Transcript of The Future of Putin and Russia: A Conversation and Performance

The number I’m going to give is 1,372. That is the publicly available known number of current political prisoners in Russia, the list kept by OVD Info, which is one of the leading human rights groups in our country today. And astonishingly, that is more than the whole of the Soviet Union had in terms of political prisoners in the mid-1980s.

When the 1987 Vienna Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was going on, the Soviet government officially admitted to holding about two hundred political prisoners. That was an underestimate. According to human rights groups, the number was actually about seven hundred. This was towards the end of the Soviet period. Mind you, that’s for the Soviet Union, so that’s fifteen countries put together.

Today, only in Russia, 1,372. And having been inside the system, I can tell you that figure is nowhere near reality. I’ve seen in Paddy Watkins on sleeping trains, in transit prisons, everywhere I’ve been, I’ve seen people who are there because of a social media post, because they stood up with a placard or because they stood up with a white sheet of paper. We have cases like this too. And they’re not on anybody’s list.

They’re not on the radars of any human rights organizations, their names are not voiced at parliamentary hearings or conferences and so on. And while this number is horrific on the one hand, I think it also is testimony to the fact that so many people in Russia disagree with this regime and this brutal war that Putin is waging on Ukraine because those cases are meant to be brazen. They’re meant to be demonstrative. They’re meant to scare. Our sentences were made public.

You know, they were all shown on national television. And just to give you a scope of the sentences, Alexei Gorinov, who was the first person in Russia to have been arrested and put behind bars for opposing the war in Ukraine, he was an elected municipal councilor in downtown Moscow, an elected representative. He came to his council meeting, this was in March 2022, and he called for a minute of silence at the council meeting for Ukrainian kids killed by Russian bombs. He got seven years in prison for that.

Maria Ponomarenko is a journalist from Siberia, mother of three girls. She is currently serving a six-year prison sentence in Vladivostok in the Far East for two Facebook posts denouncing the war in Ukraine. Dmitry Ivanov, whom I actually met while I was in pretrial detention in prison number five, Vodnik in Moscow, is a young, talented mathematician. He was a student in Moscow State University. He was arrested on the day of his final exam before he could graduate. He got eight and a half years in prison for four Telegram posts, social media posts, talking about the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine.

The Resistance Within Russia

And I could go on and on and on with this. But these are the sentences, and they’ve been being made public. And so for every person who is behind bars, there are thousands who think the same. But just you know, I don’t think in any society you would find a lot of people who’ll be willing to spend seven years in prison just for speaking out their mind. But the fact that there are so many, you know, I think back to 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

And Soviet propaganda went to great lengths to sort of create an image of total unanimity. All over the Soviet Union, there were meetings held at academic institutes and factories and trade unions and workers collectives and whatever, passing unanimous resolutions of approval. And Soviet newspapers reported that support for that invasion was unanimous. And then one afternoon that August, seven people came out onto Red Square in Moscow in a silent demonstration of protests, the Famous Seven. Now, they were within five minutes beaten, arrested and hurried away almost immediately, and they also got sentences either in prison or internal exile or worse the so-called “special psychiatric treatment,” which was the worst that was awaiting Soviet dissidents.

But after what they did, after that gesture, no one could say that there was unanimous support in the Soviet Union for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And in the same days in August 1968, Literarni Visti, a Czech journal, wrote that there are now at least seven reasons for which we’ll never be able to hate the Russian people. Today, there are thousands, thousands and thousands. If you look only at the dry statistics of police detentions in Russia since Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, you will see thousands and thousands of cases all over the country, and hardly a day goes by without another anti-war protest.

But much of the world, as I’m realizing now, being six months out of prison, much of the world is not seeing that. And a lot of people, including people in the West, fall for this Kremlin propaganda narrative that all Russians support the war, that all Russians support the regime. That is a lie. And I believe those people who repeat that in the West, maybe not always consciously, but they actually play along with Putin’s propaganda machine because that’s what Putin wants you to believe.

The Experience of Solitary Confinement

But to your question, Richard started with statistics. I couldn’t help but give my own. I don’t know what can be said and so much can be said that we’re going to spend a whole evening here. But I would just drop on one point that you raised in your introduction, the solitary confinement.

As a lawyer, you know very well that according to international law, the United Nations rules on the treatment of prisoners, solitary confinement for more than fifteen days is officially considered a form of torture.

And I’ve known about this rule for a long time because I’ve been involved in advocacy on behalf of political prisoners for many years. But I never understood it because without this experience, you look at this rule and you think, well, what’s torturous about it? Sure, you just—it’s truly better to be alone than sit in a room full of criminals, right? You can read, you can write, you can do whatever you want.

