Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has been trying to mobilize the international community to inflict coordinated and far-reaching economic pain on Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin associates for 15 years.

Finally, with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Bill Browder is seeing many of his wishes

come true. Browder knows Russia and Putin well. As an ambitious American fund manager in the 1990s,

he saw an opportunity to make quick and big bucks amid Russia's post-Soviet economic chaos. At one point,

he was the largest private investor in Russia. He backed Vladimir Putin's rise to power,

arguing that the country needed an authority figure to root out corruption and impose economic

discipline. Now, that was in 2000. By 2007, he'd changed his

tune as his own Moscow investment company, Hermitage Capital, came under state scrutiny

after Browder spoke out against continued corruption. In 2009, a Moscow lawyer working for Hermitage died in police custody,

and that prompted Browder to commit to a long-term campaign of international activism

targeting Putin and Russia's oligarchs, who, according to Browder, acted as Putin's moneymen.

By 2012, his lobbying had been instrumental in the US passing the Magnitsky Act,

which imposed targeted sanctions on Russian individuals directly connected to human rights abuses.

Since then, more than 30 other countries have passed similar legislation.

And now, of course, thanks to the invasion of Ukraine,

Russia is facing an unprecedented panoply of Western sanctions. But Putin's war machine hasn't yet

ground to a halt, and he shows no sign of reversing course. So has Russia's economic resilience been underestimated?

Well, Bill Browder joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Great to be back.

It's great to have you here.

...