Fiona Hill

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.

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.