I have spent years waiting for Putin’s assassins to come for me – the stakes now feel higher than ever

It is the revelation that should shake Britain to its core.

This week, the public inquiry into the 2018 novichok attack on former spy Sergei Skripal – a “reckless demonstration of Russian power” that left deadly residue in a perfume bottle. That discarded bottle ended up in the hands of Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother from Amesbury, who sprayed it on her wrist, believing it was a gift. She died four days later, in excruciating pain.

Yvette Cooper put it plainly: “Putin and his agents are an active threat to Britain’s citizens, our security and our prosperity.”

Dawn was not a spy. She was not a political opponent. She was collateral damage in a mafia state’s vendetta – just as Sergei and many others were. And unless we confront this threat with clarity and resolve, she will not be the last.

I’ve spent nearly 20 years confronting the man at the centre of this crisis: Vladimir Putin. Today, as his shadow stretches across Europe – threatening war, poisoning our streets, and dangling sham peace deals – the stakes feel higher than ever. And I should know: having been declared a threat to Russian national security, I’ve had multiple attempts made on my life.

My fight with Putin began long before the tanks rolled into Ukraine. I was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, managing billions in the country’s stock market. That changed the moment I exposed the corruption hollowing out the companies I invested in – corruption that lined the pockets of Putin’s inner circle. His response was swift: I was expelled in 2005, our Moscow offices were raided, and my lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a $230m tax fraud carried out by officials close to the Kremlin.

For that act of courage, Sergei was arrested, tortured for 358 days, and murdered in a filthy Russian cell in 2009.

Since Sergei’s death, Putin has pursued me relentlessly: death threats, kidnapping attempts, fraudulent Interpol red notices. In Madrid, police briefly detained me at Russia’s request as I stepped out of my hotel. The threat has never been abstract; it has shaped my life and the lives of those who’ve stood beside me.

My friend Boris Nemtsov – who helped me lobby for what became the Magnitsky Act, a raft of human rights sanctions that have since been introduced by many Western governments – was assassinated on a Moscow bridge in 2015. His protege, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who travelled the world with me to advocate for Sergei, was poisoned twice with novichok. He survived both attacks, only to be sentenced by Putin’s courts to 25 years in a Siberian penal colony for daring to speak the truth.

So when I say Putin is not a statesman but a mafia boss in a suit, I speak from experience. His rule is built on fear, theft and violence. The oligarchs he has stripped of fortunes, the journalists shot or pushed from windows, the dissidents silenced with exotic poisons… these are not accidents but methods. Putin is a man for whom human life is expendable, and power is the only currency.

For 15 years, I’ve travelled from Washington to Westminster, urging governments to act. The Magnitsky sanctions that now exist in 35 countries have frozen billions in illicit wealth and barred his cronies from enjoying the West’s luxuries.

But getting there was a slog. Business groups, intoxicated by Russian oil and gas, dismissed my warnings: “There’s money to be made,” they said, as if profit could outweigh state-sanctioned murder.

It took the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to make the world see what I’d been shouting for years. Suddenly, people recognised me on Capitol Hill: “You were right about Putin.” It was a hollow vindication. I’d have given anything to be wrong. And yet, here we are again – on the brink of another catastrophic misjudgement.

Last month, Donald Trump unveiled a 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine that read like it was drafted in the Kremlin. It demands Ukraine cede occupied territory, caps its military, blocks Nato membership forever, and restores Russia to the G8 without reparations or accountability for war crimes. Ukraine – the victim – gets only vague “security guarantees”. That isn’t peace – it’s capitulation.

Then came last weekend’s extraordinary report that Trump’s associates, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have been quietly meeting Putin’s fixer, Kirill Dmitriev. Their interest appears not to be diplomacy, but profit. The scheme at the heart of the plan would unfreeze $300bn in Russian assets for a US-led “reconstruction fund”. American firms – some with ties to Trump’s circle – would skim lucrative deals from Russia’s energy and mining sectors.

Anyone who has done business in Russia knows exactly how that ends. You’re welcomed with smiles and contracts; you leave defrauded, ruined, or – if you’re unlucky – dead. The idea that Western businessmen will profit while Putin rebuilds his war machine is a fantasy. He’ll take the money, tighten his grip, and prepare for the next act of aggression.

Meanwhile, Putin is already dragging out negotiations while his forces push forward. Thanksgiving – the plan’s original deadline – has come and gone. President Zelensky is left facing an impossible choice: accept a deal that rewards his invader or risk losing American support.

Britain and Europe cannot afford illusions. Impose real oil sanctions. Seize frozen Russian assets and direct them to Ukraine’s reconstruction, not into the pockets of opportunists promising fake peace. Expand and enforce Magnitsky sanctions. And resist any deal that hands victory to a war criminal.

Putin is not just my enemy. He is an enemy of democracy, of sovereignty, of human life itself. If we blink now – if we let greed, fatigue or wishful thinking cloud our judgement – he will strike again. From Moscow’s prisons to Salisbury’s streets to Ukraine’s trenches, the message is the same.

The mafia boss in the Kremlin will not stop unless we stop him. And the cost of failing to do so will be counted in lives far beyond Russia’s borders.

Bill Browder is the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and the author of ‘Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath’