The Green Funds That Armed Putin

“One former senior intelligence figure told Sergei that Russian interference surrounding Brexit may have been the most successful active-measures operation in modern British history. Britain still refuses to investigate it.”

Just as I was congratulating myself for my newfound efficiency in posting the videos of our symposia, I found not one but two videos that I somehow never posted.1 Here’s the original invitation, for those of you who can no longer remember what this was about:

The Symposium

Green Funds, Red Flags

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Jun 11

Sergei studies the way Western capital supports authoritarian regimes, ultimately undermining the liberal democracies whose openness gave investors the opportunity to acquire so much capital in the first place. His research has already exposed the way so-called “sustainable” funds poured into Russia in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

As we learned in this symposium, six months before Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of European investment funds bearing the reassuring label “sustainable” were pouring billions into companies that were intimately tied to the Kremlin. We’re not talking about an embarrassing little sprinkling of Russian oil, here. Their holdings included VTB, which financed Russian political-interference operations; Russian Railways, which transported Putin’s military equipment to Ukraine’s border; a steel producer that supplied missile and nuclear-weapons manufacturers; and a diamond company that sponsored a nuclear submarine. Twenty-three of the 34 Russian companies selected by these funds were subsequently sanctioned. Investors, presumably pleased with themselves for having chosen to invest sustainably, did not quite realize that they were building sustainable nuclear submarines.

Sergei discovered this while working inside the asset-management industry. When he began asking too many questions, his employer decided that he was the risk.

But this wasn’t Sergei’s first whistleblowing rodeo. He began his life as a whistleblower more than a decade ago, when he warned MI5 that Russian officials were trying to funnel money into the Conservative Party. The warning went nowhere. The intelligence establishment he describes was seemingly incapable of understanding that party financing had become an instrument of hostile statecraft.

He also discusses the refusal of the British political system to investigate what Russia did during the Brexit campaign. One former senior intelligence figure told him that this was probably the most successful active-measures operation in modern British history. Why hasn’t any UK government wanted to open that file? Why have Britain’s police, intelligence agencies, political parties, and even its democracy NGOs proved so reluctant to ask the obvious questions? And what will happen when China uses the same tricks, but on a vastly larger scale?

Sergei is now carrying out doctoral research on the larger problem his investigation exposed, namely, the eagerness of Western financial institutions to view authoritarian regimes as just another emerging-market opportunity—which is bad enough—and to sell the resulting investments to the public as unusually ethical—which is almost hilarious.

The symposium went beyond the grotesque comedy of greenwashing. Sergei argued that the West fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between commerce and autocracy. No, economic interdependence does not transform dictatorships into liberal democracies. In fact, if the relationship is asymmetric, it supplies them with the capital, leverage, and influence they need to attack the democracies that finance them.

Nominally, this was a conversation about sustainable finance. But our real topic—as it so often is—was the West’s refusal to understand and intelligently confront the threats it faces.