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transcript

Fiona Hill on the War Putin Is Really Fighting

A discussion on the Russian president’s motivations, the West’s response and how the conflict could play out.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

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If there is to be an off ramp in Ukraine, a deal, something to stop the fighting here, it’s going to need to be something that Putin, Zelensky, and the West can all agree on. And as hard as that kind of deal was to imagine a month ago, it is harder now, because — think about how all of the actors and factors here have changed. Vladimir Putin, he had a very optimistic view of how this was going to go.

He thought he was going to roll in, and Ukraine would be full of people with ethnic Russian heritage, with Russian fellow feeling. They’re going to welcome the Russians as liberators. That is not how they welcomed the Russians. So now, Putin fears the thing he fears most, which is humiliation. He’s trying to secure not just Ukraine, but now his regime survival, and his very place in history. The stakes of this war have completely changed for him.

The Ukrainian people have united under President Zelensky’s remarkable leadership. Their sense of national identity, their sense of who they are and where they belong in the world is completely different now. They are not going to allow themselves to be mere pawns in games of great power politics. The idea that this could just be carved up between Russia and the U.S. and Europe, that’s a fantasy.

And on that, the meaning of Ukraine, the stakes of Ukraine, they’ve changed for the United States and Europe too. To the extent the West thought much about Ukraine, they thought about it in terms of Russia, or just a troubling geopolitical conundrum. But now, Ukraine represents the values of the West, or at least the values West claims to hold, made manifest. And values, values are a lot harder to compromise on.

I’m recording this on Monday, and the Kremlin has just made new demands. They want Ukraine to forswear joining any security blocs like NATO. They want Ukraine to recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and to declare much of Eastern Ukraine as independent and functionally under Russian control. And then, depending on how you read their comments, they are insisting on the complete demilitarization of Ukraine.

It is very, very, very hard to imagine Zelensky agreeing to much of that at all, but is there something here that could be agreed to — is there a deal that could give all sides here a way out? If anyone would know the answer, it is my guest today. Fiona Hill served as a National Intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She was senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council under President Trump.

She’s the author of the books “Mr. Putin: Operative In The Kremlin” and “There Is Nothing for You Here.” And she’s been thinking about the strategic and geopolitical and national questions of the region for decades. And so she lays out the factors, forces, and the psychology of the various players really well here. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Fiona Hill, welcome to the show.

fiona hill

Oh, thanks so much, Ezra.

ezra klein

So there are a lot of different frameworks being thrown around right now for how to think about Vladimir Putin. There’s Putin as a strategic, rational actor. There’s Putin as a nostalgic imperialist. There’s Putin, the unhinged maniac. What is the model you’re using for understanding Putin right now?

fiona hill

Well, I think some of those models that you’ve just laid out do hold true. Putin remains a strategic thinker. He’s certainly got strategic goals that he’s trying to fulfill, irrespective of whether we might think that those are mad goals from our perspective. These are goals that he has put forward for quite a period of time, including about Ukraine, but also about the rollback of NATO, and what he sees as some kind of monumental struggle with the United States for Russia’s right to exist in the world.

And he’s certainly framed it in this way as well. And then there’s all these kinds of questions about the way that he reads history, that he reads the situation around him, and the way that he has now over a long period of time — I mean, we have to remember he’s been in power for 22 years. After a period of time, it’s — you and the state, and particularly in the case of Putin, have become fused together.

And you can just see it in the staging of everything. I mean, we can all observe as outside witnesses to his actions, the way that he sets up meetings, the rooms that he meets in with statuary of famous czars and czarinas of the past, including Catherine the Great, the way that people talk about him as being the only decision maker in the Russian state, and the way that he has taken everything personally, made everything personal in his pronouncements on the conflict in Ukraine.

So for him, the state and Vladimir Putin have become fused together. And what I fear about, when you get to the state of his mind, then, is that he sees himself as infallible — because he’s decided to do something, therefore, it should be done.

ezra klein

Do you believe that he is the only decision maker in the state?

fiona hill

Well, he can’t possibly be the only decision maker, because the decisions have to be made in the heat of battle that we’re seeing right now by the generals on the ground, but he’s certainly at the apex of a very narrow decision making vertical. I mean, the Russians call this the vertical of power. It’s not even just a pyramid, because it just is kind of a pole that Putin is at the top of.

But clearly, this latest assault on Ukraine, in the context of everything else that’s been going on, has been decided by Putin along with a very small number of military officials and perhaps a handful of security officials around him.

ezra klein

There are two things that have struck me as both strange and important here. One is that the read of Putin, as I understand it — 10 years ago, let’s say — is that he’s this very adept balancer of interests, that he’s balancing the need to raise living standards among ordinary Russians, the need to enrich the Russian elites, the oligarchs, other members of the government, obviously, the need to enrich himself.

And he was kind of managing to walk that line, you know, reasonably well. And now, very much part of the Western strategy is to split that all apart, to say that to go into Ukraine, to continue with this campaign, is to mean devastating the living standards of ordinary Russians, to mean devastating the lives of these oligarchs and other members of the government get to lead. And so the Putin who used to think that was important, if he did, and the Putin who has decided to cast all that aside to conquer Ukraine, they seem like different Putins.