Well, first of all, they don’t let you write. They only give you a pen and paper for ninety minutes a day, one point five hours. Then they take it away again. And then for the rest of the day, you just sit in that small cubicle-sized cell, seven by ten feet, two by three meters, four walls, small window with metal bars under the ceiling. Your bunk bed gets attached to the wall at five o’clock in the morning with a wake-up call, and you’re not allowed to take it back again until 9 PM with the lights out. And so for the whole day, well, you can try to sit on a really small, uncomfortable stool that sticks out of the wall, but you can’t really sit in there for long.

So all you do is just you walk around in a small circle. There is nothing to do. There is nowhere to go. There’s no one to speak to. And it’s really easy to start losing your mind.

So I do understand the rule now. Because actually, after about two weeks, so that period of time is not random in the United Nations rules, you start forgetting names, you start forgetting words, even the most basic words. You start shouting at walls. You stop understanding the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. And it’s really easy to go crazy.

And you have to make a special effort not to. I had the benefit of being a historian, and one of my areas of study had been the dissident movement. So I had the honor of knowing many of these people, people like Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky and Yuri Orlov and Elena Bonner and others. And so I had the benefit of their experience, having read their books and their memoirs. And they said that one of the most effective ways to stay sane in that situation is to learn a new language because that way you occupy your brain and give it something useful, something productive to do.

For example, Bukovsky learned English while he was sitting in the Vladimir City prison in the ’70s. Natan Sharansky practiced his Hebrew. Soviet political prisoners who were Roman Catholics would learn Latin and so on. I learned Spanish. I had a Spanish textbook, and I was just, every day, sitting there and learning the verbs and the tenses and the vocabulary, not ever hoping to be able to use it just to stay sane because this way, you occupy your mind with something useful.

Most importantly, you occupy your time because one of the most horrible things in prison is just watching the time of your life just meaninglessly go by day after day, week after week, month after month. But if you learn a language, every night you go to bed and you can say to yourself, I’ve actually done something useful with this day. I never thought I’d be able to use it, but now Bill and I are hoping to initiate a Magnitsky law in Spain.

[RICHARD SALOMON:] I appreciate that. Let me bring Bill into the conversation. During the current administration’s first term in Helsinki, Putin, unsolicited, said that Bill Browder was enemy number one. So Bill, you’ve endured quite a lot in Russia and also had many of your assets taken. So how do you assess the current situation now with regard to the war?

Putin’s Kleptocracy and the War

[SIR BILL BROWDER:] Yes. So it wasn’t a very pleasant moment. It was the summer of 2018. Trump and Putin were meeting in Helsinki. It was right after Robert Mueller had indicted twelve Russian GRU officers for interfering in the 2016 election. And so, the two presidents had this secret summit. Nobody actually knew what happened during the summit.

And then they emerged and they went into a big auditorium. And the press started asking questions. And the obvious question to Putin was, are you going to hand over the twelve military intelligence officers? And Putin smiled. He obviously had been preparing for this question for quite a while.

And he said, “Yes. It’s entirely possible that we would. But if we did so, we would expect some goodwill and reciprocity from our American friends. And specifically, we would expect them to hand over Bill Browder,” me. Well, that wasn’t very pleasant, obviously.

But it wasn’t unexpected because ever since the Magnitsky Act was passed, which was named after my lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, which freezes the assets and bans the travel of Russian human rights violators and kleptocrats, Putin has been after me. And he’s been mentioning my name publicly in a lot of different places. But what was unexpected was what happened next, which was the question then went to President Trump. “Mr. President, what do you think about Putin’s offer?”

And without skipping a beat, Trump said, “I think it’s an incredible offer.” A few days later, the Senate voted ninety-eight to zero not to hand me over, and so I was okay. But I’ve been on sort of Putin’s hit list for a long time, and it’s definitely not pleasant.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about Putin and what he’s up to and why he’s doing stuff. And I’ve got a view on this war and what’s happening, and it’s a little different than a lot of other people’s view, and I’ll just throw it out there so we can all discuss it, which is that, and I’m sure that Vladimir will agree with me because we’ve been fighting this together, but Putin is basically a thief, he’s a crook.

This is true of many government officials in Russia. You join the traffic police to extort money from drivers. You work your way up in the government. And right after the president, you steal as much money as you can. And, over a twenty-four year period or now twenty-five years, Putin and about one thousand people around him have stolen one trillion dollars from the Russian state.

This is money that should have been spent on hospitals and schools and roads. Instead, it was spent on private jets and yachts and Swiss bank accounts. And you could do this in smaller amounts for less period of time. But if you do this for twenty-five years, for one trillion dollars the Russian people are eventually going to get mad at you. And it’s kind of like Putin has spread gasoline all over the floor of Russia, and we’re just waiting for a match, you know, by stealing this amount of money.

The Roots of Putin’s War

BILL BROWDER: He’s just waiting for a match to light up. And we’ve seen this match in Tunisia when the fruit seller set himself on fire. We saw this match in Kazakhstan. Most people didn’t pay attention to this. They raised the price of gas, and people started burning the presidential palace.

