Putin critic: Stop paying Russia to kill Ukrainians
The Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder says the current sanctions on Russia do not go far enough.
The US investor and Vladimir Putin critic Bill Browder says countries buying Russian oil and gas are providing the income Russia needs to continue the war in Ukraine.
“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,” he told Hardtalk’s Stephen Sackur.
“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 a billion dollars from the sale of oil and gas to Germany, Italy, Austria, etc.
"And every day his invasion costs him a billion dollars, and so from an income perspective he continues to have the money to do this. 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.”
Mr Browder was once the largest private investor in Russia, but was barred from the country in 2005.
In 2009 a lawyer who worked for him, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison after blowing the whistle on a $230 million (£185m; €206m) tax fraud.
The European Court of Human Rights subsequently found he had been denied important medical care and there were credible allegations he was beaten by guards before he died.
Since then, Mr Browder has campaigned for “Magnitsky” laws that sanction individuals responsible for human rights violations or corruption. More than 30 countries now have such laws.
