't ever mention the name of his enemies almost on any circumstance, and he keeps on saying my name, if the magnitsky act wasn't something that he deeply cared about? right. the russians do have a bit of ammunition against you, though, because if one digs into your own businesses and the way you operate, you do some of the things which you argue that the oligarchs have been doing for a long time, which you want to stop them doing, that is hiding money in offshore centres. your own companies have done that, in the british virgin islands, for example. you have done tax runarounds in russia, which i would imagine you think the oligarchs use and perhaps you criticise them for, but you've done it yourself. you have been a very ambitious, ruthless business operator in your own right, and that does leave them with some ammunition. but the ammunition isjust not true. so, there's... is anything ijust said not true? everything you said is not true. nothing is hidden.

the stuff in the british virgin islands has been reported to the us authorities, the british authorities, etc, fully above board. and the tax allegations... now, i carefully didn't say it was illegal but i did say that you use practices which the oligarchs use. i don't. i report everything fully and transparently. and secondly, all these allegations of tax evasion have been disproved by interpol, by the british government, by the us government and many other governments. it'sjust, you know, stuff they throw out there against their enemies to try to discredit them. so, how far do you think putin might go to try to shut you up and close you down? he'd kill me if he could get away with it, he'd kill me. you've just walked into our studio, you live in london now, do you have security with you all the time? well, i don't disclose my security arrangements on national television, but of course, i take it very seriously. what's going to happen, do you think? i mean, you're one of the people who knows best how putin operates, certainly in financial and economic terms. you understand the system,

albeit you haven't lived in russia for quite some time. where does this end? militarily, one could argue it's not going well for putin right now, but also one could argue there is no way he can afford to give up. i think you're exactly right. i don't think it's going to end. first of all, it didn't start on february 24th, this thing started in 2014. we have somehow, in the west, conveniently put this 2014 invasion of eastern ukraine into some weird box, and we call it russian—backed separatists. this was a russian invasion. there's been a war going on since 2014 until now. and as far as i can tell, this war is going to continue going on because putin, he can't afford to back down, he can't afford to have a peace treaty, he can't afford to compromise. and zelensky and the ukrainians are not going to give up their territory, and so this thing will carry on. so, you've described a putin who is increasingly painted into a corner, certainly in terms of his financial and

economic position. a putin who is cornered is a very dangerous man, is he not? well, i would argue that a putin who's not cornered is an even more dangerous man, because he his whole modus operandi is like a prison yard convict. he needs to show everybody how ruthless he is. and if you let him run free, he will eviscerate anybody standing in his way. it's not like a humiliated putin is more dangerous than an unhumiliated putin. putin isjust a bad guy, and the best thing you do with a bully is you stand in his way and you stop him, and that's what we have to do. bill browder, we have to end there, but i thank you very much indeed forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much.

hello there. we've seen plenty of cloud over the past few days. wednesday brings the promise of brighter skies. but with more in the way of sunshine, we could trigger some heavy downpours with the odd rumble of thunder and some lightning mixed in as well. here's the set—up as we move into wednesday, then. we've got these weather fronts bringing and patchy outbreaks of rain pushing eastwards, so it does mean that we start the day on a generally cloudy note. there could be a bit of mist and murk and some patchy outbreaks of rain. that is all shifting its way eastwards, so it will brighten up from the west as we go through the day. sunny spells coming through with more in the way of sunshine, could trigger those heavy thundery downpours. parts of eastern scotland, north east england and the midlands through to southern and central england seeing those heavy, thundery downpours. of course, not everyone catching one, but if you do see one, it could be heavy. and with more in the way

of sunshine, it's going to be warmer highs, around 17 celsius in the south and east. as we move overnight, we'll see those showers fading away. we'll see plenty of clear spells, but turning cloudier across the north and west with some patchy outbreaks of rain. the temperatures not falling too far at all, staying in the single figures. as we move into thursday, here's how the pressure chart looks. high pressure tending to dominate across england and wales. here, we see a good deal of dry and fine weather. we have those weather fronts just topping across the top in the north—west, bringing cloud and outbreaks of rain. we do drag in this milder air from the south—west, so thursday is looking like a warmer day. a good deal of sunshine across england and wales. cloudier skies, though, across the north and west with some patchy outbreaks of rain. so, for the north, we are looking at highs of around 13—16 c, 16—21, perhaps 22 celsius in the south. friday, we'll see this band of rain pushing its way south. there could be some heavy bursts in there for parts of northern england

and the midlands. drier and brighter behind it, and temperatures dropping off a touch here, but still warm in the south and east. highs of 20 degrees celsius. into the weekend, then, and high pressure dominates the weather, so it's looking like a settled picture. we'll see a good deal of dry, fine weather with light winds. so, if we take a quick look at those outlooks, we can see plenty of dry weather through the weekend. there'll be some patchy cloud and sunny spells and temperatures reaching a high of around 21 celsius. bye— bye.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore. i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: protests in the united states after a leaked document suggests the supreme court is about to overturn the law protecting the right to abortion. the draft�*s release has caused a wave of reaction from both sides. the us senate majority leader says he'll hold a symbolic vote to put the right to an abortion into federal law. also on the programme — rescued after more than 60 days trapped underground in ukraine. more than 100 civilians, including children, who've spent weeks living beneath the besieged steel plant in mariupol finally reach safety.