This is a long read but it covers a lot. ‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’ Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk. Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of Ukraine and another former Soviet state, Georgia, beginning the process of obtaining NATO membership. In the Oval Office, Hill recalls, describing a scene that has not been previously reported, she told Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush’s appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. “So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,” she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office. “He’s just yanking your chain,” she remembers Bush telling her. “Go on with what you were saying.” But the president seemed confident that he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, “I like it when diplomacy is tough.” Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that “NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan.” Hill’s prediction came true: Several other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s recommendation. NATO ultimately issued a compromise declaration that would prove unsatisfying to nearly everyone, stating that the two countries “will become members” without specifying how and when they would do so — and still in defiance of Putin’s wishes. (They still have not become members.) “It was the worst of all possible worlds,” Hill said to me in her austere English accent as she recalled the episode over lunch this March. As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. As she feared, the carrot dangled by Bush to two countries — each of which gained independence in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and afterward espoused democratic ambitions — did not sit well with Putin. Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, “is not a country.” Obama replied, “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Hill told me that she “winced” when she heard his remark, and when Obama responded to Putin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region Crimea a year later by referring to Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” she winced again. “We said openly, ‘Don’t dis the guy — he’s thin-skinned and quick to take insults,’” Hill said of this counsel to Obama about Putin. “He either didn’t understand the man or willfully ignored the advice.” Hill was sharing these accounts at an Indian restaurant in Colorado, where she had selected some of the least spicy items on the menu, reminding me, “I’m still English,” though she is a naturalized U.S. citizen. The restaurant was a few blocks from the University of Denver campus, where Hill had just given a talk about Russia and Ukraine, one of several she would give that week. Her descriptions of Russia’s president to her audience that morning — “living in his own bubble”; “a germaphobe”; “a shoot-the-messenger kind of person” — were both penetrating and eerily reminiscent of another domineering leader she came to know while serving as the National Security Council’s senior director of Russian and European affairs from April 2017 to July 2019. Though it stood to reason that a Putinologist of Fiona Hill’s renown would be much in demand after the invasion of Ukraine this February, it surprised me that her tenure in the Trump administration almost never came up in these discussions. The Colorado events were part of a book tour that was scheduled long before the Russian attack. Her memoir, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. But it covers a period that can be understood as a prelude to the current conflict — Hill was present for the initial phase of Trump’s scheme to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who was elected in 2019, by withholding military aid in exchange for political favors. It is also an insider’s look at a chaotic, reckless and at times antidemocratic chief executive. (In response to queries for this article, Trump said of Hill: “She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing.”) Her assessment of the former president has new resonance in the current moment: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.” Looking back on the Trump years, Hill has slowly come to recognize the unsettling significance in disparate incidents and episodes that she did not have the arm’s-length view to appreciate in the moment. During our lunch, we discussed what it was like for her and others to have worked for Trump after having done the same for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her meeting in the Bush White House in 2008, Hill told me, offered a sharp contrast to the briefings she sat in on during her tumultuous two years of service in the Trump administration. Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. “His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,” she said. “It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.” Of her experience trying to steer policy during her two years in the Trump White House, Hill said: “It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self.” With a flash of a smile, she said: “We used to have this running shtick in our office at the N.S.C. As a kid, I was a great fan of Tolkien and ‘Lord of the Rings.’ So, in the Trump administration, we’d talk about the ring, and the fear of becoming Gollum” — the character deformed by his attachment to the powerful treasure — “obsessing over ‘my precious,’ the excitement and the power of being in the White House. And I did see a lot of people slipping into that.” When I asked Hill whom she saw as the Gollums in the Trump White House, she replied crisply: “The ones who wouldn’t testify in his impeachment hearing. Quite a few people, in other words.” Fiona Hill emerged as a U.S. government expert on Russia amid a generation in which the subjects of Russia and Eastern Europe all but disappeared from America’s collective consciousness. Raised in economically depressed North East England, Hill, as a brainy teenager, was admonished by her father, who was then a hospital porter, “There is nothing for you here,” and so she moved to the United States in 1989 after a year’s study in Moscow. Hill received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and later got a job at the Brookings Institution. In 2006, she became the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. By that time, the Bush administration was keenly focused on post-Cold War and post-Sept. 11 adversaries both real and imagined, in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ambitions of Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, were steadily made manifest. On March 19, 2016, two years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a hacker working with Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, from the address no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com. The email, which claimed that a Ukrainian had compromised Podesta’s password, turned out to be a successful act of spearphishing. It allowed Russia to obtain and release, through WikiLeaks, 50,000 of Podesta’s emails, all in the furtherance of Russia’s desire that Clinton would become, if not a defeated presidential candidate, then at minimum a damaged one. The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor. Hill had not expected to be a fly on the White House wall for several of these moments. She even participated in the Women’s March in Washington the day following Trump’s inauguration. But then, the next day, she was called in for an interview with Keith Kellogg, at the time the N.S.C. chief of staff. Hill had previously worked with Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and