And which one was right, or if one of them was right, strikes me as a very fundamental question.

fiona hill

Well, I think they were right. That was part of Putin. And you very rightly pointed to 10 years ago, because 10 years ago would have been 2012, not 2014. And 2014 is when Putin makes what is really the fateful and perhaps — ultimately, we’ll see whether it’s fatal or not, certainly fatal for Ukraine — a decision to annex Crimea, and to intervene in Ukraine in a very different way.

Prior to that, in 2006, of course, there was the energy crisis, where Putin decided to turn off the gas, clearly using economic tools, energy tools, rather than all of the military power. And I would say that up until 2011 and really the aftermath of the global economic crisis, Putin was very much preoccupied with building up the Russian state, spreading the wealth, increasing prosperity for the inner circle of oligarchs and the broader circle of business people around him, for ordinary Russians.

And wanted, actually, to have Russia recognized as a viable part of the G8, as it was then, and perhaps on track to be the fifth largest economy in the world, a far cry from where it is now. And then somewhere along the line, we can probably point to a period around 2007, which is on the eve of the global economic crisis — all the debt has been purged off of the Russian state, Russia is looking pretty solvent. They’re starting to build up the military.

Putin then sort of makes a decision that Russia isn’t just going to sit idly by on the world stage, that it wants to — he wants to restore Russia’s great power. He makes the infamous Munich Security Conference speech, basically saying he’s not going to put up with a unipolar world anymore, and certainly not the expansion of NATO. He’s putting the world on notice. And then in that period afterwards, after we’ve had the kind of blow up of the international financial system, he makes some decision along the line to probably take advantage of what he sees as a growing weakness of the West, and his frustration with the West, to go in a different direction on Ukraine.

And he comes back into the Russian presidency in 2012 against the backdrop of major protests against him. People were not that thrilled in the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg at the idea of Putin being back, perhaps for eternity, which is kind of the prospect they see in front of them now as well. And he starts to make all of these pronouncements around that same time about Ukraine and Russia being one and the same country.

And this becomes the prelude for a decision to go in a completely different direction with his presidency, from being someone, as you say, focused on economics and all the other things that you’ve laid out, to someone focused on regathering the lands of the old Russian Empire, not just the Soviet Union. So it’s a flip somewhere in that time frame.

ezra klein

Before we get into how Putin sees the Russian lands, because we’re going to spend a bit of time there today, I want to ask about how he understands the West, because I’m not hearing that analyzed so much. You’re seeing a lot of Putin’s imperial rhetoric discussed, but what does Putin think we want? When you read his speeches, when you listen to his comments, what is his model of us?

fiona hill

Well, his model of us is quite negative, to say the least, and part of It’s a historic model that fits into his perspective of Russia itself. If you look at the speech that he made on the annexation of Crimea, it’s steeped in history, and he sees the United States and NATO as the present manifestation of centuries of European powers — the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Swedish Empire, to all kinds of things that nobody’s thought about for a long time, or only reads about in history books, that have been after Russia, and the Russian Empire, and all the czars and czarinas, who he sees himself as the modern day embodiment.

And trying to push them back, roll them back from Europe, keep them down, constrain them, bring them to the knees — he uses all of this kind of language. And so when he puts the United States and NATO and Europe into that frame, he sees a modern day version. And everything thing that we see today just underscores that Putin believes that we’re literally out to get him. The more that we talk about crushing the Russian economy — you know, there’s loose talk by people now about, well, this will only end if Putin disappears.

This just feeds in to this mentality that Russia is always under siege, its leaders are always under siege. People always want regime change in Russia. Every time he looked at something that happened, for example, in the so-called color revolutions or uprisings. The Arab Spring, what happened? You saw Hosni Mubarak, the long standing leader of Egypt, basically pushed out of power and ending up in a prison cell, for example.

Even worse, you saw Muammar Gaddafi shot by rebel forces in what looked like a drainage pipe. And we hear stories that Putin played that image to himself over and over again, working himself into more of a state of paranoia. The overthrowing of Saddam Hussein and his hanging in Iraq, this is what Putin thinks about. He thinks that the United States is in the business of regime change.

And that always, throughout history, there’s been some malevolent force — mostly coming from the West, discounting, for now, the Mongols from the East — mostly coming from the West, who is out to basically push change in Russia, subjugate Russia, and basically install its own version of Russian power. So unfortunately, right now, even all of the events of the present are feeding into that kind of mentality.

ezra klein

Putting aside the question of malevolence, is he on some level right that the U.S. and the West are in the business of regime change, not just in Russia, but in Ukraine, in some of the other places you mentioned and didn’t mention. I’ve been thinking a bit about this narrative by the political scientist, Samuel Charap, who has been arguing that you can’t understand Russia’s actions in the region without understanding this is a two way contest for influence in Ukraine.

