Fiona Hill

You know, obviously he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble from most of us.

I mean, most of us are not in bubbles with multiple, you know, kind of palaces and, you know, kind of the Kremlin.

But, you know, we've seen, you know, so much, obviously a lot of this is staged, that isolation, you know, the kind of making it very clear that he's the czar, the guy who is in charge, making all the decisions, you know, one end of the table and everybody else is at the other end.

But, you know, it's very difficult then to bring, you know, information to him in that way.

He used to have a lot of information bundled for him in the old days by the presidential administration.

I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open in the past.

And I have a lot of meetings with people in the presidential administration who brought outside, you know, all sorts of information, you know, for him and, you know, kind of funneled in information from different think tanks and, you know, different viewpoints and, you

maybe a kind of more eclectic, diversified set of information.

He would meet with people.

You know, you've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Masha Gessen, you know, and had to come in, you know, obviously a very different character as a journalist and a critic.

We've heard about Venedicta from Echo Moscovy, the radio program, the editor, who Putin would talk to and consult with.

He'd reach out.

People like Lyudmila Alekseyeva, for example, the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her and would sometimes just talk to her, for example.

All of that seems to have come to a halt.

And I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who watch Putin, about what kind of information is he getting?

Is it just information that he's seeking and gathering himself that fits into his worldview and his framework?

We're all guilty of that, of looking for things.

It gets to our social media preferences.

People just bring into him things that they think he wants to hear, like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard.

Or is he himself in a tapping into source of information that he absolutely wants?