Fiona Hill

It's also somewhere in that period, 2011, 2012, we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine.

And he's always, you know, I think, been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history.

I mean, I heard at that time I was in, I've written about this and many of the things that, you know, I've written about Putin.

But in that same time frame, I'm going to all these conferences in Russia where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary, and they talk about him reading Russian history.

I think it's in this kind of period that he formulates this idea of the necessity of reconstituting the Russian world, the Russian Empire.

He's obviously been very interested in this.

He's always said, of course, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century, but also the collapse of the Russian Empire before it.

And he starts to be critical about Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine as...

the same country ukrainians and russians being one in the same and this is where the ledger flips because i mean the initial question you asked me is about has russia has putin been good for russia or not and this is where we get into the uh focal point of uh or the point where he's not focusing on the prosperity and stability and future of russia but he starts to obsess about the past

and start to take things in a very different direction.

He starts to clamp down at home because of the rise of opposition and the fact that he knows that his brand is not the same as it was before and his popularity is not the same as it was before because he's already gone over that period in...

anybody's you know professional and you know political life that you know if you stay around long enough people get a bit sick of you you know it's just we talked about that before should you stay you know kind of in any job for a long period of time you need refreshing and you know kind of putin is you know starting to look like he's going to be there forever and people are not happy about that

and would like the chance as well to kind of move on and move up.

And, you know, with him still in place, that's not going to be particularly possible.

And that, you know, it's around the time when he starts to make the decision of annexing Crimea.

And that's when the whole thing flips, in my view.

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the beginning of the end of, you know, Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia.

Because if you pay very close attention to his speech on the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, you see all the foreshadowing of, you know, where we are now.

It's already of kind of his view of kind of his obsessions, his historical obsessions, his view of himself as being kind of fused with the state, a kind of a modern czar, and his idea that the West is out to get him.

And it becomes after that almost a kind of like a messianic mission, you know, to turn things in a different direction.