several times had been on the Fox News foreign-policy online show hosted by K.T. McFarland, who had become the deputy national security adviser; the expectation was that she could become an in-house counterweight to Putin’s influence. She soon joined the administration on a two-year assignment. Just four months into his presidency, Trump welcomed two of Putin’s top subordinates — Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — into the Oval Office. Their meeting became public only because a photographer with the Russian news agency Tass released an image of the three men laughing together. As N.S.C. senior director for European and Russian affairs, Hill was supposed to be in the Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. But that plan was scotched after her previous sit-down with Trump did not go well: The president had mistaken her for a secretary and became angry that she did not immediately agree to retype a news release for him. Just after the Russians left the Oval Office, Hill learned that Trump boasted to them about firing James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., saying that he had removed a source of “great pressure” — and that he continued to do so in his next meeting, with Henry Kissinger, though the former secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had come to the White House to discuss Russia. Hill never developed the rapport with Trump that McFarland, Kellogg and H.R. McMaster (who replaced Flynn), her direct superiors, had presumably hoped for. Instead, Trump seemed more impressed with the former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state. “He’s done billion-dollar energy deals with Putin,” Hill says Trump exclaimed at a meeting. Trump’s ignorance of world affairs would have been a liability under any circumstance. But it put him at a pronounced disadvantage when it came to dealing with those strongmen for whom he felt a natural affinity, like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Once, while Trump was discussing Syria with Erdogan, Hill recalled: “Erdogan goes from talking about the history of the Ottoman Empire to when he was mayor of Istanbul. And you can see he’s not listening and has no idea what Erdogan’s talking about.” On another occasion, she told me, Trump cheerfully joked to Erdogan that the basis of most Americans’ knowledge about Turkey was “Midnight Express,” a 1978 movie that primarily takes place inside a Turkish prison. “Bad image — you need to make a different film,” Hill recalled Trump telling Turkey’s president while she thought to herself, Oh, my God, really? When I mentioned to Hill that former White House aides had told me about Trump’s clear preference for visual materials over text, she exclaimed: “That’s spot on. There were several moments of just utter embarrassment where he would see a magazine story about one of his favorite leaders, be it Erdogan or Macron. He’d see a picture of them, and he’d want it sent to them through the embassies. And when we’d read the articles, the articles are not flattering. They’re quite critical. Obviously, we can’t send this! But then he’d want to know if they’d gotten the picture and the article, which he’d signed: ‘Emmanuel, you look wonderful. Looking so strong.’” Hill found it dubious that a man so self-interested and lacking in discipline could have colluded with Russia to gain electoral victory in 2016, a concern that led to investigations by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Robert Mueller, the special counsel. For that matter, she told me, she had met the Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page a few times in Moscow. “I was incredulous as to how anyone could think he could be a spy. I thought he was way out of his depth.” The same held true for George Papadopoulos, another foreign-policy adviser. “Every campaign has loads of clueless people,” she said. Still, she came to see in Trump a kind of aspirational authoritarianism in which Putin, Erdogan, Orban and other autocrats were admired models. She could see that he regarded the U.S. government as his family-run business. In viewing how Trump’s coterie acted in his presence, Hill settled on the word “thrall,” evoking both a mystical attraction and servitude. Trump’s speeches habitually emphasized mood over thought, to powerful effect. It did not escape Hill’s attention that Trump’s chief speechwriter — indeed, the gatekeeper of whatever made its way into the president’s speeches — was Stephen Miller, who always seemed near Trump and whose influence on administration policy was “immense,” she says. Hill recalled for me a time in 2019 when Trump was visiting London and she found herself traveling through the city in a vehicle with Miller. “He was talking about all the knife fights that immigrants were causing in these areas,” she said. “And I told him: ‘These streets were a lot rougher when I was growing up and they were run by white gangs. The immigrants have actually calmed things down.’” (Miller declined to comment on the record.) More than once during our conversations, Hill made references to the Coen brothers filmmaking team. In particular, she seemed to relate to the character played by Frances McDormand in the movie “Fargo”: a habitually unflappable police chief thrust into a narrative of bizarre misdeeds for which nothing in her long experience has prepared her. Hill was dismayed, but not surprised, she told me, when President Trump carried on about a Democratic rival, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to a foreign leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — referring to Warren as “Senator Pocahontas,” while Merkel gaped in astonishment. Or when, upon learning from Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway of her country’s reliance on hydropower, Trump took the opportunity to share his standard riff on the evils of wind turbines. But she was alarmed, Hill told me, by Trump’s antidemocratic monologues. “He would constantly tell world leaders that he deserved a redo of his first two years,” she recalled. “He’d say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the ‘Russia hoax.’ And he’d say that he wanted more than two terms.” “He said it as a joke,” I suggested. “Except that he clearly meant it,” Hill insisted. She mentioned David Cornstein, a jeweler by trade and longtime friend of Trump’s whom the president appointed as his ambassador to Hungary. “Ambassador Cornstein openly talked about the fact that Trump wanted the same arrangement as Viktor Orban” — referring to the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, who has held his position since 2010 — “where he could push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances.” (Cornstein could not be reached for comment.) “Lessons From the Edge.” Recalling Trump’s words to me, Yovanovitch laughed in disbelief and said, “I mean, in America, we speak English, but it doesn’t make us British!” The encounter with Poroshenko would portend other unsettling interactions with Ukraine during the Trump era. “There were all sorts of tells going on that, while official U.S. policy toward Ukraine was quite good, that he didn’t personally love that policy,” Yovanovitch told me. “So there was always the feeling of, What’s going to happen next?” What happened next was that Trump began to treat Ukraine as a political enemy. Bridling at the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in hopes of damaging his opponent or helping his campaign, he was receptive to the suggestion of an appealing counternarrative. “By early 2018, he began to hear and repeat the assertion that it was Ukraine and not Russia that had interfered in the election, and that they had done so to try to help Clinton,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, told me. “I knew he heard that from, among others, Rudy Giuliani. Each time that inaccurate theory was raised, I disputed it and reminded the president that it was not true, including one time when I said so in front of Mr. Giuliani.” as Hill would memorably testify to Congress later that year, “a domestic political errand” in Ukraine on behalf of President Trump. That errand, chiefly undertaken by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, would garishly illustrate how “Trump was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes,” Hill told me. The first notable disruption in U.S.