Bill Browder: “Conflict in Ukraine has purely to do with the fact Putin is a kleptocrat“

Bill Browder talks to VOA about his new book, “Red notice“. “I believe that the Ukraine crisis has nothing to do with NATO, it has nothing to do with the historic claims on Crimea - it has nothing to do with Russian humiliation over how the West is treating Russia. It has purely to do with the fact that Putin is a kleptocrat. He’s stolen enormous amounts of money, and the Russian people were starting to get angry. And he saw a much more small version of him in Ukraine - Yanokovych - getting completely destroyed, kicked out by his people - and Putin saw that and said to himself it’s just a matter of time before Russians do that to me, unless I come up with some huge distraction, some kind of huge way of taking peoples minds off their criticism of me. And so that’s when they started this war. And it worked for him - his approval ratings went up from 55% to 88%. It goes up to 88%, but it doesn’t just stay there - he has to keep up feeding nationalism, to keep it at 88% - and to feed the nati