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Right, Bill Browder has a lovely voice. He's our next guest. So Bill Browder, he's anti-corruption
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campaigner, chief executive of Hermitage Capital and head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign
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and Bill is Putin's number one enemy. Bill, very good evening to you. Great to have you on the
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programme again. When I heard the summit between Donald Trump and President Putin being described
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as vomit inducing, I thought that must have been a quote from you, but it wasn't. What was your
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view of what happened last Friday? Yeah, well, that was a Boris Johnson quote, but I had similar
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I certainly had a similar reaction. I mean, the imagery was just horrifying. Here you had a man
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responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians, of destroying big parts of
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the Ukrainian territory, of terrorizing every Ukrainian every night. And he lands and they
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The American soldiers were on their knees putting a red carpet out for him
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And then Trump claps as he comes to him. I mean, it's just, you know, I mean, you know, if someone had made this a movie script about some kind of slapstick comedy, you would say this is insane
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But here we are in real life with the most powerful man in the free world
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applauding an indicted war criminal as he walks down the red carpet to join him
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And I mean, it's hard to get your head around that. So given what happened on Friday and what we heard in the press conference around an hour ago with Trump and Zelensky Where do you think things lie now Well I mean I have such low expectations of a good outcome that I was actually happy
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with the press conference, not because it was a great press conference, but because the last time
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And Zelensky sat in the room with President Trump and G.D. Vance and Marco Rubio
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And all those guys were shouting at him like he was some type of interloper
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This time, at least, it was all more dignified and respectful. And they didn't really say, nobody had anything specific to say
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And so I was just watching and waiting for something terrible to happen and something terrible didn't happen
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And so I was just breathing a big sigh of relief for Zelensky that it wasn't a disaster
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But the substance behind of what's going on right now, at least based on reports and tweets from Trump
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is that effectively Trump is telling Zelensky that in order to stop the war, he has to capitulate
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He's saying that Zelensky can stop this war tomorrow. Well, the only way to stop the war is to basically surrender
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and of course that would be a disaster an unmitigated disaster for for ukraine for the uk
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for the rest of the world and so it's it's all pretty awful the general dynamics of this of this
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whole situation but the the the one thing that we can give ourselves some comfort on is that whatever trump says he doesn really care what he said yesterday he can change his view in the next minute And so anything could happen as a result of this meeting with Zelensky
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anything could happen as a result of the meeting with Keir Starmer and the rest of the heads of
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state from Europe. So I guess we just have to wait and see. Do you think there is likely to be
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a trilateral between Trump, Putin and Zelensky? And if there is, how do you think Putin would play
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that? I think that I don't think there's going to be any trilateral and I don't think there's
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going to be any peace. I as much as we all so much want to see Ukraine stop being bombarded every day
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by by Putin's bombs and drones. Putin doesn't want to end the war. He thinks he's on a roll
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He thinks he's winning. He thinks that even though they're losing a thousand to fifteen
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hundred soldiers a day, he thinks that he doesn't care about the soldiers, first of all
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And he thinks that he's eventually wearing us out. And so I don't think Putin wants to end this war
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And I think that the only reason we're in this whole kerfuffle with everyone traveling
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to Washington and so on is that Putin needed to find a way to change the outcome after
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turning Trump down six times for an immediate ceasefire. And so Putin goes to Alaska with his red carpet and somehow convinces Trump that he doesn't
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that there's no longer necessary to have an immediate ceasefire. And what that means in reality is that Putin can carry on bombarding Ukraine and all this talk about peace They can have negotiations or meetings or whatever they want to have and they can just drag into perpetuity
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and Putin can both have his war and not have any intense sanctions
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which was the punishment for not having a ceasefire before. Well, we've been having a bit of a disagreement
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particularly with a caller just now, about the state of the Russian economy
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I keep reading that it's on the edge of collapse, that within 12 months it could collapse, and that's Zelensky's best hope
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Is that likely? Well, there's one thing that Russia has, which continues to support their economy, and it's
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huge, which is their sale of oil. Russia sells oil to China, to India, to Turkey, and the amounts of money they get are between
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$200 billion and $300 billion. dollars. And that's a lot of money and that buys a lot of weapons and that keeps the economy afloat
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If we wanted to, we could cut that off tomorrow. We could basically tell the Chinese, the Indians
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and the Turks that if you buy Russian oil, then you'll be subject to secondary sanctions, etc
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And if the United States does that, if the EU does that, if the UK does that
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China, India and Turkey won't buy the oil and then Russia doesn't get the $200 or $300 billion
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that they need to keep their economy going. And it would be less than 12 months
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It would probably be three or four months before Russia basically comes on its knees
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and Putin begging for a ceasefire negotiation, a real ceasefire negotiation. Thank you very much, Bill
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Always good to talk to you. That's Sabelle Browder there