-Ukraine relations during Trump’s presidency came when Yovanovitch was removed from her ambassadorial post at Trump’s orders. Though she was widely respected in diplomatic circles, Yovanovitch’s ongoing efforts to root out corruption in Ukraine had put her in the cross hairs of two Soviet-born associates of Giuliani who were doing business in the country. Those associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, told Trump that Yovanovitch — who had served in the State Department going back to the Reagan administration — was critical of Trump. She soon became the target of negative pieces in the publication The Hill by John Solomon, a conservative writer with connections to Giuliani, including an allegation by Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, that the ambassador had given him a “do not prosecute list” — which Lutsenko later recanted to a Ukrainian publication. The same month that he did so, April 2019, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post. The career ambassador and other officials urgently requested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson, issue a statement of support for her. Pompeo did not do so; according to a former senior White House official, he was eager to develop a closer bond with Trump and knew that Giuliani had the president’s ear. Subsequently, a top adviser to the secretary, Michael McKinley, resigned in protest. According to a source familiar with the matter, Pompeo responded angrily, telling McKinley that his resignation stood as proof that State Department careerists could not be counted on to loyally support President Trump’s policies. (Through a spokesman, Pompeo declined to comment on the record.) By the spring of 2019, Trump seemed to be persuaded not only that Yovanovitch was, as Trump would later tell Zelensky, “bad news” but that Ukraine was demonstrably anti-Trump. On April 21, 2019, the president called Zelensky, who had just been elected, to congratulate him on his victory. Trump decided that he would send Pence to attend Zelensky’s inauguration. Less than three weeks later, Giuliani disclosed to The Times that he planned to soon visit Ukraine to encourage Zelensky to pursue inquiries into the origins of the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and into Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and whose father, Joe Biden, had just announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination. (Giuliani later canceled his travel plans.) At about the same time, Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, announced to the vice president’s senior staff, “The president doesn’t want him to attend” Zelensky’s inauguration, according to someone present at the meeting. He did not — a slight to a European head of state. On May 23, 2019, Charles Kupperman, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, and others discussed Ukraine with Trump in the Oval Office. Speaking to the press about the matter for the first time, Kupperman told me that the very subject of Ukraine threw the president into a rage: “He just let loose — ‘They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me.’” Daniel Goldman, who served as the lead majority counsel to the House impeachment inquiry, “was that these were for the most part career public servants who took extensive contemporaneous notes every day. As a result, we received very detailed testimony that helped us figure out what happened.” In reality, however, what happened in the Ukraine episode was not evident to much of the public. Trump prevailed in his impeachment trial, seeming to emerge from the ordeal without a political scratch. This, his former national security adviser John Bolton told me, distinguished the inquiry from the investigation into the conduct of President Richard Nixon 45 years earlier, which resulted in Nixon’s fellow Republicans deserting him. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump in his first impeachment trial “clearly did embolden him,” Bolton said. “This is Trump saying, ‘I got away with it.’ And thinking, If I got away with it once, I can get away with it again. And he did get away with it again.” (Bolton did not testify before the House committee; at the time, his lawyer said he was “not willing to appear voluntarily.”) Alexander Vindman, who was removed from his job as N.S.C. director for European affairs months after testifying against Trump (the president, his son Don Jr. and other supporters accused Vindman, a Soviet émigré and Army officer, of disloyalty, perjury and espionage), told me he experienced a similar epiphany in the wake of Jan. 6. Vindman was exercising at a gym in Virginia that afternoon when his wife, Rachel, called him to say that a mob had attacked the U.S. Capitol. After recovering from his stupefaction, “my first impulse was to counterprotest,” Vindman recalled. “I was thinking, What can I do to defend the Capitol? Then I realized that would be a recipe for disaster. It might give the president cause to invoke martial law.” In Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election results, Vindman told me, the president revealed himself as “incompetent, his own worst enemy, faced with too many checks in a 240-plus-year-old democracy to be able to operate with a free hand.” At the same time, he went on: “I came to see these seemingly individual events — the Ukraine scandal, the attempt to steal the 2020 election — as part of a broader tapestry. And the domestic effects of all this are bad enough. But there’s also a geopolitical impact. We missed an opportunity to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression.” Instead, Vindman said, the opposite occurred: “Ukraine became radioactive for the duration of the Trump administration. There wasn’t serious engagement. Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it. Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here. He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys. I’m not pulling any punches here. I’m not using diplomatic niceties. These folks sent the signal Putin was waiting for.” Bolton, a renowned foreign-policy hawk who also served in the administrations of Reagan and George W. Bush, also told me that Trump’s behavior had dealt damage to both Ukraine and America. The refusal to lend aid to Ukraine, the subsequent disclosure of the heavy-handed conversation with Zelensky and then the impeachment hearing all served to undermine Ukraine’s new president, Bolton told me. “It made it impossible for Zelensky to establish any kind of relationship with the president of the United States — who, faced with a Russian Army on his eastern border, any Ukrainian president would have as his highest priority. So basically that means Ukraine loses a year and a half of contact with the president.” Trump, Bolton went on to say, “is a complete aberration in the American system. We’ve had good and bad presidents, competent and incompetent presidents. But none of them was as centered on their own interest, as opposed to the national interest, except Trump. And his concept of what the national interest was really changed from day to day and had a lot more to do with what his political fortunes were.” This was certainly the case with Trump’s view of Ukraine, which, Bolton said, describing fantasies that preoccupied the president, “he saw entirely through the prism of Hillary Clinton’s server and Hunter Biden’s income — what role Ukraine had in Hillary’s efforts to steal the 2016 election and what role Ukraine had in Biden’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.” Bolton acknowledged to me that he found Trump’s conduct both in the Ukraine scandal and on Jan. 6 to be arguably worthy of impeachment. Still, he offered a rather tangled assessment of the two processes — finding fault with Democrats in the first inquiry for “trying to ram it through quickly” and, in the second impeachment, for not pressing quickly enough and “trying him before January the 20th.” But Bolton seems to regard the former president’s abuses of power as validation of America’s institutional strengths rather than a warning sign. “I think he did damage to the United States before and because of January the 6th,” Bolton told me. “I don’t think there’s any question about that. But I think all that damage was reparable. I think that constitutions are written with human beings involved, and occasionally you get bad actors. This was a particularly bad actor. So with all the stress and strain on the Constitution, it held up pretty well.” When I asked whether he believed Trump could be viewed as an authoritarian, Bolton replied, “He’s not smart enough to be an authoritarian.” But had Donald Trump won in 2020, Bolton told me, in his second term he might well have inflicted “damage that might not be reparable.” I asked whether his same concerns would apply if Trump were to gain another term in 2024, and Bolton answered with one word: “Yes.” At the moment, Trump’s chances of victory are favorable. He remains the putative lead candidate for the G.O.P.’s nomination and would most likely face an 81-year-old incumbent whose approval ratings are underwater. Even in defeat, there is little reason to believe that Trump will concede at all, much less do so gracefully. This January, President Biden said: “I know the majority of the world leaders — the good and the bad ones, adversaries and allies alike. They’re watching American democracy and seeing whether we can meet this moment.” Biden went on to say that at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, the previous summer, his assurances that America was back were met by his foreign counterparts with the response, “For how long?” One former foreign-policy official who played a role in the Trump-Ukraine tensions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the former president, was unsettled but also unsurprised by Biden’s account. “In the back of their minds,” this former official said of America’s allies, “if Trump is elected again in 2024, where will we be? I think it would be seen among struggling democracies as a disaster. They would see Trump as someone who went through two impeachment inquiries, orchestrated a conspiracy to undo a failed election and then, somehow, is re-elected. They would see it as Trump truly unbound. But to them, it would also say something about us and our values.” Hill agreed with that assessment when I described it to her. “We’ve been the gold standard of democratic elections,” she told me. “All of that will be rolled back if Trump returns to power after claiming that the only way he could ever lose is if someone steals it from him. It’ll be more than diplomatic shock. I think it would mean the total loss of America’s leadership position in the world arena.” A couple of months ago, Hill told me, she attended a book event in Louisville, Ky. Onstage with her was another recent author, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was the House Democrats’ lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Raskin, who happens to be Hill’s congressman, had also been among the managers in the first trial. Their event took place on Jan. 24, exactly one month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though Putin’s troops had been massed along the border for several months, speculation of war was not a public preoccupation. For the moment, Hill’s expertise was in lesser demand than that of Raskin, who is now a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. For much of their hourlong colloquy, it was Hill who asked searching questions of Raskin — who, she told me, “was deeply disturbed by how close we came to basically not having a transfer of power.” At one point, Hill acknowledged to Raskin and the live audience that she had been thinking lately of the “Hamilton” song “You’ll Be Back,” crooned maliciously by King George to his American subjects. “I have been worried over whether we might be back to that kind of period,” she said. Hill went on to describe the United States as being in a state of de-evolution, with the checks on executive power flagging and the concept of governmental experience regarded with scorn rather than admiration. What she did not say then was something that Hill has told me more than once since that time. Throughout all our changes, presidents and senior staff in government, she said: “Putin has been there for 22 years. He’s the same guy, with the same people around him. And he’s watching everything.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/...W5ES5kIK2oNZ2_JPIANKBEvaI5IVJdxrpn1s2G1zgFwP4
TRANSCRIPT Putin’s Endgame: A Conversation With Fiona Hill A discussion on the Russian president’s motivations, the West’s response and how the conflict could play out. Friday, March 11th, 2022 Michael Barbaro From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Ending the war in Ukraine very much depends on how and when Vladimir Putin allows it to end. In an interview for his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, my colleague, opinion columnist Ezra Klein, spoke with one of the world’s leading experts on Putin, Fiona Hill, a foreign policy advisor for the last three American presidents, about exactly how Putin is approaching this moment and the right ways and wrong ways for the West to engage him. It’s Friday, March 11. Ezra Klein Fiona Hill, welcome to the show. Fiona Hill Oh, thanks so much, Ezra. Ezra Klein So there are a lot of different frameworks being thrown around right now for how to think about Vladimir Putin. There’s Putin as a strategic rational actor. There’s Putin as a nostalgic imperialist. There’s Putin, the unhinged maniac. What is the model you’re using for understanding Putin right now? Fiona Hill Well, I think some of those models that you’ve just laid out do hold true. Putin remains a strategic thinker. He’s certainly got strategic goals that he’s trying to fulfill, irrespective of whether we might think that those are mad goals from our perspective. These are goals that he has put forward for quite a period of time, including about Ukraine, but also about the roll-back of NATO, and what he sees as some kind of monumental struggle with the United States for Russia’s right to exist in the world. I mean, he certainly framed it in this way as well. And then there’s all these kinds of questions about the way that he reads history, that he reads the situation around him, and the way that he has now, over a long period of time— I mean, we have to remember he’s been in power for 22 years. After a period of time, it’s you and the state— and particularly in the case of