Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. However, with the war in Ukraine raising interest in all things Russia and Putin-related higher, I put this book on my list. These last are through periodic Interpol 'red notice' warrants initiated by Russia to hopefully get Browder caught in Customs by a foreign country unaware of the malicious intents of the instigators. I would have folded the first time I was threatened with extradition to Russia, never mind taken into custody.

Once adopted, however, the Magnitsky law remained mostly unused in the US, and particularly in the UK.

Why at the 2018 Helsinki summit with Trump would Bill Browder be the one person Putin named he wanted to interrogate in trade for the 12 GRU officers Mueller had indicted? It was only after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the UK authorities belatedly noticed the preponderance of corrupt Russian billionaires laundering their money in London.

Of perhaps special interest to watchers of the 2016 American Election and the often cited attempts of Russian collusion, it was especially interesting to follow the trail of Russian lawyer and Browder bête noire Natalia Veselnitskaya who notoriously met with Trump proxies at Trump Tower in June 2016. At least four people Browder knew and worked with on exposing human rights abuses and financial crimes were killed by Russian state security agencies, and two others were nearly killed or maimed.

This is an excellent book, and a quick read, and I also highly recommend Broder's previous Red Notice, which explains the rise of Putin. By the glint in Prosecutor Grinda’s eye, I could see that he would take what I was telling him seriously. Amid the horrors being reported every day from Ukraine, it also provides a highly readable insight into the true nature of the regime that is responsible for them. One of the most impactful takeaways from this book is that none of this could happen without western enablers and the acquiescence of timid and ineffective governments that refuse to follow their own laws and values.