Fiona Hill

It's just hard to see it, right, at the particular moment.

They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War, which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well, but they pushed them back.

Now, the Finns lost a lot of territory.

They lost Karelia and, you know, huge spheres of territory, but they got to be Finland.

And now they're, you know, joining NATO, but they've been part of the EU.

The question is how to

get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success.

And that's the challenge.

Again, they've already won psychologically, politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded in completely and utterly devastating them.

And this is the kind of the old Muscovite, the old Russian imperial, old Soviet mentality, going all the way back to when the

The Muscovites were the bag men for the horde, for the Mongols.

It was destruction.

You don't play with us, we'll destroy you.

People talk about it as mafia, but it's older.

All you have to go down is go and see Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev.

I mean, I remember seeing that film when I was first as a student in Moscow and just being, whoa, this is so brutal.

I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal because the whole point is that you show people who's the boss.

The destruction is the point of things as well because, you know, you are emphasizing your domination.

And that's what Putin is doing right now, is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction, so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer.

Remember when Khodorkovsky got out of the penal colony, when Putin let him out eventually?