Fiona Hill

and some of the basic expenses for the study, and they wrote me a check.

And so thanks to the miners of Donbass and this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham of the Durham Miners Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time before I embarked on my studies at university.

That's right.

That's right, in the place itself.

Yeah, I mean, there are places in the United States, in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania, like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place.

And the northeast of England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley, which has its own

I would say contours and frames.

And when you come to those industrial areas, your previous identities get submerged in that larger framework.

I've always looked at the world through that lens of being, you know, someone from the working class, the blue collar communities from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic connotations.

And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced over, you know, the last 30 years that people came from all over the place to work there.

Of course, it was a population that one might say is indigenous, you know, might have gone back centuries there, but they would have been, you know, in the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England.

Right.

And people in the case of the northeast of England came from Wales, they came from further in the south of England, the Midlands, they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland.

I have all of that heritage in my own personal background.

And you've got a different identity.

And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry.

And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Donbass.

It's a place that's apart in many respects historically and in terms of its evolution and development over time.

And, you know, particularly in the case of Russia, the Russians have tried to say, well, look,