We’ve done a lot over the past 15, 20 years to try to bring them closer to us, not just opening NATO, but supporting Western leaders, training a generation of military officers, actually arming them, integrating them into E.U. licensing and trade and regulatory regimes. And so he sees that there’s being a genuine, constant expansionary pressure from us that he’s now trying to beat back. Is there a validity to that view?

fiona hill

Well, sure. I mean, that’s the way that Putin definitely sees things. And, you know, for many people in the United States, elsewhere, see that too, as that kind of competition. There is still a lot of holdover. But what that does is totally deny any agency on the part of Ukraine, or any other country for that matter. So we’re always framing it like this — with all due respect to all my colleagues who do this from the IR perspective.

If you think around the world as well, many countries have fought for their independence precisely because people themselves want to. What about the United States, for example? We look back in U.S. history, this is like 1812. And the US has had the French, we’ve had the Spanish. We’ve had the British Empire, obviously. We’ve had all kinds of manifestations, and we have our own version of our own history. We might look very different, you know, from a different vantage point.

Think about all of the other countries of Europe that have got their independence from the dissolution of empires, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, Finland. You know, Sweden was once an empire, and had kind of basically dominion over many of these lands as well. The United Kingdom — you know, Ireland is an independent country now as well. A lot of what’s happening now is a kind of a post-colonial, post-imperial impulse on the part of Russia, this kind of feeling that it can’t possibly be lands and peoples want to go their own way.

But there must be some other malevolent force there. And when a country makes an appeal to another country for association, or to different international franchise — let’s put it that way — and wants to be part of that, that’s seen as that other entity, be it NATO or the European Union, or bilateral relations with the U.S. or anything else, that the other— those countries are acting with malevolent force to pull them away.

So what Putin can’t make sense of — in fact, most people are looking at it seem to not be able to make sense of — the people of Ukraine actually kind of want to live like people of Ukraine, in their own state, and make their own decisions. If they want to associate with the European Union and NATO offers their security, then a lot of that is their decision as well. So when we frame it that way, we completely and utterly negate the opinions and the beliefs and the aspirations of the people on the ground.

That’s what Putin is trying to do all the time. So he’s really doing a great job in propaganda, internationally. And we feed into it all the time. And to get this framed as a conflict, a proxy conflict between Russia and the United States, Russia and NATO for Ukraine — well, why do we want Ukraine? People keep asking that. We don’t want Ukraine. The United States does not want Ukraine. Just to make it very clear, we don’t want to annex Ukraine. It’s not going to become like Puerto Rico, you know, like an additional state. We’re not annexing part of it. This is not World War II or the Cold War. We are not occupying Europe anymore.

ezra klein

There’s something he’s been emphasizing that seems to me to be very much part of that idea, which is — I think we’re comfortable in a geopolitical moment, like this talking about security interests, Ukraine and NATO, Ukraine and the E.U., Ukraine and Russia, arms, training. Something that Putin has emphasized in a number of speeches is identity.

fiona hill

Yes.

ezra klein

Language, ethnicity — and this seems, to me, to have been a profound miscalculation in exactly the way you just described. But he seems to understand Ukraine is full of Russians. I mean, of course, it does have many people who were part of Russia, who speak Russian, who identify as more ethnically Russian. But he does — he seems to have vastly overestimated the potency and ubiquity of that identity, such that he seemed to believe he’d get a lot less resistance than he has.

But also his fear, as far as I can tell from some of his speeches, is not just that Ukraine is going to fall into a NATO security umbrella, but there’s going to be a Westernization or even a Ukrainianization of the identity of the Ukrainian people. And once that is done, then Russia can’t get them back, because then you are just occupying a land, not reintegrating with your brothers and sisters.

And that seems very important in his thinking, and also to have been very wrong in a way that, now, if anything, he’s made it even worse, right? I mean, nothing has done more for Ukrainian identity than this invasion. But I’m curious what you think of that, because he talks about it a lot, but I don’t hear it discussed very often.

fiona hill

Ezra, you’re spot on. So it’s very possible to be living in Ukraine and be somebody like Volodymyr Zelensky, Volodymyr being a name that would suggest Ukrainian nationalist version of Vladimir — by the way, after the great grandparents of Kyiv that Putin is also fighting over, it’s being fought over, the versions of the name. Volodymyr, Ukrainian version, Vladimir, the Russian version. And Putin is — it’s the battle of the Volodymyr’s and the Vladimir’s.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy also happens to be a Russian speaking Jew. And I think he’s blowing Putin’s mind, because in that kind of capacity, he can’t figure him out. He’s trying to say that Ukrainians are being led by a bunch of — this is bizarre labeling — drug addled, neo-Nazi fascists. Well, it’s a little hard to say that about somebody who’s completely sober, very clearly — Volodymyr Zelensky — and happens to be Jewish, and who has lost family in the Holocaust, and is very proud of his Jewish identity as well as Ukrainian identity, and his identity as a Russian speaker. And this is the problem that everybody is falling into in the modern era right now. Putin has been trying to put himself forward in many respects as the kind of leader, not just of the Slavic part of the world, the Russian part of the world, this idea of Russkiy Mir — all of the Russian speakers who are scattered around not just Ukraine, but also Belarus and northern parts of Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Republics, or the Russian diaspora abroad, which he reaches out to.

