[Fareed Zakaria, Cnn:] Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria. We've got a terrific show for you today. First up, a tale of murder and intrigue involving a familiar villain. Then I know you've heard this before, but Europe is facing a major crisis. No, really. Within a couple of weeks, the money runs out for Greece. What does that mean for the euro, Europe, and global economy? I have an all-star panel for you. Also is freedom around the world in retreat? We have the numbers. Then Bill and Melinda Gates on their big bets for the future. Their take on American education, how women are transforming the world, and the next technological breakthroughs. Think about a cloud that knows how you speak and write. And finally, Mr. Putin goes to Cairo. And you won't believe what he brings with him. But first here's my take. The deal announced Thursday to end the fighting in Ukraine will face the same obstacle the previous such agreement faced how to ensure that Russia will abide by it. Frustrated by Moscow's continued support for Ukrainian separatists, Western statesmen have begun discussing military assistance for the Ukrainian government. But in trying to decide what would actually deter Moscow, it might be worth listening to what seems to scare Russians themselves. And it is not military aid to Kiev. When asked recently about the possibility of so-called swift sanctions, which would bar Russia from participating in the international payment system centered on the dollar, Prime Minister Medvedev warned that Moscow's response would be without limits. It's understandable why Putin's closest associates are so rattled by the prospect of additional economic sanctions. The Russian economy is in free fall. In a report released this week, the International Energy Agency said that Russia is facing a perfect storm of collapsing prices, international sanctions and currency depreciation. The IMF projects Russia's economy will contract by 3 percent in 2015. And Putin needs strong oil revenues to maintain his power. From 2008 to 2009 when oil revenues did collapse during the global financial crisis, the Russian government increased its spending by a staggering 40 percent, all to preserve social stability. This according to the economists. On the other hand, Russia could easily handle continuing its military skirmishing in eastern Ukraine. Moscow's defense budget in 2014 was roughly 20 times that of Kiev's, according to figures published this week by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The argument against sanctions is that while they may raise the cost for Russia, Putin has shown that he does not respond to higher costs in a rational calculating manner. But if that's the case, then military aid for Ukraine won't work either. No one believes that Kiev can actually prevail in a military contest with Moscow. A recent think tank report urging military aid itself acknowledges that the aid package will merely raise the cost for the Kremlin in order to force it to then negotiate. In other words, the consensus is that the only possible strategy is to raise costs for Russia. The disagreement is really about what kinds of costs Vladimir Putin finds most onerous. I think that military aid to Ukraine would stoke the fires of Russian nationalism, let Putin wrap himself in military colors and defend his, quote-unquote, "fellow Russians," in an arena in which he will be able to ensure that Moscow prevails. For a regime that waged two bitter and costly wars in Chechnya, a region far less central to the Russian imagination than Ukraine, the loss of some men and money in a military operation is not likely to be much of a deterrent. Why would the West want to move from its area of enormous strength, economic pressure, to an area where it will be outgunned in every sense? If Russia breaks this fragile peace, then more sanctions should be considered. Senator Lindsey Graham recently offered the most honest reason why some in Washington are advocating military assistance. Even though it doesn't seem likely to work, it's a way of doing something in the face of Russian aggression.
[Sen. Lindsey Graham , South Carolina:] I don't know how this ends if you give them defensive capability but I know this. I will feel better because when my nation was needed to stand up to the garbage and stand by freedom, I stood by the freedom.
[Zakaria:] But the purpose of American foreign policy is not to make Lindsey Graham feel better. It is to actually achieve American objectives on the ground. That means picking your battles and weapons carefully. For more go to CNN.comfareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started. To understand what motivates Vladimir Putin, we decided to call in a man who once helped him get rich. Bill Browder went from being Russia's largest foreign investor to being blacklisted from that country. The CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, Browder was once a supporter of President Putin. That is until he was expelled from Russia in 2005 after being considered a threat to national security. Browder writes about his experiences in his terrific new book "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice." He joined me recently to tell me what he learned about how the Kremlin works. So you begin the book by with this incredible story. You're the largest foreign investor in Russia, you your fund has returned 1,500 percent returns, you're managing $4.5 billion in capital at a time when that was real money, and you get to the airport and they put you on a plane and throw you out. What have you done that so pissed off the Russians?
