Putin is cornered as he shows ‘unprecedented’ weakness | Bill Browder

And I've never seen in all the time that Putin has been in power, him showing this kind of weakness.And so it's significant.It's very significant that he's saying that and doing that.And it shows that he's backed himself into a corner.

Hello and welcome to Frontline with me, Laura Martinez -Williams.And today we're talking to financier and political activist Bill Browder.So William is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and was the largest foreign investor in Russia until he was banned for exposing corruption.He established the Nixie sanctions and campaigns to impose them on corrupt individuals linked to the Kremlin and on a global scale.Bill, welcome back to Frontline.

Great to be here.

So in the last four days, we've seen the Ukrainian military intensifying its attacks near the Russian -annexed Crimea.It's hitting at least 25 ships, 12 Russian oil tankers, a tugboat and a dry loader in the Sea of Azov was just overnight.Ukraine claims that these vessels are part of the Russian Shadow Fleet.How significant are these strikes in Ukraine's wider operation?

Well, I think that we have to look at these strikes in conjunction with everything else that's being struck.And what's really significant right now is that Ukraine has found the fundamental weakness of Russia, which is because it's such a vast and big country, they don't have the air defence to protect everything.In fact, they don't have the air defence to protect anything other than perhaps the Kremlin and Putin's private residence.And as a result, the Ukrainians have come up with this very ingenious strategy, which is just to look at what the economic pressure points are for Russia, and the economic pressure points are oil, and then systematically start to destroy those pressure points.And so they've started hitting oil refineries as far as Omsk, which is just in the middle of Siberia.I mean, it's a 10 -hour drone flight from the Ukrainian

border to Siberia.They're hitting refineries in the Baltic, hitting refineries on the Black Sea, hitting refineries all over the place.And as they've done this, the Russians are running out of gasoline.And so they're trying to reposition gasoline where they can.And then the Ukrainians are hitting the ships that are transporting the gasoline, which is pretty remarkable.And then, of course, they're hitting the shadow tankers.

And so this is a truly amazing military move, which there's no question that it has a very strong impact on Russia.I think that we may be getting ahead of ourselves when we say that Ukraine is now going to win the war because they're doing this.They're causing a lot of pain.They're winning the war.But the one thing they're doing for sure is they're changing the way Russians view this war.For about three years, the Russians said, oh yeah, this is fine, because Putin called it a special military operation, not a war.

They recruited all the military men from poor regions of Russia.They emptied out the prisons.And everyone in Moscow and St. Petersburg were living a normal life, maybe even a better life in some cases.But now all of a sudden, they don't have gasoline.There are people standing in line, the people having fistfights in line at the gas stations.I've read stories that they're going to run out of effectively good gasoline for cars, and they're going to have to use really low -grade gasoline, which will start ruining the engines of all cars made after 2015.

And so this is really, it touches everybody.And now every Russian has to say, theoretically, is this war making sense for us?But practically, does this war make sense for us?Do we, are we happy that we're having this war?Are we happy to stand in line?What are we getting for, you know, we have to stand in line for gas, our cars, engines are going to burn out.

What are we getting in return?We're getting in return some sliver of Eastern dawn bass.Why do we need that?Why do we want that?How does that change our lives?How does that make us any better off?

And those questions being asked by the Russians potentially put Putin in a, in a weaker position.But then again, I should warn everybody that just because he's in a weaker position doesn't mean that that the war is going to end Putin is not a guy who reacts to humiliation.Well, my prediction is that he'll then try to do something horribly just.brutal to Ukrainians, a terrible attack on civilians.But what it does do is it brings this war home to the Russians.

You mentioned there about the attacks going all over the place.We've also seen them directly in St. Petersburg and Moscow.I was wondering, what does this do to affect his efforts to conceal the truth about the war with his misinformation campaign?