Putin— have become fused together. And you can just see it in the staging of everything. I mean, we can all observe it as outside witnesses to his actions. The way that he sets up meetings. The rooms that he meets in with statuary of famous czars and czarinas of the past, including Catherine the Great. The way that people talk about him as being the only decision-maker in the Russian state. And the way that he has taken everything personally and made everything personal in his pronouncements on the conflict in Ukraine. So for him, the state and Vladimir Putin have become fused together. And what I fear about when he gets to the state of his mind then is that he sees himself as infallible. Because he’s decided to do something, therefore it should be done. Ezra Klein Do you believe that he is the only decision-maker in the state? Fiona Hill Well, he can’t possibly be the only decision-maker because the decisions have to be made in the heat of battle that we’re seeing right now by the generals on the ground. But he’s certainly at the apex of a very narrow decision-making vertical. I mean, the Russians call this the vertical of power. It’s not even just a pyramid because it just is kind of a pole that Putin is at the top of. But clearly, this latest assault on Ukraine in the context of everything else that’s been going on has been decided by Putin along with a very small number of military officials and perhaps a handful of security officials around him. Ezra Klein Before we get into how Putin sees the Russian lands, because we’re going to spend a bit of time there today, I want to ask about how he understands the West. Because I’m not hearing that analyzed so much. You’re seeing a lot of Putin’s imperial rhetoric discussed. But what does Putin think we want? When you read his speeches, when you listen to his comments, what is his model of us? Fiona Hill Well, his model of us is quite negative, to say the least. And everything that we see today just underscores that Putin believes that we’re literally out to get him. The more that we talk about crushing the Russian economy. There’s loose talk by people now about, well, this will only end if Putin disappears. This just feeds in to this mentality that Russia is always under siege, its leaders are always under siege, people always want regime change in Russia. Every time he looked at something that happened, for example, in the so-called colored revolutions or uprisings— the Arab Spring— what happened? You saw Hosni Mubarak, the long-standing leader of Egypt, basically pushed out of power and ending up in a prison cell, for example. Or even worse, you saw Muammar Qaddafi shot by rebel forces in what looked like a drainage pipe. And we hear stories that Putin played that image to himself over and over again working himself into more of a state of paranoia. The overthrowing of Saddam Hussein and his hanging in Iraq. This is what Putin thinks about. He thinks that the United States is in the business of regime change, and that always throughout history there’s been some malevolent force, mostly coming from the West— he’s discounting for now the Mongols from the East— mostly coming from the West who is out to basically push change in Russia, subjugate Russia, and basically install its own version of Russian power. So unfortunately right now even all of the events of the present are feeding into that kind of mentality. Ezra Klein Putting aside the question of malevolence, is he on some level right that the U.S. and the West are in the business of regime change, not just in Russia, but in Ukraine, in some of the other places you mentioned and didn’t mention? I’ve been thinking a bit about this narrative by the political scientist Samuel Charap, who has been arguing that you can’t understand Russia’s actions in the region without understanding this is a two-way contest for influence in Ukraine. We’ve done a lot over the past 15, 20 years to try to bring them closer to us, not just opening NATO, but supporting Western leaders, training a generation of military officers, actually arming them, integrating them into E.U. licensing, and trade and regulatory regimes. And so he sees as there as being a genuine constant expansionary pressure from us that he’s now trying to beat back. Is there a validity to that view? Fiona Hill Well, sure, I mean that’s the way that Putin definitely sees things. But what that does is totally deny any agency on the part of Ukraine or any other country for that matter, right? If you think around the world as well, many countries have fought for their independence, precisely because people themselves want to. What about the United States, for example? We look back in U.S. history. This is like 1812. And the U.S. has had French. We’ve had the Spanish. We’ve had the British empire obviously. We’ve had all kinds of manifestations. And we have our own version of our own history might look very different from a different vantage point. You think about all of the other countries of Europe that have got their independence from the dissolution of empires— Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, Finland. Sweden was once an empire and had basically dominion over many of these lands as well. The United Kingdom— Ireland is an independent country now as well. A lot of what’s happening now is a kind of a post-colonial, post-imperial impulse on the part of Russia. This kind of feeling that it can’t possibly be that lands and peoples want to go their own way, but there must be some other malevolent force there. And when a country makes an appeal to another country for association or to different international franchise— let’s put it that way— and wants to be part of that, that’s seen as that other entity— be it NATO, or the European Union, or bilateral relations with the U.S. or anything else— that those countries are acting with malevolent force to pull them away. So what Putin can’t make sense of— in fact, most people looking at it seem to not be able to make sense of— that people of Ukraine actually kind of want to live like people of Ukraine in their own state and make their own decisions. If they want to associate with the European Union and NATO for their security, then a lot of that is their decision as well. So when we frame it that way, we completely and utterly negate the opinions, and the beliefs, and the aspirations of other people on the ground. That’s what Putin is trying to do all the time. So he’s really doing a great job in propaganda internationally. And we feed into it all the time. And to get it to this framed as a conflict— a proxy conflict between Russia and the United States and Russia and NATO for Ukraine— well, why do we want Ukraine? People keep asking that. We don’t want Ukraine. The United States does not want Ukraine. [LAUGHS] Just to make it very clear. We’re not going to annex Ukraine. It’s not going to become like Puerto Rico and some additional state. We’re not annexing part of it. This is not World War II or the Cold War. We are not occupying Europe anymore. Ezra Klein There’s something he’s been emphasizing that seems to me to be very much part of that idea, which is I think we’re comfortable in a geopolitical moment like this talking about security interests— Ukraine and NATO, Ukraine and the E.U., Ukraine and Russia, arms, training. Something that Putin has emphasized in a number of speeches is identity— Fiona Hill Yes. Ezra Klein —language, ethnicity. And this seems to me to have been a profound miscalculation in exactly the way you just described. But he seems to understand Ukraine is full of Russians. I mean, of course, it does have many people who were part of Russia, who speak