Boosting funding for Ukraine’s defence against Russia is the best way to punish Vladimir Putin for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, according to his friend Bill Browder.
He told GB News: “Putin needs to be taught a lesson and there's not much more we can do in terms of narrow individual sanctions, and we should do them of course, but the one thing that we should do now is on a very broad scale and we should help Ukrainians defeat Russia.
“And what does that mean? That means, in the United States, the US Congress is holding up $63 billion of military support for Ukraine and I'm hoping that those congressmen who are holding it up now feel embarrassed supporting Putin.
“Here on the UK side, we can come up with a plan to confiscate the frozen Russian Central Bank reserves. There's about $300 billion of central bank reserves that were frozen after the war started and that money should be confiscated and handed over to the Ukrainians for their defence and reconstruction.”
In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he continued: “And then the third thing we should be doing is that there are a number of other political prisoners that are dying in Putin's jails right now.
“One specifically is a British citizen. His name is Vladimir Kara-Murza. Vladimir, like Navalny, went back to Russia, he criticised Putin openly. He was arrested. He was put in jail and he's sentenced to 25 years, he sits in a Siberian prison.
“He's a British citizen, and we should be doing everything we possibly do to get him out so that if and when the Putin regime falls, we have somebody who believes in democracy to pick up the pieces.”
He added: “I was just reading the reports this morning and, other than one newspaper, they didn't he didn't even mention Alexei Navalny. It's just remarkable. It's like this is the Soviet Union all over again, that they erased him from history almost immediately.
“Putin has never uttered the words Alexei Navalny. These people can't stand to mention the name of somebody who was so beloved by the people. And so beloved because he provided really a breath of fresh air and an alternative from the criminality of the regime.”
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