THE İ PAPER
I’ve fought against Putin for 25 years. He’s never been so vulnerable
Jamison Firestone has faced off against the Russian President. His book Rule of Lies shows what must be done
Things aren’t going well for Russia, and it’s about to get a lot worse. Vladimir Putin is now four years into a war that was supposed to be over in days. He now has decisions to make, including whether to risk his own power and possibly his life.
Before I explain those decisions and how we can use them to thwart Russia’s President, let me first introduce you to Putin, the man I grew up fighting. By his own account he’s a street fighter and a bully. He grew up poor and learned that the small kid on the streets must project toughness and power.
However, he’s also a coward. Putin never starts a fight he thinks he might lose. He’s the man who was so scared of Covid-19 that he lived in isolation for two years during the pandemic and sat 20 feet away from France’s Emmanuel Macron at a comically long table.
He’s also the man who now spends most of his time living in bunkers, who’s fixated on the image of Muammar Gaddafi being beaten to death by his own people, and who is terrified of an uprising in Russia. In his mind, he has two enemies: the West and his own people.
I know a bit about bullies and about Putin because I was raised by bullies before I ended up fighting Putin. I grew up in New York as the son of a rich conman who happened to own Manhattan’s most exclusive brothel. My father’s friends were killers and loan sharks, and their kids, often my involuntary playmates, became the same. I wanted no part of it, but I learned how to deal with that world and explain things to thugs.
After my father went to prison and I went to law school, I moved to Moscow in 1991 and set up Russia’s first independent foreign law firm. Russia in the 90s was lawless, but given my background I knew how to operate in that world. I’ve fought protection rackets, raided an office at the head of a private Swat team and bugged the offices of corrupt Russian police.
In the 2000s, Putin made government the mafia and weaponised the justice system. Instead of people stealing with guns they now stole with court cases. A person with money or power could create a fake criminal case against someone and then use it to take what they want.
In the midst of one such situation, criminals and officials – often the same thing in Russia – hijacked three of my client’s companies and used them to steal £170m from the Russian government. When my employee, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed them, they arrested and killed him. That’s when I ended up fleeing to the UK and going to war with Putin’s Russia.
My client was a man named Bill Browder, and with the help of a young blogger named Alexei Navalny, we went after Sergei’s killers by exposing their crimes through YouTube videos and showing how rich they got from their crimes. Our videos were a sensation. It was the first time victims of Putin’s system hit back at the people persecuting them. I became a minor media star. But in the end, we couldn’t get justice in Russia.
Law enforcement was suborned by the people we were chasing, and Dmitry Medvedev and Putin did nothing to stop them. All of Sergei’s killers, who were now inordinately rich, were exonerated.
At that point we switched gears and went after them outside of Russia. We chased their money all around the world, using existing anti-money laundering laws to freeze it.
During that process we exposed hundreds of billions of dollars of money laundering and took down banks in several countries, but we only managed to actually freeze about $40m. That wasn’t enough for us. So, we switched gears again and asked governments all over the word to sanction Sergei’s killers, and anyone like them who fostered corruption or human rights abuses.
The passage of Magnitsky Sanctions destroyed the impunity of Putin’s officials. Since their adoption by the US, UK, Canada, EU and Australia, Sergei’s killers have been banned from these countries and so have numerous other bad people from Russia and nations all over the world. But Putin’s hold on power was unaffected.
Navalny ran with our idea but took on the highest officials in Putin’s government. The entire population of Russia was watching his videos, and he built a real political organisation to oppose Putin, organising voters and bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. That was the first real resistance to Putin, and eventually he killed Navalny and criminalised opposition.
There are those who say Navalny’s cause, and my cause – that of ending Putin and Putinism – is hopeless. But they are wrong. Navalny and others planted a seed, and it was growing. But it’s hard to bring down a dictatorship when much of the population is comfortable.
Enter the war. When Russia attacked Ukraine, victory was a sure thing in Putin’s mind. The big thug attacking the little guy. Ukraine had no chance. But Ukraine didn’t fall and the West came to its aid.
The war is an existential issue, not just for Ukraine but for the rest of Europe. Thugs keep taking until they are stopped. A triumphant Russia will be looking at all the lands the Soviet Union lost, including countries now part of the EU and Nato.
But the war is also the key to thwarting Putin. Cutting Russia’s revenue through sanctions and funding Ukraine are now the focus of my efforts. My colleagues and I have developed the legal framework to utilise $300bn of frozen Russian state assets and put them to work for Ukraine: www.makeputinpay.org.
When the war started, Russia was rich. Sanctions, the demands of the war and Ukrainian bombings of Russia’s oil infrastructure have drained its treasury and strangled new revenue.
The war also created a shortage of manpower. At first Putin resorted to a draft. As a result, 400,000 of Russia’s most-skilled people fled the country. Putin then cleaned out the prisons, sending convicts that nobody cared about to fight. When prison conscripts ran out, he bribed people to serve, offering sky-high pay and benefits to soldiers. There are no longer any takers for this offer, and local governments don’t have the money to pay what they already owe.
And so here we are. Russia is beginning to lose some of its gains in Ukraine, and it’s losing more men each month than it recruits. No one doubts that Putin can continue to fight – but not without ending his people’s never-ending party.
Does Putin fully militarise the economy, cut off people’s escape to the West along with their prized right to vacations, cut off their ability to organise over the internet? Does he tell everyone the party’s over and they need to go fight and perhaps die on the front line? Or would he rather declare “victory” and stop where he is?
The old man in the bunker doesn’t want to die.
Now is the time to offer Putin a hard deal. “Stop where you are, we’re giving your frozen $300bn to Ukraine, and if you behave, we’ll lift sanctions and shave money off your exports until Ukraine has been paid all the reparations it’s owed.”
Tell him he can spin it how he wants – “You can even call yourself Vladimir the Gatherer of the ‘Russian’ Lands” – or we’ll just keep funding the war and you’ll break all your promises to your people and risk dying at their hands.
The EU and UK have an economy 10 times the size of Russia’s. If we fund Ukraine, Putin can’t win. If he doesn’t know it now, he’ll find out soon. The longer he fights, the more unstable his rule will become.
It’s time to tell Putin the way it’s going to be, and keep funding Ukraine until that’s the way it is.
Jamison Firestone is an attorney who lived in Russia for 18 years. He co-founded the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. His book, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride through Chaos, Corruption and Murder in Putin’s Russia, published on 4 June, tells his personal story interwoven with Russia’s descent into dictatorship.
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