Russian, who identify as more ethnically Russian. But he seems to have vastly overestimated the potency and ubiquity of that identity, such that he seemed to believe he’d get a lot less resistance than he has. But also, his fear, as far as I can tell from some of his speeches, is not just that Ukraine is going to fall into NATO security umbrella, but that there’s going to be a westernization or even a Ukrainianization of the identity of the Ukrainian people. And once that is done, then Russia can’t get them back because then you are just occupying a land, not reintegrating with your brothers and sisters. And that seems very important in his thinking and also to have been very wrong in a way that now, if anything, he’s made it even worse. I mean, nothing has done more for Ukrainian identity than this invasion. But I’m curious what you think of that. Because he talks about it a lot, but I don’t hear it discussed very often. Fiona Hill Ezra, you’re spot on. So it’s very possible to be living in Ukraine and be somebody like Volodymyr Zelensky. Volodymyr being a name that would suggest Ukrainian nationalist version of Vladimir, by the way, after the Great Grand Prince of Kyiv that Putin is also fighting over. It’s being fought over the versions of the name— Volodymyr, Ukrainian version, Vladimir, the Russian version. And Putin is— it’s battle of the Volodymyrs and the Vladimirs. Volodymyr Zelensky also happens to be a Russian-speaking Jew. And I think he’s blowing Putin’s mind, because in that kind of capacity, he can’t figure him out. He’s trying to serve that Ukrainians are being led by a bunch of— this is bizarre labeling— drug-addled neo-Nazi fascists. Well, it’s a little hard to say that about somebody who’s completely sober, very clearly— Volodymyr Zelensky— and happens to be Jewish, and who has lost family in the Holocaust, and is very proud of his Jewish identity as well as Ukrainian identity and his identity as a Russian speaker. And this is the problem that everybody is falling into in the modern era right now. Putin has been trying to put himself forward in many respects as the kind of leader, not just of the Slavic part of the world, the Russian part of the world, this idea of Russkiy Mir, all of the Russian speakers who are scattered around, not just Ukraine, but also Belarus, and northern parts of Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Republic or the Russian diaspora abroad which he reaches out to. But he’s got this idea of a white Christian Russian Orthodox Russia that is leading then the kind of peoples who are opposed to these other kinds of identity politics. So he’s right there in the middle of it. And I think he’s talked himself in to that idea that there can only be one particular form of identity. And just as you say, I think the main impetus for this is he saw that Ukraine was moving away. So what we’re seeing here is almost in a way a kind of a battle for people to be able to espouse their own identities, as complex as they may be, because Ukraine is full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. There are many Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, but who would be Russian-speaking. There are millions of Ukrainian citizens working in Russia. And there are lots of people in Ukraine who speak Russian but now feel a very strong identity tied to place and to history and shared culture, especially for the last 30 years. They don’t want to go back to whatever version of Ukraine— or multiple versions of Ukraine, because it seems that Vladimir Putin wants to carve the whole country up— that he is presenting to them. They want the right to decide for themselves. Ezra Klein I want you to continue on spooling something you began talking about there. We’ve talked a fair amount so far about what Putin fears. But what does he want? What does he aspire to? Fiona Hill Well, at this particular point, when it comes to Ukraine, I really fear that he aspires to punish them severely for not falling in line with his vision of what he’s calling the Russian world of Russkiy Mir, and laying down their arms, surrendering, and overturning their government so they can put in a puppet. That’s exactly where we are right now. He’s made it crystal clear. Any pretense is off now. And so what he wants to do is punish them severely and also punish us. I mean, I feared many times before that if we got to this point, Putin would be willing to fight to the last Ukrainian or the last Ukrainian that’s willing to stand up and hold their head high. His aspirations were very clearly laid out. The two documents that were submitted to the United States and NATO back in December that said no Ukraine and NATO, no NATO deployments in the lands of Eastern Europe that were made after 1997, which also suggests nothing about the expansion of NATO into countries like Poland and the Baltic states, for example, and then the U.S. pulling out of those same kind of territories. And if not just there, even more of a pullout out of Europe as well, putting the U.S. on notice too. But since then, he’s made other demands. Not just the full surrender of Ukraine but the recognition that Crimea belongs to Russia, recognition of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in their full administrative borders, not just the rebel-held territories— the suggestion that that might be annexed too into Russia because they’ve been given passports. And making it also very clear that he wants the neutralization, demilitarization, not just of Ukraine but probably of the whole swathe of former Soviet republics, unless they’re in Russia’s own alliance. I mean, he’s laid all of this out. It’s the kind of maximalist position of everything that he’s probably ever thought of and that circle around him. And many of those demands go back in nationalist Russian circles since the very beginning— or to the very beginning, rather, of the period in the early 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So Putin’s been picking up lots of threats. So I have a picture that I was given of me of a whole bunch of us sitting at that big white table with Putin. So Putin has four statues in that room. One is Catherine the Great. And when he talks of Crimea, he looks at her, because it’s Catherine the Great who basically annexed Crimea. The other is Peter the Great, the first person who really created the Russian Empire in the Battle of Poltava in Ukraine. And then the other two are Nicholas I, who fought the debacle of the Crimean war but was the hard tsar who basically made the world a safer autocracy during all the uprisings of 1848. And the other is then Alexander the Great. Alexander I who chased Napoleon out of Moscow all the way to Paris way across the Elbe. And he’s got these four around him. And then there’s he, Vladimir the Great. And he built this big statue of Vladimir the Great, the Prince of Kyiv, the Grand Prince, outside of the Kremlin. When this is really Volodymyr the Great, Grand Prince of Kyiv, who is also there in Kyiv as well and outside of the Ukrainian embassy and London and all the rest of it. And so it’s like a kind of a battle and he’s putting his statuary all over the place. So this is a guy who kind of— you hear about Jerusalem syndrome of people going to Jerusalem and thinking they’re Mary Magdalene, or Jesus Christ, or John the Baptist. And he thinks he’s one of these guys. He’s Catherine the Great, or he’s Peter the Great, and Vladimir the Great. And you look at that and you think, OK, you get where his head-space is. Ezra Klein But that is part of what makes his current position confusing to me. I can understand, particularly if you begin this fight with the view