It's unconcealable.The St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which is Russia's Davos, version of Davos, that the forum was starting out and there's this amazing image of black smoke in the horizon, um, uh, rising over the, uh, uh, the refinery in St. Petersburg and, and, you know, refine in Moscow, the same thing, it's, it's unconcealable.And what's interesting is that Putin, who is a guy who doesn't admit anything is wrong.And as you mentioned, use the word misinformation, um you know they're busy you know saying black is white and and one is zero and all sorts of other stuff on the news but they can't say that now and and i and putin in in an interview which is published on television admitted that that they were having problems and i have to say most people probably just watched that and said of course there's problems he's talking about it i thought that was one of the most unusualthings I've ever seen in the 26 years that he's been in power.And in the 17 years that I've been in a conflict with him, I've never seen him admit a problem.

He always says the opposite of the truth.And the fact that he had to admit it really means that it's obviously something affecting Russians.And just today, there was a leak of Zenya Sobchak.Zenya Sobchak is a leading media personality.And there's a leak of her direct messages from Telegram, which somehow was obtained by some Russian hackers.And you could see all this struggle around how do we report what's going on and the pressure coming from the Kremlin and the censors getting on her back and her employees saying, how can we lie?

And it was all very interesting to see the struggle that they're having trying to create the misinformation.

I was wondering, again, you mentioned the Omsk shutdown.and it directly targeting Russian petrol supply.What are the economic impacts of this?

Well, first and foremost, according to the statistics I read over the last two days, with the Omsk refinery hit, and I think that's responsible for 8 % of Russia's refined products, they're down somewhere, and I'm not sure if I can believe these numbers, but 48%.And so Russia then has to import fuel or gas and diesel from other countries.Ukraine is perhaps hitting or will hit some of these ships coming in.And so this absolutely has to have an impact.And it's not just an economic impact, but a military impact, because the military in Crimea, the troops that have occupied Crimea, need to be resupplied.And they can't be resupplied with fuel and oil and they can't be resupplied with other materials because they're being cut off.

And so this will have a military.and an economic impact.Now, again, I urge everybody not to celebrate that the war is going to be over soon.I don't think it's going to be over soon.But it does put Russia on the back foot.And Russia's only response to this is just bombing civilians in Ukraine.

And at the moment, Ukraine doesn't have air defense to shoot down the missiles coming in.And so every time a missile comes in, it's like an act of terror.You know, Ukraine is hitting economic targets in Russia.Russia is hitting civilians in Ukraine.That's that's what's going on.

It's interesting that you mentioned about air defences, because earlier in the week, we had the NATO summit in Ankara with the US President Donald Trump promising licensing for Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles.We all know the importance of air defence in this war.How promising is this?

Well, I think that it's promising.But again, we shouldn't get too excited about it, because to go from having a license to actually having Patriot missiles is a long process.And of course, the Ukrainians are very good at short -circuiting long processes, because their survival depends on it.But I don't think we're going to see Ukrainian -made Patriot missiles on the battlefield in the next three months or even six months.It's probably a year out.But the one thing we can say is that Ukrainians are so good at developing military technology, whether it's offensive or defensive, that they will have the necessity as the mother of invention, and they will have things that will help them further shoot down Russian drones and Russian missiles.

And I know also that the French, which have a slightly inferior air defense product to the Patriot missiles have also allowed them or signed a deal with them to supply them with that.And and and so, you know,different methods, they will improve their air defenses.But that is the area that Russia can continue to destroy morale and kill civilians.And by the way, this is something that's been going on for decades.Russia in Chechnya used bombers to kill civilians.

In Syria, they used bombers to kill civilians.And back in the Soviet times in Afghanistan, uh this is what they do they just go kill civilians it's just a way of that to brutalize people and and uh uh this is the first victim of that that's actually able to fight back and the Ukrainians have fought back pretty well and they're able to shoot down a lot of different things but they don't shoot down all of them and so you end up with these days like we had a few days ago where I think you know 25 or 30 Innocent civilians that weren't combatants were killed in their apartments in Kiev.