But he’s got this idea of — kind of a white, Christian, Russian Orthodox Russia that is leading, then, the kind of peoples who are opposed to these other kinds of identity politics. So he’s right there in the middle of it, and I think he’s talked himself in to that idea that there can only be one particular form of identity. And just as you say, I think the main impetus for this is he saw that Ukraine was moving away.

So what we’re seeing here is almost, in a way, a kind of a battle for people to be able to espouse their own identities, as complex as they may be, because Ukraine is full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. There are many Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, but who would be Russian speaking. There are millions of Ukrainian citizens working in Russia. And there are lots of people in Ukraine who speak Russian, but now feel a very strong identity tied to place, and to history and shared culture, especially for the last 30 years.

They don’t want to go back to whatever version of Ukraine, or multiple versions of Ukraine — because it seems that Vladimir Putin wants to carve the whole country up — that he is presenting to them. They want the right to decide for themselves.

ezra klein

I want you to continue on unspooling something you began talking about there. We’ve talked a fair amount, so far, about what Putin fears. But what does he want? What does he aspire to?

fiona hill

Well, at this particular point, when it comes to Ukraine, I really fear that he aspires to punish them severely for not falling in line with his vision of what he’s calling the Russian world of Russkiy Mir, and — laying down their arms, surrendering, and overturning the government, so they can put in a puppet. That’s exactly where we are right now. He’s made it crystal clear. Any pretense is off now. And so what he wants to do is punish them severely, and also punish us.

I mean, I feared many times before that if it got to this point, Putin would be willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, or the last Ukrainian that’s willing to, you know, stand up and hold their head high. His aspirations were very clearly laid out. The two documents that were submitted to the United States and NATO back in December that said no Ukraine in NATO, no NATO deployments in the lands of Eastern Europe that were made after 1997, which also suggests nothing about the expansion of NATO into countries like Poland and the Baltic states, for example.

And then the U.S. pulling out of the same kind of territories — and if not just there, even more of a pullout out of Europe as well, putting the U.S. on notice too. But since then, he’s made other demands. Not just the full surrender of Ukraine, but the recognition that Crimea belongs to Russia, recognition of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in their full administrative borders, not just the rebel held territories, the suggestion that might be annexed too into Russia, because they’ve been given passports.

And making it also very clear that he wants the neutralization, demilitarization, not just of Ukraine, but probably of the whole swathe of former Soviet republics, unless they’re in Russia’s own alliance. I mean, he’s laid all of this out. It’s the kind of maximalist position of everything that he’s probably ever thought of, and that circle around him. And many of those demands go back in nationalist Russian circles since the very beginning, or to the very beginning, rather, of the period in the early 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

So Putin’s been picking up lots of threads, and historical threads as well — the idea of the borderlands of Russia, which again extend out. To be honest, as far as one can think about the old writ of the Russian Empire — and so I have a picture that I was given, of me and a whole bunch of us sitting at that big white table with Putin. So Putin has four statues in that room. One is Catherine the Great. And when he talks of Crimea, he looks at her, because he did this with me and Bolton and Huntsman and others.

And we thought, really? Because it’s you know, Catherine the Great who basically annexed Crimea. The other is Peter the Great, the first person who really created the Russian Empire in the Battle of Poltava in Ukraine. Catherine the Great is also the creation of New Russia. And then the other two are Nicholas the I, who fought the debacle of the Crimean War, but was the hard czar who basically made the world safe for autocracy during all the uprisings of 1848.

And the other is Alexander the Great, Alexander the I, who chased Napoleon out of Moscow all the way to Paris, way across the Elbe. And he’s got these four around him, and then there’s Vladimir the Great. And he built this big statue of Vladimir the Great, the Prince of “Kiev,” the Grand Prince, you know outside of the Kremlin, when this is really Volodymyr the Great, Grand Prince of Kyiv, who is also there in Kyiv as well, and outside of the Ukrainian embassy in London and all the rest of it.

And so it’s like a kind of a battle. And he’s putting these statuary all over the place. So this is a guy who kind of — you know, you hear about Jerusalem syndrome, of people going to Jerusalem and thinking they’re Mary Magdalene, or Jesus Christ, or John the Baptist. And he thinks he’s one of these guys. He’s Catherine the Great. Or he’s Peter the Great, and you know, Vladimir the Great. And you look at that and you think, OK, you get where his headspace is.

ezra klein

But that is part of what makes his current position confusing to me. I can understand, particularly if you begin this fight with the view that Ukraine is full of Russians, and that they are going to welcome Russians back in — I understand wanting those borderlands. I understand wanting the old Russian Empire back.

It is a little hard for me to understand the Putin who, in many ways, trenchantly critiqued some of America’s foreign adventures as graveyards for regimes, for hegemons, wanting to on the one hand expend blood and treasure on an endless occupation of a country, a gigantic country, where many of the people don’t want him there. And on the other, to the extent you fear NATO, to the extent you fear an aggressive West, to unite the West, to put NATO into an entirely different posture with regard to defense spending.

