Fiona Hill

And remember, he is not a military guy.

He's an operative and he was sort of trained in operations and, you know, contingency planning.

Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, as a civil engineer, was the former minister of emergencies.

He wasn't a military planner.

Somebody like Gerasimov, the chiefs of staff, maybe a military guy in this case from the army, but he's also somebody who's in a different part of the chain of command.

He's not somebody who would spontaneously start telling Putin things.

Putin comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that intelligence gets filtered and works.

He's probably somebody who wants to consume raw intelligence.

He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis.

He's thrived in the past of picking things up from people.

I've taken part in all of these meetings with him, gone fireworks, because he's just collecting.

He's collecting information.

He's sussing people out.

He wants to know the questions they ask.

He learns something about the questions that people ask, the way that they ask them.

So he's kind of soliciting information himself.

And if he's cut off from that information because of circumstances...

then, you know, how is he formulating things in his head?

And again, getting into, you can't get into his head, but you can understand the context in which he's operating.

And that's where you worry, because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine behind the back of most of his security establishment.