Britain and countries worldwide have been urged to use hundreds of billions of pounds of frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war against Vladimir Putin, as a London businessman known as the Kremlin leader’s “number one enemy” said it would be a “total game changer” in the conflict.
Bill Browder, who was the largest international investor in Russia until being declared a threat to its national security for exposing corruption, said that handing frozen Russian assets – which are estimated to total at least £275billion worldwide including £23billion in Britain – to Ukraine would tip the balance and allow to “fight off the Russians” and “arm themselves properly”.
His call came amid increasing optimism that the G7 powers, which include the US, Britain, France and Germany, are close to agreeing a deal to increase support for Ukraine by using frozen Russian assets.
The Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has said one option could be to use the security of frozen Russian assets to provide loans to Ukraine on the basis that the debts can eventually be paid off by reparations imposed on a defeated Kremlin. Other suggestions include diverting future interest payments on the frozen assets to Ukraine.
But Mr Browder said countries worldwide should instead agree to seize the frozen Russian assets completely and give the money generated to Ukraine.
“This could be the difference between defeat and victory for Ukraine,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“It’s something that will completely change the landscape and something that Putin is desperate to avoid because this is effectively a resource war and Russia has more resources.”
Mr Browder added: “To say that it’s ok to take the interest or to make bonds on the value of the future interest is not a lot of money and it’s just an added complication that doesn’t make any sense. The right approach is just to take the money.”
The renewed call for action to seize Russian assets by Mr Browder, whose lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in prison in Russia in 2009 after being jailed without trial and tortured following his exposure of corruption, came as the BBC published an analysis showing that the Russian death toll has risen to more than 50,000 since it invaded Ukraine in March 2022.
The corporation said that Russian fatalities had been 25 per cent in the second year of the conflict and had been calculated by methods including examining new graves in cemeteries as well as newspaper and social media reports of individual military deaths.
It said, however, that the true total was probably much higher and did not include deaths of Russian militia in the occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