To awaken Germany, where somebody said to me — who specializes in the region — it’s usually not great for Russia for Germany to become a military power again, historically. I can sort of understand the Putin theory from two months ago. It’s a little harder for me to understand the end game that looks good to him now.

fiona hill

Yeah, and I think that’s the problem. It’s the same for him, Ezra, because I think that he completely and utterly miscalculated on a number of fronts. First of all, underestimating all of those things that you just laid out there, the Ukrainian willingness to resist this kind of grand plan of reincorporation — maybe dismemberment and reincorporation, and whatever else they had in mind.

Totally underestimating not just the strength of the Ukrainian military, but also people power in Ukraine, for exactly the reasons that we just talked about — that Ukrainians don’t think of themselves as Russians, even those who speak Russian and might be ethnic Russian think of themselves as Ukrainian now. And then there’s the whole — as you said, NATO and European response and global response, on the level of ordinary people suddenly waking up and thinking, hang on, we’d completely discounted this.

Isn’t this the 21st century? There is the countries of the global south, as people like to call it — Africa and Asia, and others who have their own post-colonial histories, and know what it was like to have an overbearing empire and the pressure that was put down on them as they were trying to breakaway in the wake of World War II, or any other time in their history as well. And then there’s been the power of commerce and of the pressure that we’ve had on big corporations to engage in good corporate governance and social responsibility, the famous ESG.

People are getting reminded of the way that they’ve helped to fuel conflicts in the past, and they’re pulling back — all of these, the kinds of things that Putin couldn’t possibly have anticipated. And so the carefully laid plans of Putin and his men have gone awry. And they clearly thought that this would be over and done with a couple of days. They thought that this would be very quick. They’d be making some pronouncement about Ukraine now being under Russia’s thrall. I mean, again, it sounds pretty medieval, you know, in many respects as well.

And the dominance, the dominion of Russia — and that we’d then be moving on a different place. They didn’t expect the massive backlash that they got. And so now I think he’s having the same problem that you laid out. He also doesn’t really know what the end game will be, beyond the end game that he already had in mind. He’s still sticking to the plan. So when Macron called him — President Macron of France — over the last several days, and said, hey, you’ve made a mistake.

Putin had no other response than, no, I haven’t, I’m still sticking to my plan. Because he believes that the plan is right, because he said it. And he’s become so wrapped up in that he is going to now throw everything that he’s got at it to make sure that he succeeds in subjugating Ukraine.

ezra klein

I’m worried about that last part particularly, because if he maybe began this by having goals for Ukraine, I presume at this point he has goals for himself and for Russia. And for everything that you have said and laid out about his psychology and his narrative, being humiliated at the hands of an independent Ukrainian uprising and a united West punishing Russia with sanctions and economic devastation, that’s not how he wants to go down in history. Like, he’s not going to slink out of there.

fiona hill

No, he’s not.

ezra klein

What does somebody with Putin’s psychology — how do they react to this kind of quagmire that he’s now in?

fiona hill

Well, first of all, he’s going to double and triple down on the military side of things. And he has very deliberately put his nuclear card on the table. That’s a way of playing it, right, because it certainly gets everybody thinking — whoa, he’s in a corner, what’s he going to do? So he’s going to nuke us to get out of it? He’s saying yeah — yeah, no, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about doing things like this.

ezra klein

Do you take that seriously?

fiona hill

Well, I think we have to take it seriously, but we have to deal with it with the calm, collected — which we’ve done so far, which is like, OK, you’re really going a bit too far here. Here, you have scenes of old ladies and children preparing Molotov cocktails, and you’ve already gone nuclear. There is a kind of a disproportionate, asymmetric element to that book, which is classic Putin. We’ve seen them now shifting some of the narrative for their internal purposes, and also to anybody else who’ll listen.

And there are, of course, many people who pay attention to what Putin says, and buy his propaganda that the Ukrainians were looking to try to get a nuclear weapon. I mean, basically he’s making stuff up. And that’s the whole point there, because he’s trying to kind of shift the rhetoric. Because if you make it nuclear, it’s not, again, about Ukraine and Russia, and what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It suddenly becomes U.S., NATO, nuclear powers, permanent five at the U.N. Security Council — of the nuclear powers, China, U.K., France, Russia, the United States. You put it in a different box. So we have to keep this focus on what this is, which is Russia invading Ukraine. And that also goes to the other part of your question there about what to do with him and his psychology. If he starts to think that this goes into regime change — you know, he’s looked at interventions in Iraq, he’s looked at interventions in Libya. What about Syria? Why did Russia intervene in Syria in 2015? It was to stop Assad being toppled — even though now in 2022, Assad is still there, but the country has gone completely.

It’s been turned to rubble. That’s, you see, what Putin is prepared to do to stay in place. He did not want Assad to follow down the lines of everybody else where there’d been some kind of intervention. So I think dealing with his psychology, the loose talk that’s out there about — this only ends if Vladimir Putin goes. There’s plenty of people that are out there saying that. We’re going have to be very careful about that rhetoric, because that will make him be fighting for his own self-preservation and his life.

