Fiona Hill

And when Brexit happened, you know, Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all.

They wanted to kind of still be, you know, having a window on Europe.

And that's kind of historic.

And lots of people in Ukraine have looked west, not east.

You know, it depends on where you are, not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that, but also in Kiev.

And Kharkiv, you know, was kind of predominantly a Russian-speaking city.

But Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian literature, you know, at different points.

People have different views.

I grew up in the north of England.

We don't feel like the south of England.

There's been a massive divide between north and south in England.

For millennia, not just centuries.

So, you know, people feel differently depending on where they live and, you know, kind of where they grew up.

And Putin just didn't see that.

Oh, he was, what was it, 38%, something like that, but best in the popularity?

You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded in 1941.

You see, the problem is Putin always reads history from one perspective over another.

I think most countries basically rise to their own defense.

So this is actually one of the first times that Russia has been on the offensive rather than on the defensive.

So there's kind of a bit of a flip there.