Discussion #27: Red Notice: A True Story of Corruption, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice, by Bill Browder

<p>Welcome to Citizen Scholar! Since launching five months ago we’re reaching hundreds of people a week, so we thank you for your support. If you enjoy our writing on civic virtue and individual excellence, we humbly ask you to share Citizen Scholar with your family members and friends who may enjoy it. The contents of the audio and text formats are identical and meant to accommodate your preferences. Please let us know if you have any feedback - we’re always looking for ways to improve!</p><p><strong>Introduction</strong></p><p>Our next few posts at Citizen Scholar will sample memoirs of fascinating lives. For our first feature in this mini-series, we revisited the 2015 best-selling memoir <em>Red Notice</em>. This page-turner chronicles prolific investor-turned-human rights activist Bill Browder’s experiences in post-Soviet Russia. At the time of writing, we’re waiting to see if the Russian government will move to escalate conflict in Ukraine so we figured it may be a fitting time to cover the well-known book.</p><p>Anyone paying attention to the current news flow about Russia and Ukraine faces a barrage of mixed signals. The US administration continues to warn us about Russian plans for further aggression, including false flag operations and a massive invasion by conventional ground forces. The Ukrainian government has pushed back, perhaps because it is equally worried by capital flight and material deprivation that panic could hasten. In a remarkable throwback to pre-World War II diplomacy, Russia isn’t trying to invent a moral narrative publicly – it is clearly demanding, among other things, written assurance that NATO will not expand to Ukraine. Russia is making a security-based demand to a weaker country; that it abrogate its own sovereign right to join NATO to serve Russia’s historical geopolitical need for ‘strategic depth’.  </p><p>The resulting dialogue in the US has also been fragmented. Notable threads include the one that deemphasizes Putin himself and blames the arrogant Washington establishment fo