Fiona Hill

Because if Ukraine doesn't have agency, nobody else has agency either.

Nobody else has any kind of decision-making power.

And, you know, we have an environment in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players.

There's the United States and Russia and China.

And maybe occasionally it might be India and perhaps Brazil or some other, South Africa or some other country, like maybe the BRICS at some point.

But, you know, ultimately it's like the old days, big powers resolve everything.

And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right, you know, to determine things, you know, strong man to strong man, big country to big country, and, you know, determine, you know, where things happen next.

That's why he's talking about things being provoked and it's being the United States' fault.

Oh, there's always going to be people who like that approach.

Of course there is.

But then they don't necessarily dominate.

That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about.

I mean, you know, Putin can, you know, read, you know, all the various articles and hear the kind of pronouncements of people.

But, you know, this gets back to, you know, the way that the United States operates.

Putin saw that Trump wanted to have a top-down vertical of power, and other presidents have wanted to have that, but the United States is a pretty messy place, and we have all kinds of different viewpoints.

Now, of course, we know that in Russia, everything, even criticism of the Kremlin, is usually fairly orchestrated, usually to kind of flesh out what people think about things.

When we had these hardliners saying we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less, and that the army wasn't doing enough,

It was in many respects, you know, kind of encouraged by the Kremlin to see how people would react to that, you know, to kind of actually create a constituency for, you know, being more ruthless than you had before because, you know, they wanted to clamp down.

In the United States, I mean, I can say whatever I want.

It doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House.