Vladimir Putin's reign in Russia might have been in the balance, which could be why he chose to punish Ukraine with an invasion, according to Kremlin nemesis and one-time Russian hedge-fund manager Bill Browder.
"Every once in a while, the guy in charge has to do something to make people less angry at him," Browder told The New York Times in a Q&A. "The purpose of these wars is that he was afraid of being overthrown. And so the best way to do that is to get everyone to rally around the leader.
"When you're talking about an endgame, there is no endgame. This is just him staying in power."
Browder equated Putin's world to that of a prison yard, where the bully is feared and wields the power.
"The problem is that there's some psychological features that feed into this whole thing, which make it a particularly toxic brew," Browder said. "The world that he lives in is like a prison yard. This is a world where everybody is sort of eyeing each other up aggressively, and everybody has to show strength to each other. You know, the most powerful person in a yard has to be the most vicious person in order to keep their power.
"And so his idea was to just destroy Ukraine and then thump his chest and show everybody how powerful he is."
But, worse, Ukraine's ability to punch back against the bully is going to get Putin to consider something even more aggressive, Browder fears.
"His misjudgment in how effectively the Ukrainians are fighting back has made him look stupid," he continued. "And for a prison yard type of person, that’s the worst thing that could ever happen.
"It's not just the people around him. It's also the people in the West. The Ukrainians have shown him huge disrespect by successfully fighting back. And so, for example, the war crimes that have been committed are not by accident. This is part of his thing.
"He's got to show that he and his people and everybody around him are so vicious. They'll just keep on escalating and upping the ante, and they don't care what people think about them. In fact, they want people to think this bad stuff about them because that makes them look more brutal."
Browder's new book, "Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath," comes out Tuesday.
"There is no reasonable way for this thing to end," Browder said. "There's only an unreasonable way.
"It's either he ends up taking over Ukraine and then moving his way toward the Baltic countries to challenge us at NATO — or for him to be defeated by Ukraine and then having the Russian people overthrow him because he was the weak guy who couldn't beat Ukraine."
Browder put both of those extremes at "15% probability," and the remaining 70% is the reality the war in Ukraine lasts years.
"That he and the Ukrainians and all of us are stuck in this low simmer," Browder continued. "It's not going to be at the same level of awfulness that it is right now, but at this low simmering conflict that just goes on and on and on for years."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.