Across the border from Ukraine, in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko was facing that prospect of being overthrown by protests at home. And what did he do? He threw in his lot for Putin, and is now allowing Belarus not just to be a staging ground, but is also fully participating in the conflict in Ukraine to save his own skin. Putin is going to clamp down like crazy inside of Russia as well. The prospect of protests, the prospect of any backlash, this is going to be a very difficult period for ordinary Russians who have got absolutely nothing to do with this. I mean, the big point in all this, too, is this is not the Russians and the Russian people making this choice. They may have bought into the propaganda that there was no alternative, you know, given the depictions that they’re getting in that bubble of information inside of Russia itself. This was a decision made by Putin and, clearly, some small circle of military and security officials. But Putin is not going to leave anything to chance right now. So we’re going to have to be very careful about how we talk about this.

And we’re going to have to keep framing this in the frame that we already have, that this is the invasion of Russia, of Ukraine, that we’re trying to stop. And we need to try to get Vladimir Putin to pull out of Ukraine. That’s how it has to be framed in the United Nations. We’re going to have to be extremely careful. This is like handling Chernobyl and trying to create a sarcophagus around it, because it really does have all kinds of dangerous spillover potential.

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ezra klein

I want to keep in mind something you said a few minutes ago, which is not to pretend this is simply great power conflict. I think that the frame of a lot of asking how this ends is asking how the West and Russia, as the two actors here, carve up a settlement. But the Ukrainian people are the central actor here. We’ve talked a bit about what Putin’s goals and bottom lines might be. What do you understand that to look like for Ukraine, for the Ukrainians? And what do you understand that now to look like for the West? What do we want, and are those two things compatible?

fiona hill

Yeah, it’s a really good question. As you said, if you put Russia out of the equation, what Putin wants — and again, this is what Putin wants, rather than what Russians want, because I think Russians would want to go back to how things were the day before Putin decided to go in there. And Ukrainians know they’re not going to get that back again, but they do want their country. And so they won’t want us to be kind of over their heads, talking about concerts of Europe, and kind of great, big agreements on European security that somehow marginalize them and their voices.

Zelenskyy has, from his hideout in Kyiv — still there manning the fort, so to speak, has asked for E.U. immediate entry. They’re trying to mobilize, not just for sanctions against Russia, but how to protect Ukraine, create war bonds, create payments for Ukrainian citizens, for example. How can you start to think about how to rebuild Ukraine, or build up some portion of Ukraine that is not occupied by Russia? So that is going to shape a lot of this. It’s not going to be so simple as a sitting down anymore, and basically thinking about a new European security framework that’s kind of done sort of with only the marginal participation of Ukrainians. So I think that we’re going to see a very fluid situation. But what we want, obviously, is a security arrangement in Europe that factors in all of these difficulties with Russia, but actually secures all of the countries involved, not just the big powers, but also the other countries in Europe that have a say, and where their own people are mobilizing now in response to this great tragedy.

ezra klein

Let’s talk about Zelensky for a minute. We’ve spoken so much about Putin, but I think it is fair to say when you look at where NATO was, when you look at where American sanctions were on the day of the Russian invasion, and then you look at how they changed come the following Monday, come a week from that Monday, that he himself has also, just like Putin, reshaped the world and reshaped the West.

I think that he took our values and threw them back at us, and asked, well, what are you really? And so before all this, I think there were many deals that America and Western Europe would have taken, that would have treated Ukraine like a vassal state. I don’t think any deal can be made so long, hopefully, as Zelensky survives, that is not a deal he would take, because just as Putin as a power — I mean, I do think Zelensky has the moral power and the sort of global voice now. Do you have a sense of what he would take, because it seems to me he has changed during this, of course, too. I mean, he has watched Russia try to destroy his country and kill many of his countrymen. Things that he might have been OK with two weeks ago may not be things he’s OK with two weeks from now.

fiona hill

Yeah, and just just him, right? There’s an awful lot of other Ukrainians with government experience who are out there, who won’t accept anything different either. And Zelensky is really a president for the new, interconnected, social media savvy 21st century. He’s 44 years old. When the Soviet Union fell apart, he was only a teenager. I mean, he is a post-Soviet guy. And he’s also a gifted actor. And he — clearly, it’s not just performance.

He’s obviously — the guy’s also got balls, let’s just put it that way. That incredible line that — he basically said, look, I need ammunition, not a drive, when he was offered safe passage out of Kyiv. I mean, that was one of those transformative moments for everybody else watching this as well. And although he’s become iconic out there in social media, as you have said, he’s actually in a real, material way shifted everything.

His emotional appeal to the European Union, the way that created redevelopment of a spine on the part of so many people watching that. It’s really important to have that kind of charismatic, transformative leader in that moment when you absolutely need them to get everybody in motion. And that’s exactly what he has done. And he has transformed that landscape, just as you say. And it will be very hard for other people to back down from that right now. He’s gone full Winston Churchill.

ezra klein

I want to say this truly honoring him, and truly being amazed at what he’s done. But in a way, it’s made the conflict scarier, because it is in many ways easier to imagine compromises — over material compromises, over security compromises, over land. It is very hard to compromise over values. And the remarkable thing he’s done for the West is to recenter this around values. I mean, he does not treat it, as you were saying earlier, like, oh, just great power politics.