[Bill Browder, Ceo, Hermitage Capital Management:] Well, I wasn't just a regular investor. I was what's what they what's commonly referred to now as a shareholder activist. I started out being just buying shares of Russian companies and I realized that the oligarchs and government officials were stealing all the profits out of these companies. And so I thought the only way that I could run a sort of moral and profitable business would be to try to stop it. Basically we researched how they did the stealing and then we share it with the international media. And for about four years this naming and shaming of Russian companies actually worked because my interests coincided with Putin's. He was fighting with the same guys I was fighting with. The oligarchs were stealing power from him and they were stealing money from us. And so every time I would publicize a scandal, Putin would step in and fix it. And so my profits went up, the company's profits went up. And I was feeling like I was feeling like the best guy in the world because I was making money and doing good at the same time.
[Zakaria:] But then Putin makes a deal with all these oligarchs and at that point things start to change for you.
[Browder:] He arrested the richest oligarch in the country and said to the other guys, if you don't want to be arrested you need to share your money with me.
[Zakaria:] Right. Right.
[Browder:] So he became a business partner and then my all of my activism became very inconvenient. At that point, I was not going after his enemies, I was going after his own financial interest. And so when I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport in November 2005 after living there for 10 years, I was stopped at the VIP lounge. I was taken down to the detention center of the airport. I was kept there for 15 hours. Deported and declared a threat to national security. What I didn't realize then, and it's become absolutely plain and obvious to me now, based on my experience, is that Putin wasn't above it all, Putin was intimately involved in it all. And it wasn't like he was restraining the oligarchs, he was the biggest oligarch. And everything that he's done since then has come to prove that.
[Zakaria:] Do you think Putin is about power or about money?
[Browder:] Well, I would say the first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could. And some people, including myself, believe that he's the richest man in the world or one of the richest men in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth that was stolen from Russia. It's changed, though. It's mutated. All
[Zakaria:] Really? I mean, you understand numbers. And you understand the numbers of these Russian companies. You really think Putin is the richest man in the world?
[Browder:] I really think that. And I'm not just saying that crazily.
[Zakaria:] Estimate his net worth?
[Browder:] $200 billion.
[Zakaria:] Really?
[Browder:] I believe that it's $200 billion. After 14 years in power in Russia and the amount of money that the country has made and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.
[Zakaria:] And it would explain why he personally has so much power, right? It's not the power of the party or the army you worry about or the state.
[Browder:] But the power is very simple in Russia. Whoever has the power to arrest people is the person in power. And so what Putin does is he has a bunch of guys around him who have the power to arrest people. And so it doesn't matter how rich you are, if you can be arrested, put in jail and have your money taken away, the guy who can do that to you is the most powerful person in Russia.
[Zakaria:] The second half of your book is about this incredible campaign that you have you've launched ever since the death of Sergei Magnitsky, your the guy who was looking after your accounts and the legal issues surrounding them. How did you manage to get people in the United States,
[Browder:] Well, my attorney Sergei Magnitsky, he was murdered for exposing government corruption, murdered in pretrial detention, and they covered up his murder. What they did to him was so evil and so heartbreaking and so well-documented that when I went and told the story to members of Congress, it didn't matter whether you were the most conservative Republican or the most liberal Democrat, this is the one thing in Washington everybody could agree on, which was these people were bad. These guys killed Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer, for money. They all got rich, they all got bank accounts, and villas and cars. Why should we allow them to come to America, travel to America, keep their accounts here and spend that money? Everyone said, yes, that's easy. It doesn't cost anything to stop them from doing that. And so this started snowballing and against the interest of the U.S. administration. The U.S. administration at that time wanted to play nice with Russia. We got the Magnitksy Law passed 92-4 in the Senate. It's the one thing that everyone in Washington could agree on.
[Zakaria:] Oil prices are down 15 percent. The Russian economy is being sanctioned, banks are in trouble. How does this how does this play out for Putin?
[Browder:] Well, there's the Zimbabwe-North Korea scenario where he just runs Russia truly and absolutely into the ground and stays in power. And that could happen. There's also the Ukraine-Georgia- Kyrgyzstan scenario where people the Russian people say, why are we allowing this man to ruin everybody's life. He makes some decisions, some small decisions, it doesn't have to be big decisions, it just sparks a million people on Red Square and they get rid of him or it could even be that some members of the army and the police decide palace coup, let's get rid of him. We don't know. But in the meantime while he's still in power he's going to be running Russia into the ground and causing the West a lot of problems.
[Zakaria:] Bill Browder, pleasure to have you on.
[Browder:] Thank you.
[Zakaria:] Up next Greek and European officials are playing a game of chicken. Who will blink? Stay tuned for a fascinating conversation.