Fiona Hill

Thank you.

Thanks so much, David.

It's really great to be with you.

Well, David, it's good that you pointed out those negative aspects of some of the recent changes for Putin from the start.

Thinking about those blows, as you put it, I think very aptly in Iran and Venezuela, two countries which have very close relationships with Putin and Russia, which I'm sure we'll get to in the course of our discussion.

But if you put some of those downsides, again, on the shelf for the moment until we get back to them, if you took it at just face value, the world would look pretty propitious from Putin's point of view.

Because you mentioned in your introduction,

Trump's efforts to extort, as you put it, President Zelensky of Ukraine in the run-up to that first impeachment trial.

And Putin's all in the business of extortion, basically using all kinds of manipulation or force, bullying, you name it, to get what he wants.

And he wants a world in which might makes right, in which it's a battle for basically spheres of influence by strongmen.

And on the surface, that seems to be where we are.

If we look back to the first Trump administration in 2016, and then of course the whole period with Biden, things look much more ambiguous from Putin's point of view.

He wasn't really quite sure what the trajectory was going to be.

He wasn't sure what the direction of travel was going to be, but he was certainly hoping that he'd be able to take advantage of circumstances

and to push Russia's advantage.

You may remember that he also tried to bully Biden in 2021.

It seems so far away now that none of us can really remember it.

When he basically puts the United States on notice that if Russia doesn't get what it wants in terms of the United States pulling out of Europe, pulling back from Ukraine, taking NATO back to the studs, back to the borders, which it was in before its expansionary phase in the late 1990s, then Putin was going to do something extreme.

which, of course, turned out to be the full-on invasion of Ukraine in the February of 2022.

And so Putin's been pushing for advantage that whole period.