Fiona Hill

He got a boost from Crimea.

I mean, I didn't mention that before.

I mean, one of the reasons for invading Crimea was...

And annexing or invading Ukraine the first time, annexing Crimea was, look what happened to his ratings.

They went from kind of declining, and they were still pretty good, you know, by anybody's standards, to just rocketing off into the stratosphere.

I mean, I didn't really meet anybody in Russia who thought that annexing Crimea was, you know, kind of a bad thing.

I mean, even, you know, kind of people who opposed Putin on so many other things.

Crimea was, you know, Krimnash, they kept saying.

You know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back.

You know, it should never have gone away.

It was ours, you know.

But, you know, this is more complex.

And he wasn't, I don't think at the time, planning on annexing all of Ukraine when he went in this special military operation.

He was going to try to turn it into what Belarus has become, you know, part of a...

you know, bring back the Commonwealth of Independent States or the Union, a new union with Belarus and Ukraine and Russia over time.

But certainly, you know, remove Ukraine as a major factor, independent factor on the world stage and, you know, consolidate Crimea and maybe, you know, kind of incorporate Donetsk and Luhansk, you know, kind of

That was also a possibility, but it wasn't in his intention in any case to have something on this kind of scale.

He wanted to get on with then preparing for what was going to be, he would think, the cakewalk, the shoe-in of the next presidential election.

I mean, last time around, he had to invite a bit of competition with this person who's reputed to be his goddaughter, Ksenia Sobchak, you know, for a bit of, you know, kind of entertainment for people.

this next time around, you know, maybe he wasn't really planning on running, you know, against any other, you know, serious opposition.