Fiona Hill

And that it would be like 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levy, as it's called, a kind of cohort of people who come into the KGB under Yuri Andropov.

And Yuri Andropov has presided over a lot of these anti-dissident, you know, kind of movements inside of Russia itself and how you suppress opposition, but also over, you know, how you deal with, you know, kind of the uprisings in,

Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

And there's all these lessons from this that, you know, you can put everything back in the box.

And yeah, there might be a bit of violence and a bit of fighting, but ultimately you think you've got the political figures and you decapitate the opposition.

So they thought Zelensky would run away.

Jadokovic ran away, but...

That was kind of a bit, you know, sort of a different set of circumstances.

And they thought that all of the local governments would, you know, kind of capitulate because they had enough Russians and inverted commas in there.

Again, mistaking language and, you know, kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity or how people would react in the time and not understanding people's, you know, linkages and, you know, kind of importance of place, the way that people feel about who they are in a certain set of circumstances or place.

I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's kind of if he looks back into the past, you're right, though, he wasn't involved in 68 or 56 or what happened in the 1980s in Poland.

This isn't Chechnya or this isn't, you know, kind of Syria or for example.

It was more like Afghanistan, but they didn't realize that because again, Ukrainians are us.

There's this kind of inability to think that people might think differently and might want something different.

And that 30 years of independence actually has an impact on people and their psyches.

And if I look back to the 1990s, I mean, I remember being in seminars at Harvard at the time, and we were doing a lot of research on, you know, what was happening in, you know, the former Soviet Union at the time, because the early 1990s, just after the, you know, the whole place fell apart.

And there was already under Yeltsin this kind of idea of Russians abroad, Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers, and the need to bring them back in.

And I remember, you know, we had seminars at the time where we talked about at some point, there'd be some people in Russia that would actually believe that those Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia, but that the people who spoke Russian might have moved on because they certainly had other opportunities and other windows on the world.

I mean, look what's happened in Scotland.