You mentioned about Ukraine managing to almost outmaneuver Russians when it comes to their drone offensive.We've got Ukraine has just signed a significant drone and unmanned technology corporation deals with the Netherlands and Estonia.As Ukraine increasingly out -innovates Russian technology on this battlefield, do you expect Putin to lean more heavily into brutal human wave tactics and nuclear sabre rattling to compensate for Russia's technical difficulties?

Putin really only has that.He has nuclear sabre rattling, which worked very well for him for the first few years when Biden was president.He responded to that by saying, let's restrict Ukrainians from using any American made military equipment and hitting targets in Russia because he didn't want to escalate because Biden was so afraid of nuclear a nuclear escalation with Trump cutting off military aid Ukraine.The Americans couldn't place conditions on the Ukrainians.so the Ukrainians have been hitting these targets, as we discussed, all over Russia.But Putin will continue to nuclear saber rattle, and Putin will continue to—there's now rumors of mass conscriptions, so he can send more troops across the border.

Having said that, the Ukrainians have been very effective at creating an effective kill zone at the front line.Again, it doesn't mean that Russians aren't going to make progress, and the more soldiers that are put into the meat wave, incremental progress can be made.But it's a pretty futile situation for Putin.He's not going to end up getting Ukraine.He's going to lose a lot more soldiers, and a lot more of his economy is going to be destroyed and dismantled.But nobody should ever underestimate Putin's ability to take pain, or I should say, his ability to not Pay any attention to the death and pain of his own people for because he's he's a person who absolutely under no circumstances will compromise give up or or accept humiliation.

He's he's truly a brutal.uncompromising individual.And so whatever the Ukrainians are doing right now, we should expect just more escalation going forward.

So then do you agree?Earlier this week, we had the Czech President Petro Ravel, who warned Ukraine that only has two months before Putin escalates the war, as the Russian leader could order the general mobilization after his party elections in September 20th.Surely, general mobilization would backfire on Putin.How likely is that threat?

Well, so the Czech president is right in that Putin always escalates.I completely agree with him.Why two months?Why not next week?I don't know.And you're right about the whole mobilization.

So Putin has very steadfastly avoided a mass mobilization because he understands that the moment he does that, then people are going to be angry.People weren't angry when it was called a, quote, special military operation.And they weren't angry when poor people from the regions were going to get killed on the front line.They'll be very angry if young men are being mass mobilized.When they do that, they'll have to close the borders so people can't leave, which will make people even angrier.They've already cut off the internet and cut off Telegram, the messaging app, inside Russia because they're afraid of people organizing against the government.

This is Putin's worst nightmare, really.I mean, he could have never imagined the situation getting so bad.He thought that with Donald Trump in the White House, Donald Trump effectively partnering with him in his efforts to get Ukraine to surrender, his situation would improve.But it turns out it hasn't, that Trump can't solve this problem for him.And so Putin is really hanging out to dry.But again, I have said this a bunch of times, and I'll say it one more time, Russia is like North Korea.

He'll starve his people completely and absolutely.He'll send many hundreds of thousands to die in battle.He'll destroy his economy.to make a point.And that's just his psychology.That's just how he is.

And so Russia, my prediction is that Putin will be around for a while longer, and that Russia will continue to move towards the North Korean model of isolation and self -sacrifice in some absurd foreign adventure.I don't think there's any any chance that Putin does anything different than that.

everyone in Russia will start feeling it because it will be targeting the elites and the people in his inner circle.Interestingly, though, yesterday on Frontline with Kate Zhubo, we had the political analyst Nikolai Petrov, and he said the thing that the West gets wrong about Russia and Putin's inner circle is that it's not the fact that his inner circle will turn on him because they're made up of Putin's loyalists, But the thing that would be its downfall is that they are aging, the individuals in this circle itself.What do you think of this analysis?

Well, the main thing I think that Putin has to worry about is not any, there's no inner circle, outer circle, oligarchs, anybody who has the courage to take Putin out or to challenge Putin.They all understand that they do that.They go the way of Sergei, I'm sorry, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, you know, who went down in his airplane, which was bombed by the Russian security services.Everybody understands that.Putin's big risk is he does something which gets people so angry, the Russian people generally, that is a disorganized uprising where people, you know, and maybe they then try to quell the uprising by killing a bunch of people and then more people get angry.And it's all a function of of, are people more scared, or are they more angry?

And for the last 26 years, everyone's been more scared.There might be a moment, and I can't predict it, nor can Putin, when he does something which just makes people more angry, and you end up with a mass uprising.And that's the fear of Putin, and that's the fear of every dictator, and we've seen many examples where that's happened.That happensin Egypt in the Arab Spring.It happened in Tunisia.

It happened in Ukraine with Yanukovych.It's happened in a lot of places.And that's Putin's worst nightmare.That's the fear.He can kill a few people like Yevgeny Prigozhin.He can kill Alexei Navalny, the head of the Russian opposition, or Boris Nemtsov.

But he can't kill a million people marching on Red Square.And if that were to happen, then all bets are off for him.And that's what he's desperately trying to avoid.And he increases the chance of that happening if he does a general conscription, of course.And then everybody is saying, well, if I'm going to die in war, maybe I should die fighting the war, which is something that hasn't happened before.

Do you think we're seeing Putin acknowledging this with his recent change in language when it comes to the rhetoric of his special military operation now being turned into a war?

Well, he's definitely acknowledging it.And the fact that he's even talking about the fuel crisis and the enemy causing an information attack on Russia and all this kind of stuff.This is unprecedented.I've never seen in all the time that Putin has been in power, him showing this kind of weakness.And so it's significant.It's very significant that he's saying that and doing that.

And it shows that he's backed himself into a corner.

And finally, Bill, Politico is reporting that during the NATO Ankara summit, Zelensky learned from his European leaders that China urged Russia to not use nuclear weapons in an ultimatum -like form.Is this a sign of cracks starting to form in the relationship between the two superpowers, or does it show that China has the real power over Putin?

Well, I think China is a really important part of Putin's situation.China is giving him weapons and economic support through the purchase of oil,through the purchase of other things, through the sale of products that are banned by the West.So China is an important part of this whole thing.And if China were to abandon Russia, they would really be left to hang out to dry.And China absolutely does not want Russia to use nuclear weapons.

And they've made that clear from day one.I mean, Putin probably would have used a nuclear weapon if China hadn't been there telling them not to.I mean, we would be in a completely terrible world that wouldn't help China if Putin were to use a nuclear weapon.And so that's certainly a big pressure on Putin not to.And I would say that Putin also has his own other pressures not to use a nuclear weapon, which is if he used a nuclear weapon, he wouldn't win the war.Ukraine is a very dispersed country.

The military is all over the place in Ukraine.All the attacks that are coming out of Ukraine are not centralized in Kiev or some other city where they could just destroy it all with a nuclear weapon.And so all it would do is isolate Russia.It would put Putin in the worst place as far as the world is concerned.It would cut off China's support, and the war would carry on.And perhaps NATO would get involved at that point in some way bigger than they are right now.

And so I don't think Putin is going to cross that line.I think he understands that if he did cross that line, that would probably be the end for him.But he's going to continue to do whatever he can short of nuclear war to make life miserable for the Ukrainians.And he might do something in a NATO country in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland.He may try to see how strong the NATO guarantees really are.Would the Americans step in if he attacked Poland?

Probably not.You know, there's a lot of things he could do and may do beyond the Ukrainian border to try to get himself out of this mess.

Well, let's hope that doesn't happen.Bill, that's taken us to the end of our time.Thank you so much for joining me today on Frontline.

Thank you.

You've been watching Frontline with me, Laura Martinez -Williams.And for all the latest updates on the war in Ukraine and global security, you can subscribe to this channel and sign up to be a member.You can also listen to Frontline wherever you get your podcasts and on Times Radio at 1 .30am UTC.And for all the latest news and analysis, you can visit thetimes .com.Thanks for watching.

Goodbye for now.