that Ukraine is full of Russians and that they’re going to welcome Russians back in. I understand wanting those borderlands. I understand wanting the old Russian Empire back. It is a little hard for me to understand the Putin who, in many ways, trenchantly critiqued some of America’s foreign adventures as graveyards for regimes, for hegemons, wanting to, on the one hand, expand blood and treasure on an endless occupation of a country— a gigantic country— where many of the people don’t want him there, and on the other, to the extent you fear NATO, to the extent you fear an aggressive West, to unite the West, to put NATO into an entirely different posture with regard to defense spending. It’s a little harder for me to understand the end game that looks good to him now. Fiona Hill Yeah, and I think that’s the problem. It’s the same for him. The carefully laid plans of Putin and his men have gone awry. And they clearly thought that this would be over and done with in a couple of days. They thought that this would be very quick. They’d be making some pronouncement about Ukraine now being under Russia’s thrall. I mean, again, it sounds pretty medieval in many respects as well and the dominance, the dominion of Russia, and that we’d then be moving on a different place. They didn’t expect the massive backlash that they got. And so now I think he’s having the same problem that you laid out. He also doesn’t really know what the end game will be beyond the end game that he already had in mind. He’s still sticking to the plan. So when Macron called him— President Macron of France— and said, hey, you’ve made a mistake, Putin had no other response than no, I haven’t, I’m still sticking to my plan. Because he believes that the plan is right because he set it. And he’s become so wrapped up in that that he is going to now throw everything that he’s got at it to make sure that he succeeds in subjugating Ukraine. Ezra Klein I’m worried about that last part, particularly, because if he maybe began this by having goals for Ukraine, I presume at this point he has goals for himself and for Russia. And for everything that you have said and laid out about his psychology and his narrative, being humiliated at the hands of a independent Ukrainian uprising and a united West punishing Russia with sanctions and economic devastation, that’s not how he wants to go down in history. He’s not going to slink out of there. Fiona Hill No, he’s not. Ezra Klein What does somebody with Putin’s psychology— how do they react to this kind of quagmire that he’s now in? Fiona Hill Well, first of all, he’s going to double and triple down on the military side of things. And he has very deliberately put his nuclear card on the table. That’s in a way of playing it, right? Because it suddenly gets everybody thinking, whoa, he’s in a corner, what’s he going to do? So he’s going to nuke us to get out of it? He’s saying, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about doing things like this. Ezra Klein Do you take that seriously? Fiona Hill Well, I think we have to take it seriously, but we have to deal with it with the calm, collected, which we’ve done so far, which is like, OK, you’re really going a bit too far here. You have scenes of old ladies and children preparing Molotov cocktails and you’ve already gone nuclear? There is a kind of a disproportionate asymmetric element to that, which is classic Putin. We’ve seen them now shifting some of the narrative for the internal purposes and also to anybody else who’ll listen. And there are, of course, many people who pay attention to what Putin says and buy his propaganda that the Ukrainians were looking to try to get a nuclear weapon. I mean, basically he’s making stuff up. And that’s the whole point there, because he’s trying to shift the rhetoric. Because if you make it nuclear, it’s not, again, about Ukraine and Russia and what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It suddenly becomes U.S., NATO, nuclear powers, permanent five at the U.N. Security Council of the nuclear powers— China, U.K., France, Russia, the United States. You put it in a different box. So we have to keep this focus on what this is, which is Russia invading Ukraine. And that also goes the other part of your question there about what to do with him and his psychology. If he starts to think that this goes into regime change— he’s looked at interventions in Iraq, he’s looked at interventions in Libya. What about Syria? Why did Russia intervene in Syria in 2015? It was to stop Assad being toppled. Even though now, in 2022, Assad is still there, but the country has gone completely— it’s just been turned to rubble. That’s you see what Putin is prepared to do to stay in place. He did not want Assad to follow down the lines of everybody else, where there’d been some kind of intervention. So I think dealing with this psychology, the loose talk that’s out there about this only ends if Vladimir Putin goes— there’s plenty of people out there saying that— we’re going to have to be very careful about that rhetoric, because that will make him— he’ll be fighting for his own self-preservation and his life. And we’re going to have to keep framing this that this is the invasion of Russia of Ukraine that we’re trying to stop. And we need to try to get Vladimir Putin to pull out of Ukraine. And so it has to be framed in the United Nations. We’re going to have to be extremely careful. This is like handling Chernobyl and trying to create a sarcophagus around it because it really does have all kinds of dangerous spillover potential. [Music] Michael Barbaro We’ll be right back. Ezra Klein Let’s talk about Zelensky for a minute. We’ve spoken so much about Putin. But I think it is fair to say when you look at where NATO was, when you look at where American sanctions were on the day of the Russian invasion, and then you look at how they changed come the following Monday, come a week from that Monday, that he himself has also, just like Putin, reshaped the world and reshaped the West. I think that he took our values, and threw them back at us and asked, well, what are you really? And so before all this, I think there are many deals that America and Western Europe would have taken that would have treated Ukraine like a vassal state. I don’t think any deal can be made so long hopefully as Zelensky survives that is not a deal he would take. Because just as Putin is a power, I mean I do think Zelensky has the moral power and the global voice now. Do you have a sense of what he would take, because it seems to me he has changed during this, of course, too. I mean, he has watched Russia try to destroy his country and kill many of his countrymen. Things that he might have been OK with two weeks ago may not be things he’s OK with two weeks from now. Fiona Hill Yeah, and not just him, right? There’s an awful lot of other Ukrainians with government experience who are out there who won’t accept anything different either. And Zelensky is really a president for the new interconnected social media savvy 21st century. He’s 44 years old. When the Soviet Union fell apart, he was only a teenager. I mean, he is a post-Soviet guy. And he’s also a gifted actor. And he clearly— it’s not just performance. He’s obviously— the guy has also got balls, let’s just put it that way. That incredible line that he basically said, look, I need ammunition not a drive, when he was offered safe passage out of Kyiv. I mean, that was one of those transformative moments for everybody else watching this as well. And although he’s become iconic out there in social media, as you have said, he’s actually in a real material way shifted everything. His emotional