And so Putin, at a certain point, realized that he had just stolen too much money. And the only way that he could make sure that people aren’t going to rise up and take over the Kremlin and hang him from a lamppost, the way they did with Ceausescu in Romania, would be to divert their attention. And so what do you do if you’re a dictator who has stolen too much money, you’re afraid of your own people? You find a foreign enemy and you start a war. And that’s what this war in Ukraine is about. This is not about NATO enlargement.

It’s not about Putin’s designs on territory in Ukraine. This is about a little man who’s stolen too much money, and he understands that if the Russian people come for him, they’re going to kill him. And, it’s Machiavelli 101. That’s why he’s in Ukraine. And so this idea that somehow, he’s going to agree to any kind of peace deal, I think, is very unrealistic.

I don’t think that there’s—you know, there’s a lot of talk now about Trump saying we’re going to solve this war in 24 hours. It’s now gone from 24 hours to 100 days. They’ve put out the contours of a peace plan that is going to be, “here’s the line of where the war is going to stop” and “no more NATO” and “here’s where the peacekeepers are going to be,” which, for some people, that’s a decent compromise, not for me, but for some people. But it doesn’t really matter what contours they put out there because the person that’s going to determine whether there’s going to be any peace deal is Vladimir Putin, who has no interest in any peace deal because he needs to be at war. Because if he’s not at war, the people are going to turn on him.

And so my sort of contrarian prediction is that there’s not going to be any peace deal.

RICHARD SALOMON: So, Vladimir, let me ask you because you have families being decimated, mothers, husbands, wives. You have the military suffering great losses. You just read in the paper the other day how the North Koreans are no longer on the front lines, that even their leader decided to pull them back. Do you see vulnerabilities, including with the military and growing tired of his ambitions and what he’s trying to do to hide the ball to Bill’s point?

The Power of Information

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: Well, I think the key to everything here is information. Because I’ll start with a small story. When I was first arrested, this is still in Moscow in pre-trial detention, I was put in a cell with six people. And by sort of unwritten instruction in the Russian prison system, you’re not supposed to hold political prisoners together. So I was the only political there and the rest were there for drug offenses or some economic crimes or whatever.

And this was just an average cross section of people you’d find on the street in Moscow. And so when I was in that cell, the other five thought of the war in Ukraine what they were told to think of the war in Ukraine by Putin’s state television. And I had to be a little patient and explain and talk and reason and argue and argue again and point to the facts. And after about three or four weeks, everybody in that cell thought about the war in Ukraine the same as I did. Not because I said anything genius or brilliant, I did not.

I just gave people the facts. And this is the basic point. You know, people in Russia are no better but also no worse than people in any other country. Most people in Russia are normal people. Any normal person would prefer peace over war.

Any normal person would be horrified at the thought of civilians and children being killed and hospitals and schools being bombed. But however astonishing this may sound to people who live in a free country in the twenty-first century, a large part of the Russian population has no idea that this is all going on. Because at the same time as he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin shut down what remained, and it wasn’t much anyway, but what remained of independent media in Russia. And his government imposed a total Internet censorship blockade. So all the social media are blocked.

All the independent media websites are blocked. For a lot of people, it’s just impossible to get this information. And so, as I mentioned, I’m a historian and I always like to look at the way that things were done before. And for me, one of the biggest contributing factors to the collapse of the Soviet regime was the fact that it had become delegitimized in the eyes of a large part of its own population, of its own citizens. Because for years and years, what we call radio voices, Western radio services like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, Swedish Radio and so on, would beam those short frequency radio signals in the languages of the peoples of the Soviet bloc across the Iron Curtain to reach millions of people with truthful and objective information about what this regime was doing.

There was an internal KGB report that was declassified in the early 1990s under President Yeltsin. And it showed that according to KGB estimates, up to 15% of the adult population of the Soviet Union, it’s about 30 million people, were regular, meaning daily or weekly listeners of these foreign radio broadcasts. And as Vladimir Bukovsky wrote, those teenagers who were listening to these radio voices in the 1970s were the thirty-somethings who went to die at the barricades by the Moscow White House in August 1991 during the Democratic Revolution. There’s a direct correlation. Unfortunately, it’s not quick.

It’s not immediate, but it’s there. And this is what should be done now. I think the free world should put a lot of efforts into trying to reach Russian citizens inside Russia with objective and truthful information about this war and about this regime in the Russian language. But not only do we not see this happening, we often see, especially if we’re talking about Western businesses or Western tech companies, we’re seeing the exact opposite. Just yesterday, we had an op-ed in the Washington Post by Yulia Navalnaya, Ilya Yashin and me, drawing attention to the way, for example, that Apple, a very important American tech company, behaves itself in Russia.

