Fiona Hill

And, you know, part of it is the larger international environment where Putin himself has become kind of convinced that the United States is out to get him.

And part of it goes back to the decision on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in 2003.

There's also the recognition of Kosovo in 2008 and the whole kind of machinations around all kinds of other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere.

But Iraq in 2003 and this kind of whole idea after that that the United States is in the business of regime change and perhaps has him in his crosshairs as well.

But there's also then kind of, I think, a sense of building crisis after the financial crisis and the Great Recession, 2008, 2009, because I think Putin up until then believed in, you know, the whole idea of the global financial system and that Russia was prospering and that Russia, you know, part of the G8 and actually could be genuinely one of the, you know, the major economic and financial powers.

And then suddenly he realizes that the West is incompetent, that, you know, we totally mismanaged the economy of our own, the financial crash in the United States, the kind of blowing up of the housing bubble, and that we were feckless.

And that had global reverberations.

And he's prime minister, of course, you know, in this kind of period.

But then, you know, and I think that that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency and try to kind of take things under control again in 2007, 2012.

And after that, he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees the United States as a bigger problem.

And he also, you know, starts to, you know, kind of focus on also the domestic environment because his return to the presidency is met by protests.

And he genuinely seems to believe, because again, this is very similar to belief here in the United States that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be elected by Americans.

There somehow was some kind of

external interference because the Russians interfered and had an impact.

Putin himself thinks at that time, it's one of the reasons why he interferes in our elections later, that the United States and others had interfered because he knew that people weren't that thrilled about him coming back.

They kind of liked the Medvedev period.

And the protests in Moscow and St.

Petersburg and other major cities, he starts to believe are instigated by the West, by the outside.

Because of, you know, funding for transparency in elections and, you know, all of the NGOs and others, you know, they're operating, State Department, embassy funding, you know, and, you know, the whole attitudes of God is back, you know, kind of thing.

And so after that, we see Putin going on a very different footing.