Fiona Hill

So, you know, what this debate about NATO is all about, or Russia being provoked, is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower mentality.

bipolar relationship where everything is negotiated with the United States.

It's to try to deny that Ukraine or Belarus, well, Belarus has kind of been absorbed by this point, you know, by Russia or Moldova or Kazakhstan or any of the other countries have any kind of agency, not even Poland or Hungary or, you know, kind of France and Britain.

For years and years and years, senior people like Putin and people around the Kremlin have demanded a return to the kind of what they call the old concert of Europe or the concert of Vienna, where the big guys, which now means the United States and Russia, just sit down and thrash everything out.

And so, I mean, Putin by saying, look, it was provoked.

It's the United States.

It's NATO.

It's a proxy war or it's this or it's that or this is going to be a nuclear confrontation.

It's like the Cuban Missile Crisis or it's the Euro Missile Crisis.

It's basically just saying, you know, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union and the United States worked things out.

I want to go back to the whole, you know, period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan just kind of got together and figured things out.

Or, even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran and the big meetings at the end of World War II where we resolved the whole future security.

We've had a war.

We've had the Cold War.

Now we've got another war.

We've got a real war, a hot war.

We've got a war in Ukraine.

It should be the United States and Russia that sort this out.

So this is where we see the United States waffling about as well, trying to kind of figure out how to handle this because...

it has to be handled in a way that Ukraine has agency.