Fiona Hill

I think of people like Sergei Kiryenko.

I knew Kiryenko back in the 90s.

I mean, my God, that guy's all in.

Or like Dmitry Medvedev.

You know, who was, you know, a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin.

Certainly had a totally different perspective, wasn't it, in the KGB?

A warmer, fuzzier version, yeah.

I mean, he's kind of like, he was literally a warm personality.

I don't know if you watched him during the September 30th annexation.

The guy had all kinds of facial twitches and looked so rigid and stiff that he looks like he might implode.

I mean, that wasn't, you know, how he was, you know, earlier in his career.

And he, you know, had a different view of Perestroika.

We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia during Perestroika, he was in Dresden, watching the East German state fall apart.

And, you know, dealing with the Stasi and in a kind of place where you weren't getting a lot of information about what was happening in West Germany, or even what was happening back home in Perestroika.

And he has that kind of group of people around him, the Patrashevs and Botnikovs and others.

And

Sergei Ivanov and others from the different configurations of his administration who have come out of that same kind of mindset and are kind of wanting to put everything back together again.

So there's a lot of enablers, there's a lot of power seekers, and there are a lot of people who think the same as him as well.

He is a man of his times, a man of his context.

Are there people he trusts for some things?