With the coming close to the Ukraine proxy war, now is a better time than ever to look at what sparked the post-cold war hostilities between America and Russia.
Some could point to multiple events including the Maidan coup, the downing of the MH17 flight, the Russian intervention into the Syrian war, Russiagate, or the Ukraine proxy war.
But one event precedes all of these things.
That is the passing of the Magnitsky Act sanctions in 2012.
The bill, which put sanctions on Russian officials supposedly for “the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei Magnitsky, for the conspiracy to defraud the Russian Federation of taxes on corporate profits through fraudulent transactions and lawsuits against Hermitage, and for other gross violations of human rights”.
The bill was passed in the House and Senate and was eventually signed into law by then-President Barack Obama.
This story came from Bill Browder, an American billionaire who set up shop in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union to try to make money off of Russia’s new IMF-imposed economy.
According to Browder’s account, he was the head of Hermitage Capital Management, which he called “the largest investment firm in Russia.” Browder alleged that in 2007 his office was raided by two Russian policemen named Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov who seized documents that were “used to fraudulently re-register the ownership of our investment holding companies as well as to create $1 billion of fake tax liabilities”.
He alleged that “the corrupt officials used their new “ownership” of our companies and the fake liabilities to fraudulently reclaim $230 million of taxes we paid in the previous year”.
He claimed that he then “hired Sergei Magnitsky, then a 35-year-old tax lawyer, to investigate”.
According to Browder’s story “he helped us file criminal complaints against the police officers involved in the raids with a different branch of Russian law enforcement and was so brave that he even testified against them.” And in retaliation “was arrested by two of the same Interior Ministry officers against whom he had testified”.
Hellbound and Down 