appeal to the European Union, the way that created redevelopment of a spine on the part of so many people watching that. It’s really important to have that kind of charismatic transformative leader in that moment when you absolutely need them to get everybody in motion. And that’s exactly what he has done and he has transformed that landscape just as you say. And it will be very hard for other people to back down from that right now. He’s gone full Winston Churchill. Ezra Klein I want to say this truly honoring him and truly being amazed at what he’s done, but in a way it’s made the conflict scarier. Because it is in many ways easier to imagine compromises over— material compromises over security, compromises over land. It is very hard to compromise over values. And the remarkable thing he’s done for the West is to recenter this around values. I mean, he does not treat it, as you were saying earlier, like, oh, just great power politics. This is not a great power I.R. realist. This is somebody who has re-framed this successfully, correctly— because, I mean, it’s true— around values. But that means that a lot of the dirtier or uglier compromises that you could have imagined the West and Russia coming to to end this, that doesn’t satisfy, not just Ukraine now, but I think many people in the West. I’m not sure you can speak the way Joe Biden spoke at the State of the Union. I’m not sure you can speak the way many of the European leaders are speaking right now and then turn around and carve up Ukraine to let Vladimir Putin save face. That pathway out has become harder for me to imagine. And I’m curious how you imagine it now. Fiona Hill Well, look, in wartime, it is very important to have that inspirational charismatic leader. And if you think about what Winston Churchill did at the end of the war, sitting down at Yalta and Potsdam and the other conferences and actually making deals with Stalin and the Soviet Union, it wasn’t particularly in line with what he was actually saying when he was talking about fighting on the beaches and everything else that was doing to rally against Nazi Germany. So I think that there’s different phases in all of this. And I would like to point out that Zelensky is also being very pragmatic and practical in many different respects. At the very beginning, when he came into office, he did signal to Russia that he was willing to try to find some kind of solution accepting that everything wouldn’t go Ukraine’s way. And even now, he is trying to push forward and the people around him are pushing forward, not just on humanitarian corridors, but to have a ceasefire, and basically talking about talks without preconditions and actually basically laying out there, look, we’re willing to negotiate. Now, clearly not willing to negotiate Ukraine away. I mean, the Russians have basically said they want to have recognition of Crimea. They’ve already tried to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk. Somewhere down the line, there may be some very difficult discussions that absolutely have to be had. But I think Zelensky is capable and the people around him are capable of doing many things at once. It’s important to have everybody mobilized to basically put that pressure. It can’t just be the Ukrainians standing on their own, to get the United States, to get the European Union, to get the world paying attention— the United Nations, those big fora. And that’s what who Zelensky is appealing to. He’s not just appealing to us. He’s appealing to all of these other countries who have faced the same challenges and dangers or might in the future. Because if Russia doesn’t pull back, if Putin doesn’t pull back from what he’s doing in Ukraine, it opens the door for everybody else to do the same. So he’s able then to strengthen his hand in having that inevitable negotiation that’s coming forward. He wants to be a seat at the table. He doesn’t want to be like basically Europe that was in the rubble as you had three guys and a few others sitting down at some wartime conference and making decisions without them. Ezra Klein What looked to you like the various scenarios that could be the end of this? I mean, all the way from full Russia conquers Ukraine to various kinds of settlements ranked from likeliest to least likely. How do you rate the end games? Fiona Hill Oh, well, look, a lot of it depends on how— I had a deep sigh there because of how we all respond. And we have to be extraordinarily careful given the dangers that we’ve already outlined. We’re dealing with somebody in the form of Vladimir Putin, who sees himself as all tied up with the Russian state. He cannot lose. So we have to figure out about how to formulate something that deals with that. And the fact that he’s likely to react extraordinary badly at any perceived intervention on the part of NATO, of NATO forces, painting the Russians into a corner, discussions of economic warfare. We’re going to have to tamp all of this down and to really focus on getting Russia out of Ukraine, focusing on cease fires, focusing on withdrawals of Russian men and equipment, heavy artillery, these barbaric high-end weapons systems that they’re bringing in there, trying to head off the use of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, et cetera. So we’ve got to focus on these kinds of things and be very careful about the rhetoric. I think we’ve said all the things that can actually go wrong. So a lot of it is on us as well right now and about how we react. And then how can we, to the best of our ability, formulate a further discussion about structures within European security or globally with the United Nations and others involved to find a pathway out. So this is why I’m very reluctant to get drawn into how this ends, because I think in a way you can then start leading the path for what seems to be the most likely scenario. I mean, the only scenario that is really going to work is one in which Russia pulls out of Ukraine but we find some kind of mechanism to make Putin feel like he’s got something out of this. And unfortunately, we’re going to have to factor China into this. We haven’t really talked about China so far. But China leapt into this whole debate and now into the conflict in a rather spectacular way around the margins of the Beijing Winter Olympics on February 4 when they issued a joint statement between President Xi and President Putin basically with China calling out NATO and NATO enlargement and suddenly making itself a factor in European security. Now, there are NATO countries that operate in the Asia-Pacific, not least of those the United States and the Canadians, and the French and the Brits. But you could hardly say that NATO has been menacing China in its neighborhood. But of course, NATO’s been worrying about China and the China factor. And China’s been a factor economically and politically in Europe as well. It was the biggest investor in Ukraine up until this particular point. So China has now thrown its hat into our ring. And we’re going to have to figure out now a much more globalized solution to this. It’s going to be very difficult, very difficult indeed. I mean, this is something that we’re going to be thinking about, talking about, and grappling with for years to come. [Music] Ezra Klein I really appreciate the time you spent here with us. It’s been very, very, very enlightening, if a little scary. Fiona Hill, thank you very much. Fiona Hill Thanks so much, Ezra. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/...raine-russia-ezra-klein.html?showTranscript=1
When you have the time you should. Also the interview of Fiona Hill about Putin that I also posted is informative.
