“Every day, while we are all sanctioning Russia, the E.U. is sending Putin $1 billion in the form of payments for oil and gas.”

Putin’s Enemy No. 1

Eight questions with Bill Browder, whose new book, Freezing Order, offers a captivating follow-up to his 2015 nonfiction Russia thriller, Red Notice

By Jim Kelly

Vladimir Putin is now reviled and condemned around the world, but let the record show that Bill Browder got there pretty much before everyone else. A onetime investor in Russia (and whose grandfather Earl was president of the American Communist Party in the 1930s), Browder turned against Putin and his corrupt cronies almost 20 years ago, leading both to his being banned from the country in 2005 and in 2015 to the publication of his first book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice. This week marks the publication of Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath, a sequel of sorts bringing readers up-to-date on how he became Putin’s enemy No. 1.

JIM KELLY: For more than a decade now, you have been decrying Vladimir Putin as a corrupt and murderous thug. Why did it take the invasion of Ukraine for the rest of the world to catch up with your assessment?