And what it does is that not only is it not helping for that true information to get to Russian citizens, to its Apple users in Russia, it’s actually aiding and abetting very actively, very energetically, Putin’s dictatorship in suppressing that information. Because over the past couple of months, Apple has voluntarily, at the request of the Russian government, removed more than 100 VPN services from its Russian App Store. Those are services that allow you to go around the Internet blockages. They have removed the apps belonging to major independent media organizations like the Insider, the BBC, Echo of Moscow, RFE/RL. These are U.S. media outlets. They removed them too just because Putin asked them. And I think it’s completely unacceptable when Western companies are actively helping dictators to suppress information to hide it from their own people.

RICHARD SALOMON: Knowledge is power, and they’re enabling it.

Sanctions and Russian Assets

RICHARD SALOMON: There’s no question. Our time is short, so let me turn to an issue of sanctions. You know, you have the Magnitsky sanctions that the two of you, you in particular, Bill, both of you, pioneered. Beyond that, there have been other things our government and otherwise has done. We have in the audience the distinguished chess icon and global activist Garry Kasparov and Uriel Epstein who run the Renew Democracy Initiative that pioneered with you the effort to get billions in Russian sovereign assets to fund the war effort and reparations.

You know, that has only had limited effect because it was mostly interest. And the numbers may vary whether it’s $300 million. We know that over $190 billion is parked right now in a Belgian bank. Question is, given it’s unlikely the Trump administration is going to fund the Ukrainian war effort, how do you view that Bill as a step that might be taken to help the Ukrainians persevere?

BILL BROWDER: So when the war started, one of the most interesting things that happened from my perspective from the Western fight back, was the United States together with the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland froze $300 billion of Russian Central Bank reserves.

So Putin thought he was very rich when he started this war. He had $650 billion in central bank reserves. That was his war chest. And he never, in his most pessimistic dreams, thought that the West, and in particular, the European Union, would freeze that money. So within a week, that money was frozen, which was which I think was a very powerful sanction.

And then we saw this unbelievable murderous invasion and more bombs and destruction and terrible stuff. And it became obvious to me very quickly that that money shouldn’t just be frozen, that money should be confiscated. And so, as you mentioned, Garry Kasparov and myself and Vladimir and various other people started to talk about confiscating that money. And at first, the conversation was very, nobody wanted to hear it. It seemed like a terrible idea.

And one of the main reasons people didn’t want to hear it was they thought the war was going to end very quickly. People thought that the war would be over, either Putin would win or it would somehow there’d be a ceasefire or something would happen. And here we are three years into the war and a lot of countries, a lot of people in a lot of countries are saying, well, wait a second. We have to keep on funding this thing. And the answer is, if we don’t fund it, if we don’t fund the Ukrainians, then the Russians will win.

And if the Russians win, then the Russians will move on other countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. There’ll be tens of millions of refugees from all those countries fleeing to Western Europe. There’ll be all sorts of problems. So we have to continue to fund the war. Trump, in his campaign and various of his proxies were saying that we shouldn’t fund it anymore.

And so there’s this easy solution, which is to confiscate the money. Confiscate the $300 billion which would give the Ukrainians a runway of three or four years to fight their fight back. I think within that three or four years, Russia would finally collapse under its own weight. And let Putin pay for the defense of Ukraine. And I think that Trump has only been in power for a couple weeks, but I think that this would appeal to him very much, that if he’s got to continue to fund the war, let Putin pay for it, that this sort of solves his problem.

And so, I think the probability of this money being confiscated has probably increased a lot in recent days, and we’ll see what happens. But that’s one of the main things that I’m working on to try to help Ukrainians.

RICHARD SALOMON: Wow. It’s certainly an important effort. So, Vladimir, beyond what you’ve already said about information is power and getting the word out, what else can the West do?

We have in the audience, at least one distinguished faculty member from the Harriman Institute at Columbia who asked me the question, what can activists around the world do to help Russians learn more beyond what you’ve described? What other steps can we take?

The Path to Peace in Europe

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: You know, in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” there’s a moment when Alice asked the Cheshire Cat which way she should turn. And the Cheshire Cat responds, “Well, that very much depends on where you want to get to.” And I think that’s the key question that the free world of Western world has to ask itself.

I think it’s very important for democratic nations to understand, and many of them do. I’ve had many conversations since being out of prison with heads of state and government in countries on both sides of the Atlantic. And that was always a part of this conversation. There is this understanding in many policy making circles that if we’re really serious about securing long-term peace, stability, security on the European continent, if we are really serious about securing Ukraine’s borders, if we’re really serious about securing peace in Europe, the only way that’s ever going to happen is with a democratic Russia. There is no other way.

As long as there is an authoritarian regime in the Kremlin that tramples on the rights and freedoms of its own people, you will always violate the civilized norms of international behavior. Those two go together. A regime that doesn’t respect its own citizens is not going to abide by the rules of international law. And so the only way, to use the Cheshire Cat’s words, we have to know where we want to get to. And instead of—and again, I’ve sort of these last few months, I’ve been catching up in two and a half years worth of information vacuum.

