Fiona Hill

It was a very complicated and complex explanation.

It wasn't as simple as how it sounded.

And also, there's a long tail to 2016.

You know, Putin's perceptions, the kind of things that he thought were going on, you know, the whole way that...

What they did was actually fairly straightforward.

They'd done this before in the Soviet period during the Cold War, classic influence operation.

It just had gone beyond the bounds of anything they could have anticipated because of social media and just a confluence of circumstances in the United States as well.

We were very fragile and vulnerable.

And I remember at one point having a discussion with the Russian ambassador where, you know, we were complaining about the Russian intervention.

He said, are you telling me that the United States is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable to these kinds of efforts?

And he actually looked genuinely mystified.

Although, you know, obviously it was probably part of a kind of political argument.

Stick there, but he had a point the United States had never been that vulnerable as it suddenly was in 2016 and in the time that I was in government and Going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment and the whole exercise in in Congress

That vulnerability was as stark as it ever could be.

Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem as anything else.

They were the kindling to all of the fires.

Putin didn't start any of this other kind of problems.

Domestically, he just took advantage of them and basically added a bit of an accelerant here and there.

Yeah, I always kind of wonder if is it possible to do something on this scale that's positive?

Because a lot of people seem to be able to use all of this for pretty negative effect.