This is not a great power, IR realist. This is somebody who has reframed this successfully — correctly, because I mean, it’s true — around values. But that means that a lot of the dirtier or uglier compromises that you could have imagined the West and Russia coming to end this, that doesn’t satisfy — not just Ukraine now, but I think many people in the West. I’m not sure you can speak the way Joe Biden spoke at the State of the Union. I’m not sure you can speak the way many of the European leaders are speaking right now, and then turn around and carve up Ukraine to let Vladimir Putin save face.

The pathway out has become harder for me to imagine. And I’m curious how you imagine it now.

fiona hill

Well, look. In wartime, it is very important to have that inspirational, charismatic leader. And if you think about what Winston Churchill did at the end of the war, sitting down at Yalta and Potsdam and the other conferences, and actually making deals with Stalin and the Soviet Union, it wasn’t particularly in line with what he was actually saying when he was talking about fighting on the beaches, and everything else he was doing to rally against Nazi Germany.

So I think that there’s different phases in all of this. And I would like to point out that Zelensky has also been very pragmatic and practical in many different respects. At the very beginning, when he came into office, he did signal to Russia that he was willing to try to find some kind of solution, accepting that everything wouldn’t go Ukraine’s way. And even now, he is trying to push forward — the people around him are pushing forward not just on humanitarian corridors, but to have a ceasefire, and basically talking about — he talked without preconditions. And actually, basically, laying out there — look, we’re willing to negotiate. Now, clearly, not willing to negotiate Ukraine away — I mean, the Russians have basically said they want to have recognition of Crimea. They’d already tried to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk. Somewhere down the line, there may be some very difficult discussions that absolutely have to be had. But I think Zelensky is capable, and the people around him are capable, of doing many things at once.

It’s important to have everybody mobilized, to basically put that pressure — it can’t just be the Ukrainians standing on their own to get Europeans, to get the United States, to get the European Union, to get the world paying attention. The United Nations, those big fora — and that’s what Zelenskyy is appealing to. He’s not just appealing to us. He’s appealing to all of these other countries who have faced the same challenges and dangers, or might in the future.

Because if Russia doesn’t pull back, if Putin doesn’t pull back from what he’s doing in Ukraine, it opens the door for everybody else to do the same. So he is able, then, to strengthen his hand in having that inevitable negotiation that’s coming forward. He wants to be a seat at the table. He doesn’t want to be like basically, Europe, that was in the rubble as you had three guys and a few others sitting down at some wartime conference and making decisions without them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

What looks to you, like the various scenarios that could be the end of this — I mean, all the way from full Russia conquers Ukraine, to various kinds of settlements, ranked from likeliest to least likely. How do you rate the end games?

fiona hill

Well, look, a lot of it depends on how — I had a deep sigh there because of how we all respond. And we have to be extraordinarily careful, given the dangers that we’ve already outlined. We’re dealing with somebody in the form of Vladimir Putin, who sees himself as all tied up with the Russian state. He cannot lose, so we have to kind of figure out about how to formulate something that deals with that, and the fact that he’s likely to react extraordinary badly at any perceived intervention on the part of NATO of NATO forces.

Painting the Russians into a corner, discussions of economic warfare, we’re going to have to tamp all of this down, and to really focus on getting Russia out of Ukraine, focusing on cease fires, focusing on withdrawals of Russian men and equipment, heavy artillery, these barbaric high end weapons systems that they’re bringing in. They’re trying to head off the use of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, et cetera. So we’ve got to focus on these kinds of things and be very careful about the rhetoric.

I think we’ve said all the things that can actually go wrong. So a lot of it is on us as well right now, about how we react, and then how can we, to the best of our ability, formulate a further discussion about structures within European security, or globally, with the United Nations and others involved, to find a pathway out. So this is why I’m very reluctant to get drawn into how this ends, because I think in a way, you can then start leading the path for what seems to be the most likely scenario.

I mean, the only scenario that is really going to work is one in which Russia pulls out of Ukraine, but we find some kind of mechanism to make Putin feel like he’s got something out of this. And unfortunately, we’re going to have to factor China into this. We haven’t really talked about China so far, but China leapt into this whole debate, and now into the conflict, in a rather spectacular way around the margins of the Beijing Winter Olympics on February 4th, when they issued a joint statement between President Xi and President Putin.

Basically, with China calling out NATO and NATO enlargement, and suddenly making itself a factor in European security. Now, there are NATO countries that operate in the Asia-Pacific, not least us — the United States, and the Canadians, and the French, and the Brits. But you could hardly say that NATO has been menacing China in its neighborhood. But of course, NATO’s been worrying about China and the China factor. And China’s been a factor, economically and politically, in Europe as well.