And I was sort of shocked to hear in some quarters—this is in no way, don’t get me wrong, this is in no way the dominant narrative. But in some quarters, in some European Union countries, for example, you do sometimes hear these arguments that, “Oh, you know, these Russians, they’re all genetic slaves, that they can’t do democracy” and then all whatever other nonsense. And people say, “Let’s just encircle them with a wall, with a fence, with a moat of crocodiles.” I don’t know what. Well, nothing could be more damaging and counterproductive than this.

The Future of Putin and Russia: A Conversation and Performance

[RICHARD SALOMON:] And if we’re really serious about having that Europe whole, free and at peace, as the phrase goes – this has been the goal of Western policymakers for generations. If we’re really serious about that goal, the only way we’re going to get there is with a peaceful and democratic Russia. And so in order to go there, we need to know where we want to get to. And sometimes, the most important thing is words and the messaging.

I think there should be a way for democratic countries to message those millions of people inside of Russia who are against Putin, who are against the war, who want to see Russia become a normal democratic country, messaging them to say that this fight is not with the Russian people. This fight is with Putin’s murderous regime and that there’s a difference because sometimes people neglect that difference, and it’s a big one. The message could be that life for Russian citizens will be better without Putin and after Putin than it is today. And I think that will go a long way.

[VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:] Well said. It’s also true there are a lot of people watching the Cheshire Cat, including China or otherwise. And so, there’s a lot at stake in what Ukraine is doing. It’s going to affect others.

U.S. Involvement in European Conflicts

[RICHARD SALOMON:] So let’s touch on for a minute, a question that came up with regard to 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine went into effect. More recently, it’s been suggested by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser for Trump, speaking about how U.S. hegemony should exist over the Americas. And I guess if we follow Trump, he has expansionist interest beyond that and refused to get involved in European wars. What’s your view, Bill, in terms of that doctrine as to the concerns raised by Vladimir and beyond?

[SIR BILL BROWDER:] Well, I think that the European wars affect America in a very profound way. Let’s just talk about the different scenarios. Let’s say that America were to withdraw from this war. We’ve actually had a little bit of a taste of this whole thing.

In January of last year, Trump called up Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and said, don’t let any Ukraine military aid get voted on in the floor of the House of Representatives. And so, for four months, there was no vote. The money was withheld. During those four months, the Ukrainians started to run out of ammunition.

As they started running out of ammunition, they started to make desperate calls saying that if they run out, then the defensive lines will break. It’s hard to say who is exactly responsible. I’ve heard different people tell me they were responsible. But at the time, David Cameron was the UK foreign secretary, and he met with Trump. According to him, he convinced Trump to let the money go through.

Trump made the call to Mike Johnson. The vote was called. The Ukrainians got the money, and they were able to fortify their lines, and the Russians didn’t break through. If we were to stop funding military aid to Ukraine, then what would happen is the same thing, but the Russians would break through. When the Russians break through, what do they do? They occupy Ukrainian territory.

What do the Russians do when they occupy Ukrainian territory? Well, we’ve seen examples of this because they did. They occupied Bucha and Irpin. If you remember those horrible images after they were expelled, we discovered that all the women in these towns were raped. The men were tortured, tied with their hands behind their back and shot in the back and then buried in shallow graves, and the children were kidnapped. So that’s what would happen to the people that get occupied.

Now what happens to the people who aren’t yet occupied? Well, they say, I don’t want to get occupied and I’m going to leave. And so, you end up with fifteen million refugees fanning across Europe. Europe can’t handle those refugees.

And then what happens when Russia has gotten their claws into Ukraine? Then they start to say, well, let’s see if this whole NATO thing is real. And let’s have a go at Estonia, a member of NATO. At this point, then there is a debate in the United States. President Trump has said he’s not a big fan of NATO. Is he ready to go to war with Russia? He’s the guy who says he doesn’t like foreign wars. Is he ready to go to war with Russia over a country of a million people that probably most Americans couldn’t find on a map? Probably no.

And so if America’s not involved in NATO, is Europe going to go to war with Russia? Probably no. So Putin then gets Estonia, then he gets Latvia, then he gets Lithuania, then maybe he makes the move on Poland. And at some point in this process, America does get sucked into this war, but it’s no longer a war that the Ukrainians are fighting against the Russians. This is a war that everyone’s going to be fighting against everyone. And so I think we have a very strong national interest in continuing to support Ukraine.

[RICHARD SALOMON:] Now it’s interesting to note in Putin’s final address at the end of last year, he spoke about the year of the defender of the motherland, but his conspicuous omission in this was he wasn’t even stating the country he was fighting or why to your point earlier.

Potential Peace Settlement Scenarios

[RICHARD SALOMON:] You know, there have been a number of questions here. I’m going to intermix them with my own questions. Even though you don’t think Putin wants a resolution of this, Vladimir first and maybe Bill add on, if there is to be some negotiated settlement, what would it look like? Obviously, Russia would keep Crimea. I assume there’s no clear path for Ukraine into NATO. How do you see this as playing out if not in twenty-four hours if Trump has his desire to follow through on this?

[VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:] I want to draw attention on something that happened last week, something really rare that we almost never see in these last three years. There was a public appeal signed jointly by Ukrainian and Russian human rights organizations. Human rights NGOs most prominently the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, Center for Grammadesky Slovod and Memorial, the leading, most respected human rights organization in Russia. They’re actually both the co-winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

In this initiative, they launched a campaign called “People First.” And it has everything to do with the peace settlement or post-war settlement or ceasefire settlement, whatever it’s going to be called, that you’re asking about.

There are thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war currently in Russian captivity. There are perhaps tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian hostages in Russian captivity, which is a term, as you know well as a lawyer, that’s not provided for in any legal documents, not in the Hague Convention, not in the Geneva Convention, not in the Additional Protocol, nothing. It’s not even supposed to exist, but it does.

And there are tens of thousands of people, Ukrainian citizens, who are forcibly held by Putin’s state in prisons and detention centers in horrendous conditions. There are Ukrainian kids, children, who have been forcibly kidnapped from Ukrainian territory. That was the subject of the ICC warrant against Putin. And they are still being held by the Russian authorities illegally.

And then there are Russian political prisoners, many of whom are behind bars because they have publicly spoken out against this war in Ukraine. And so the purpose of that campaign, launched jointly by Ukrainian and Russian human rights organizations, is to make sure that any peace settlement, ceasefire settlement, post-war settlement, whatever it’s going to be called, includes a clause on the liberation of all of these people, all Ukrainian POWs, all Ukrainian civilian hostages, including children and all Russian political prisoners who are imprisoned because they’ve opposed this war.

And to me, this was also the most important aspect of any such agreement. And I think it is not only the legal but the moral obligation of Western democratic countries to insist that this clause is included and implemented.

Putin’s Future

[RICHARD SALOMON:] Bill, let me ask you, here’s the question that I was going to pose, but also one from the audience, put on your stargazing hat. When and how do you see Putin being dislodged? You don’t need to do it by the minute. Just rough.

[SIR BILL BROWDER:] I’m going to dislodge him in twenty-four hours. I mean, I think there’s only one scenario that I can envisage that would actually work, which is that if the Ukrainians are given the tools, the military aid to expel Russian troops from their territory. And it works.

I don’t think it’s an impossibility. Everybody sort of underestimates the Ukrainians. They say they don’t have nearly as many soldiers as the Russians. They don’t have the resources. But we saw what the Ukrainians were able to do with the war that was supposed to be won in three days by the Russians. It’s still three years into it.

I think if you give the Ukrainians the tools, triple what we gave them before, let them use their American missiles to fire into Russian territory, to destroy Russian military bases, all the things that they’ve been asking for, and they succeed in pushing Russian soldiers out of their territory, I think the Russian people are going to say, “Well, why did we lose a million young men? Why did we spend a trillion dollars on this war? For what?”

And I think at that point, the Russian people – you know, it’s easy to put propaganda on TV, but everybody can see for their own eyes that it’s not working. And when it starts to become when the king’s not wearing any clothes, I think that’s the moment that Putin gets dislodged.

But he’s not going to be dislodged by a negotiation where we settle with him. His intention is to stay in power until the day he dies. There’s no Putin presidential library for him to retire to. He understands that if he loses power, he loses his money, he goes to jail and he dies. And so he doesn’t want to die, and so he’s going to do everything he can to stay in power.

The Russian people can get rid of him, and what he’s doing to the Russian people is so horrific. I mean, just yesterday, I read this story about how Kim Jong Un was so offended by Putin’s meat grinder approach towards the North Korean troops that he pulled his own troops back. I mean, if Kim Jong Un is offended by Vladimir Putin, how are the Russian people feeling about that?

And I think that the Russian people, as Vladimir says, no normal person would want to be in this kind of country. And to the extent that people are saying that Russians support this war, how does anyone know? If you go to jail for eight years for calling it a war, which is the jail term you get for calling the war a war, so you got to call it a special military operation. If you say the slightest – he was telling the story about Alexei Gorinov, who wanted to hold a minute of silence for the Ukrainian children, who got seven years in jail and then getting an extended jail term. Of course, everyone’s going to keep their mouth shut.

There’s nobody in Russia saying anything on the phone to relatives outside anywhere because they’re all so scared. I think it’s just a pressure cooker waiting to blow, but it requires something to make it blow.

[RICHARD SALOMON:] Do you want to add anything, Vladimir?

[VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:] I’ll just add that if modern Russian history teaches us anything, it is that major political changes in our country happen like this: suddenly, swiftly, unexpectedly. Both the Tsarist Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Soviet regime at the end of the twentieth century went down in three days, literally, not a metaphor. And the next time, it’s going to be exactly like this.

You asked Bill to draw up a scenario how this is going to happen. My friend Evgeny Roizman, who is the last democratically elected Mayor of Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, he’s a historian too by education. He says, “I can draw up for you one hundred different scenarios of how Putin’s power is going to end. And in reality, it’s going to be one hundred and first, but none of us can think about it.” That’s exactly how it’s going to be.

And so I think the only responsible thing, both for us in the Russian democratic movement but also for the free world, is to prepare for that moment, have that strategy, that roadmap for the day after Putin, because there’s not going to be time to prepare when it starts happening. We’ll have to have that plan. And this is in the interest of everybody to make sure that next time there’s a window of opening, an opportunity for democratic change in Russia, that it succeeds, that that experiment succeeds. Because again, if we ever want to see the European continent whole, free and at peace, the only way it’s going to happen is with a democratic Russia.

[RICHARD SALOMON:] Well, you clearly need to plan for the day after. There’s no question. So let me widen the aperture a little bit. There are a few questions from the audience, but also my own. We see literally threats to democracy and the rise of authoritarianism and autocracy around the world. Do you want to comment on that as to, you know, what that portends and the fears?

Global Political Trends and Democracy

RICHARD SALOMON: And then I’m going to drill down to something with you with your Pulitzer Prize winning background. But comment, both of you, on what we’re seeing around the world.

BILL BROWDER: So, the answer is yes and also no. So, you have the AfD rising in Germany. Marine Le Pen is rising in France. There’s a far right government that has been elected in Austria. And so we tend to extrapolate and say the whole world is turning into a far right, fascist dictatorship.

But at the same time as that’s happened, Poland, which had a very far right government, swung in the other direction. We saw the Russians try to push their narrative in Moldova, and the good guys, the Europeans won. The Russians tried to get their far right guy in Romania, and the Romanian courts actually intervened and stopped that.

I think that there is all sorts of wild volatility in politics. I would say that with inflation, with standard of living going down, it creates all sorts of opportunities for populists and demagogues. But at the same time, a lot of people just want to have normal lives. And I think that we can’t be too pessimistic about this.

It’s different places at different times. And I don’t want to generalize and say that everybody is going in the wrong direction because I don’t think that’s the case.

RICHARD SALOMON: Vladimir, let me switch it a little, but related. You’re a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist as well. Speak a little about the chilling of the press around the world. And one of the audience questions even says whether parallels ought to be drawn to some of the things going on in this country we’re currently sitting in.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: Well, President Reagan once said that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” So it is absolutely right to be vigilant, to be watching out, to make sure that we do defend those rights and freedoms that we have because just as no countries or nations are unfit for democracy, there are no countries or nations where it’s guaranteed. We know this from the course of world history. And so I do understand why people are so concerned.

But I just want to back up what Bill said because I think he’s absolutely right. Sometimes this alarmism gets a little over the top. We were just chatting before coming on the stage with Mikhail Voskresensky, who’s going to play his Grand Piano in a few minutes. And he said to me, “You historians have an advantage. You look at larger periods, at longer periods of time.”

And that’s true. He’s absolutely right. We do. And if we look the way that historical progress occurs, it is always two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. I think now we’re in that step back. But then there’s going to be two steps forward again. And the progress is still—it may not be as fast as we would like, but it’s still forward.

And let’s look at large periods. Let’s look at not two months or a year. There’s a human rights organization in this country called Freedom House. And every year, they publish the rating and the map of countries which they rank as free or unfree. And they’ve been doing this since the 1970s, more than half a century.

If you look at the Freedom House map of Europe, let’s say forty years ago, that’s nothing by historical standards. That’s like yesterday morning. You will see, yes, in 1985, look at the map of Europe from Freedom House. You will see that half of the European continent is painted purple, “not free.” Countries living under various forms of dictatorships, authoritarian, totalitarian regimes and so on.

If you look at the Freedom House map of Europe today, you will see only two countries painted purple, “not free.” That’s Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus. So the progress is undeniable. The direction is unmistakable. It’s still two steps forward, one step back. And I have no doubt that if we look at the Freedom House map in a couple decades’ time, there will not be a single unfree country on the map of Europe.

Personal Sacrifice and Commitment to Democracy

RICHARD SALOMON: Well, to end on one other note, one last question. I may turn it to you, Vladimir, because of your confinement. And I urge everyone in the audience, if you haven’t watched it, I watched it again this afternoon, the interview that 60 Minutes did with you in September after you came back from the East-West Exchange. Excellent interview. But in it, you were poisoned once, and you were close to death. And you were, I think, being treated in the United States.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: No. It was in Russia.

RICHARD SALOMON: And then you were poisoned a second time, and you were being treated in the United States, if I remember correctly.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: No. Both times in my life. Both times in Russia.

RICHARD SALOMON: It was under rehab. You had the opportunity to stay in the United States at one point.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: I couldn’t.

RICHARD SALOMON: And I know the answer, but why don’t you tell the audience, why is it after being close to death twice, did you choose to go back? And what does that indicate as to how democracies can survive and why leaders like you, upstanders, need to speak out?

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: I’ll start with a short story. In the mid-2000s, there was an initiative from the Russian opposition to nominate Vladimir Bukovsky, who I mentioned several times in this conversation, who’s a legendary Soviet dissident and writer and spent many, many years in the Gulag. We nominated him for President of Russia. It was, of course, as everybody understood, a symbolic gesture, but it was a very important one.

Sort of juxtaposed that to what the Putin regime was doing. So if you are strengthening KGB rule, we’re going to put forward a Russian Václav Havel against you. So that was the idea. And we held a big rally on Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow, which is the former Mayakovsky Square, which is a place where the Soviet dissident movement originated with the banned Poetry Readings back in the 1960s, which Bukovsky organized. So there was a meaning in that as well.

And at the end of this rally, a woman came up to Bukovsky. And he had lived for a long time abroad after the exchange, the prison exchange that freed him, he lived in England, and he lived there until the end of his days. A woman came up to him and asked, “Why did you return? Do you really hope to change something here?” And he looked at her and said, “No, no, of course, I don’t hope to change anything now. But I returned because people are starting to be afraid again. And when people are starting to be afraid, you have to come and stand next to them and say, here I am. I’m not afraid.”

I was listening to that conversation. I had goosebumps on my back. I’m a Russian politician. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. I came to work with Boris Nemtsov in 1999. I believe a politician has to be in his or her own country, can’t be any other way. This was not a profession you can do by Zoom.

And I think especially at times of crisis, at times of war, at times of repression, political figures, political leaders, the public faces of opposition movements have a sense of public responsibility that frankly outweighs any considerations of personal safety, personal comfort. I would not feel I’ve had any moral right to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up to Putin’s dictatorship if I didn’t do it myself, if I just ran away. That was never a question that crossed my mind. And so, yes, I did not leave after the poisonings. I did not leave after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine because I think a politician has to be in their own country.

And when we were expelled, nobody asked our opinion. They just put us on the plane like cattle and kicked us out. And when our plane was taking off at Vnukovo-2, which is the government terminal southwest of Moscow, the FSB officer was sitting next to me. We all had our personal FSB escort from the Alpha Group. This is a special elite unit of the FSB.

As the plane was taking off, he turned to me and said, “Look out the window. This is the last time you’ve seen your homeland.” And I just laughed in this guy’s face, and I said, “Look, man, I’m a historian. I don’t really think, I don’t only believe, I know that I will be back in my home country of Russia, and that’s going to be much quicker than you can ever imagine.”

RICHARD SALOMON: Well, on that inspiring note, and don’t leave, we have a wonderful recital. I want to thank Sir Bill Browder and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Another round of applause.

Musical Performance Introduction

RICHARD SALOMON: So I’m going to just quickly introduce our musician, Misha Voskresensky. We live in a world that has less and less heroes, but Misha is certainly one of mine. Misha is a lot older than all of us here.

When the war started in 2022, he was 87 years old. He was one of the most esteemed and recognized musicians in Russia. He was head of the Moscow Conservatory where he played piano, and he lived a life of real privilege where he had respect, he had property, he had everything you could have from an 87-year career as a top musician.

And when the war started, Vladimir Putin particularly wanted everybody to support the war, and he put a lot of pressure and leaned on all the cultural figures in the country to support the war because it was particularly important to have influencers. And almost all of them rolled over and did what they had to do to live their comfortable lives and support Vladimir Putin’s murderous war.

But the one person who didn’t is Misha Voskresensky. At the age of 87, with all the privilege, all the comforts that he had from his career, he gave it all up. He came to America with nothing. No property, no money, no nothing, to start a new life here in protest of the war. And there’s very few people who are ready to make any kind of sacrifice for their principles. And Misha sacrificed everything to protest the war.

And in addition to being a great hero, he’s also a great musician. And it’s my great honor to introduce to you Mikhail Voskresensky. Please give him a hand.

Mikhail Voskresensky: Thank you very much. Thank you very much to everybody. I will play first movement of Pathetic Sonata of Beethoven and Largo and final of Chopin’s sonata B minor.

Related Posts

• Transcript: ‘Quite a Shock’ Trump and Mamdani ‘Bro Up’ in Oval Office – Piers Morgan Uncensored
• Transcript: Kamala on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Rebellion – Bulwark Podcast
• Transcript: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on Putin vs. Trump – MD MEETS Podcast #5
• John Mearsheimer: Bleak Future of Europe – Defeated & Broken (Transcript)
• Transcript: ‘Ukraine Is A Corrupt MESS’ Trump Finalizes Russia Peace Deal – Piers Morgan Uncensored