“This Is an Organized Crime Story”: Putin Critic Bill Browder’s New Book on Corruption in Russia Finds New Relevance
… For years, Browder has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, and devoted his life to exposing corruption in Russia after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was tortured and beaten before he died in a Russian prison after being denied proper medical care for pancreatitis. For the past several years, he has urged the passage of the Magnitsky Act, in the U.S. and countries around the world, to punish those who commit human rights abuses. In Browder’s telling, he was analogously trapped in a glass box; he claims his warnings about Putin fell on deaf ears. “If we had used sanctions before the invasion, we could have done a much smaller amount of sanctions and it would’ve had a much bigger effect and the reason I say that is because Vladimir Putin has had a history over the last 20 years of doing terrible things and not having robust reactions to his terrible things,” he had told me earlier in the day at the Gansevoort Hotel in the Meatpacking District. The U.S. should give Volodymyr Zelenskyy the no fly zone, he added.