It was the biggest investor in Ukraine up until this particular point. So China has now thrown its hat into our ring, and we’re going to have to figure out now a much more globalized solution to this. It’s going to be very difficult, very difficult indeed. I mean, this is something that we’re going to be thinking about, talking about, and grappling with for years to come, in different ways.

ezra klein

How do you think about China? I’ve seen both versions of understanding — China’s now part of — something all the way to Russia, China bloc, to maybe a little shocked at how this is gone. Could they even be a mediating force in this? Could they see this as an opportunity to step into some kind of superpower status and bring the world down from the brink? Do you think there’s a productive role for them to potentially play?

fiona hill

Well, all of those things are possible. And they’ll be simultaneously in existence, because China is a huge country. I’m sure that the Chinese government is watching this, kind of with some concern, about people power and protests, and people organizing and mobilizing. I mean, that’s why we have the great Chinese firewall on the internet, because the Chinese people are not homogeneous, and they can be unpredictable as well.

So I think there’s all kinds of ways in which this will shape Chinese thinking. It’s entirely possible they could play a mediating role, and I think a lot of us are hoping that they might in some way — rather than mediating directly between kind of all the rest of us and Vladimir Putin, but at least trying to dissuade Putin from going the whole way into full destruction of Ukraine. So there may be some sort of intermediate steps, but I don’t think it will come from the U.S. asking.

We need a whole host of other countries in this game as well with us, trying to kind of figure out — can we halt the hostilities, stop the conflict, and then begin to figure things out? But you’re absolutely right. There may be a lot of thinking in China about, how can we make a real opportunity out of this to best position ourselves and push back a lot of the things that we don’t like? Because right now, it’s very clear that China likes the idea of a quasi bloc, or even a formal bloc.

They’ve set no limits to their partnership with Russia, because it really puts the United States on the back foot.

ezra klein

Let me ask you about how one possible outcome here has changed, because it feels to me that in changing, it has changed everybody’s calculations in a way that hasn’t fully reverberated. I think if you look at how maybe both Putin and many players in the West thought this would go, there were these real, but not overwhelming sanctions, initially, around his invasion. There was a view that he would quickly take the country, and maybe he would be able to pacify it fairly fast.

And I think what people implicitly thought would happen is that over the next year or so, the sanctions would be a pain for everybody. The West doesn’t really care about Ukraine. People would be working around them. And so you have a period of tumult, but it’s not too big. And you’re kind of on a climb back to normalcy. That’s gone. If he takes Ukraine — right, if he is militarily successful with everything that will be required to do that, and all the brutality we will see around the world, these sanctions are going to get worse.

And they’re not coming off. There’s no way now that a Joe Biden, a Germany, can take them off. So now you have — what — you have a Russia in an unending economic horror show, a Ukraine occupation. What happens, I guess, in a way, if Russia wins in Ukraine? What kind of victory would that be now?

fiona hill

Yeah. I mean, one thing on the sanctions, and many of the other measures that have been taken — if they’re framed as temporary suspensions of activity, because a lot of companies have pulled out, rightly so, because otherwise they’re part of fueling the war effort here. But if it’s made very, very clear that they will consider going back in again, and will go back in again if this stops and we get to a reasonable solution, that’s one set of incentives.

Against the backdrop of what you’ve just said, as kind of the worst case scenario, we still have the huge dilemma of energy, because we’re fixated on Nord Stream 2. But there was a Nord Stream One, which is still flowing, which is the first pipeline bringing gas directly to Germany from Russia. There’s also a Blue Stream, which is a pipeline bringing gas to Turkey across the Black Sea, directly from Russia. And then there are the Soviet era pipelines, bringing gas in across Ukraine — still going — and Belarus and Poland.

And then there’s obviously oil flows. Now we, the United States, buy oil from Russia. We can stop doing that. But the reality of stopping all of the energy flows, it’s going to be very difficult. And the Russians know that, so there’s no way that I can see that we would stop cold turkey, all of a sudden, buying Russian gas and oil on a global stage. And I think we have to be very careful about how we talk about this, because there’s an awful lot being bandied around about immediate energy sanctions. Decisions can be made. The United States can decide not to buy Russian oil on an open market. But lots of other countries are still sort of locked in, kind of a period, for those supplies. But they are going to start to change. And that can be a point of negotiation with the Russians as well if they’ve occupied Ukraine, because there’s still going to be that pipeline as well, bringing gas from Gazprom across Ukraine. So this is going to be complicated.

And so how does it look? We’re going to have to still be discussing things with the Russians, and we’re going to have to kind of figure out how their future relations are working as well. It is a much more integrated world. It’s backfired for Russia. But there’s still ways in which Russia, particularly in the energy and other sectors, is going to be part of this globalized economy. We’re going to have to figure out how to handle it.

ezra klein

Without getting into the loose talk that people have bandied about the sanctions leading to Putin somehow being pushed out of office, one of the theories of them is, however, that it is a problem for him if Russians are unbelievably unhappy. And one thing I’m drawing out a little bit in that scenario is a world in which Russia militarily wins in Ukraine is a world in which — what are now quite profound, even with the energy carve outs. I mean — now, the central bank sanctions. These are real.

The economic crisis in Russia is going to be devastating. And Putin is a guy who rose to power by helping to pull Russia out of a howling economic crisis. I mean, he’s a guy who rose to power on the back of real incomes multiplying. And now, they’re going to go down. