Former Russia investor says sanctioning Putin's oligarchs before the invasion of Ukraine would have had a 'much greater effect' on the war

• Ex-Russia investor Bill Browder said Putin's oligarchs should have been sanctioned earlier.
• In an interview with NYT, he said pre-invasion sanctions "would have had a much greater effect."

Bill Browder — an international investor who once ran the largest foreign investment fund in Russia — said if Russia's oligarchs were sanctioned before the invasion of Ukraine, "it would have had a much greater effect" on Putin's actions.

"It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing it now," Browder told The New York Times in an interview published Saturday by DealBook. "But he [Putin] was betting that there would be no serious sanctions because he's done a lot of terrible things over the last 20 years and there haven't been serious sanctions before."

Back in February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the West to not wait for an invasion of Ukraine to announce sanctions against Russia.

"We don't need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders, or after we will have no economy," he said in an interview with CNN. "Why would we need those sanctions then?"

Tom Keatinge, the founding director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies (CFCS) at RUSI who has called sanctions on Russian oligarchs a symbolic "PR exercise," told Insider that it's impossible to know whether or not pre-invasion sanctions would have deterred the war.

"'Would sanctioning and investigating oligarch wealth in years gone by have averted the current Russian war in Ukraine? It's an unanswerable question," he said. "Certainly deterring Putin from action would have been easier than coercing him to reverse his current course."

Western allies have responded weakly to past acts of Russian aggression, such as the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a British double agent and former Russian military officer, Keatinge said.

"In assessing the threat of sanctions before his invasion of Ukraine, Putin will have — understandably — assumed the rhetoric was empty once again," he continued.

By sanctioning Russia's oligarchs, the US and its allies are attempting to cut off "Putin's wallet." Ultimately, the hope is that a disgruntled elite class might put pressure on Putin to end the war, or make it more difficult to finance future attacks.

But some experts — and some of the sanctioned oligarchs themselves — have said that the Russian president could care less about what the wealthy businessmen think of him.

"Right now, the reality is that the only person who is going to change Putin's mind is Putin himself," Keatinge told Insider, adding that while oligarch sanctions have helped the conflict remain in the public's eye, it "seems highly unlikely" that they could reverse his course.

"Reversal now would be failure for Putin and failure is not an option for such a man," he said.