Thank you very much for this opportunity to address you this afternoon on the horrible situation in Ukraine.
I'm here to talk about sanctions specifically.
As some of you know, I am the person behind the Magnitsky act. Sergei Magnitsky was my lawyer in Russia, who was murdered on November 16, 2009. After his murder, I was looking for a way in which to seek justice for him. The idea came about because there were no other ways of finding redress. We came up with this idea of freezing the assets and banning the travel of the people who were responsible for his murder.
I first took this idea to the United States and, in a truly bipartisan way, the Magnitsky act was passed in 2012 with a vote of 92 to 4 in the Senate and 89% in the House of Representatives. It became a law on December 14, 2012.
Vladimir Putin went out of his mind when this law was passed. In retaliation, he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. After that, he put Sergei Magnitsky on trial in the first-ever trial against a dead man in Russian history, and put me on trial as Sergei's co-defendant. We were both found guilty.
They couldn't do anything more to Sergei, but they sentenced me to nine years in absentia and have been chasing me around the world ever since. They've issued eight Interpol arrest warrants for me, and they've gone to the British government on numerous occasions for my extradition. They've made death threats and various other things. It has become a full-time job for a number of people in the Russian government to come after me.
We know, then, that with the Magnitsky act we've hit a nerve. We know we've found something they really care about. In fact, it's a nerve probably greater than any other nerve: Putin declared it his single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the Magnitsky act and prevent it from spreading around the world.
Why does Putin care about this so much? He cares about it because Putin is a kleptocrat who has stolen an enormous amount of money from the Russian people, from the Russian state and from Russian oligarchs. I would estimate that he is worth $200 billion, but none of this money is kept in his own name. The money is kept in the name of people he trusts. I describe them as “oligarch trustees”.
As we're looking around at this Ukrainian situation, there are so many different conversations going on and asking, what do we do to stop Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine? The one thing I can say is that we should come up with something that he cares about. We know what he cares about. He cares about his money, and he cares about his money that's held through these trustees.
As we're looking at policies, the one policy that I've been advocating for—I'm advocating for it here right now and I've advocated in the U.K. and in the U.S.—in addition to all the other military strategies and so on, is a policy of going after the individuals who hold his money for him. My voice has gotten through in the U.K. and it's gotten through in the U.S., and both countries have made statements in the last 10 days to say they that would sanction the oligarchs looking after Putin's money.
It's very interesting, because there was a statement made by the British foreign secretary Liz Truss last Sunday, and moments after that statement was made, Vladimir Putin emerged for the first time to publicly discuss the situation in the Ukraine. He had been hiding, effectively, for the previous month, and not saying a word about Ukraine. He finally came out because we finally hit his Achilles heel.
As we look forward to what to do about this situation, my prescription is to make a list of the 50 biggest oligarchs who look after Putin's money. There's no mystery as to who these people are—various people, such as Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who's in jail, and many others have made this list—and we hit these people with Magnitsky sanctions.
We start with five before any invasion to show Putin we're serious. We then tell him that he has 10 days to pull back from the border or we hit him with another five. If he invades, we go after the rest of the 40. I believe this would stop Putin in his tracks and he wouldn't invade Ukraine.