Fiona Hill

And, you know, they start the kind of, you know, they're revving up, you know, to get to the point and then he cuts them off.

So you think about that and then you think about, well, what information has he got?

And then how does he process it?

And is he suspicious of it?

Does he not believe it?

And what inside of his own history then, you know, leads him to make one judgment over another?

He clearly thought the Ukrainians would fall apart in five seconds.

I think he pretty much thought it, because I think he thought that Zelensky wasn't very popular.

There was an awful lot of pro-Russian sentiment in whatever way he thinks that is, because people have Russian speakers, and they're kind of...

You know, in polling, you know, they expressed affinity with Russia.

I mean, certainly in Crimea, that worked out because a majority of the population had, you know, higher sentiments or feelings of affinity with Russia.

And, you know, obviously, you know, that kind of, they got traction there.

But it's more complicated.

We talked about Donbass before, about being a kind of melting pot.

When, you know, they tried the same thing in Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk, as they tried in Crimea in 2014, didn't kind of pan out.

In fact, you know, a whole wall broke out.

They tried, you know, to kind of in, you know, many of the major cities that are now under attack, including Odessa, to kind of ferment, you know, pro-Russian movements.

And they completely and utterly fell apart.

So Putin was thinking, you know, I'm pretty sure based on polling and the FSB having infiltrated, you know, an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchies we're now seeing is quite apparent with so many of the dismissals in Ukraine.

He was pretty sure that, you know, kind of he would get traction.