[parcifal]

Bill Bowder over hoe om te gaan met de ultracorrupte Putin en zijn bedreiging van het westen :

http://www.businessinsider.com/russi...ts-2017-3?IR=T

Jeff Schechtman: Have we all gone a little crazy with our obsession with Russia of late or are there really things happening that we should genuinely be concerned about?

Bill Browder: Well, there’s been stuff that we should’ve been genuinely concerned about for the last 15 years while Vladimir Putin has been running Russia and it’s been a slow catchup from perception to reality. Putin is a different type of leader than any other head of state in that Putin has been stealing money hand over fist to the tune of 200 billion dollars for himself in his presidency. Russia is effectively a mafia organization in which he’s the capo and the only difference between this mafia organization and the Colombian mafia or the Italian mafia is that Vladimir Putin controls thousands of nuclear warheads.

Jeff Schechtman: After all these years, Russian diplomats are still dropping dead. What’s going on?

Bill Browder: Well, I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist. Having said that, having dealt with the Russians, there’s a good reason why there are so many theories (ed.) because there really are conspiracies. The Russians kill people for all sorts of reasons and I’ve seen it up close and personal in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer. Sergei Magnitsky discovered a massive government corruption scheme from the outside. He wasn’t in the government; he was just my lawyer and he exposed it and he was killed. One of the Russians who was part of the corruption scheme became a whistleblower and came to us with this information about this corruption scheme in London. And after he gave us the information – and that information was used to freeze accounts in Switzerland and open up a major money laundering investigation –

he dropped dead in front of his house in a suburb of London. Then another guy who was a Russian opposition activist who was involved in campaigning for sanctions against Russia in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer, this man, his name is Vladimir Kara-Murza, he was poisoned twice, almost killed twice in Russia. And so they poison, they kill, they do all sorts of stuff as a matter of course. This is what they do.

What is the best way in your view, for the rest of the world, for the west to deal with Russia at this point?

Bill Browder: I don’t think it’s our place to overthrow him or not. It’s not our place and it’s not our ability to do that. What the West needs to do is understand that this man is an international menace, he intends nothing but bad things to happen to us in the West. It’s been proven that that’s how he is and so we need to contain him. This is a different type of Cold War situation, but one where we can’t let him make another further move in the West. And we have to stop all the stuff that he’s doing, which means we need a very strong military presence on NATO countries on the border. And we need to be doing big, big investigations into the money laundering of Russians in the Western banking system. And we need to freeze the assets of the oligarchs and ban their travel for the ones who are managing Putin’s money, which is a lot of them. If we did that stuff, we would completely clip his wings and he wouldn’t become an international menace, he would stop doing what he’s doing because the West is infinitely more powerful than him if we worked together.

Jeff Schechtman: I guess the question is what he might do in response.

Bill Browder: Well, he’s going to huff and puff and threaten to blow our house down, but we’re not talking about starting a war with Russia, we’re just saying you can’t take another step further. Don’t. We will react if you do.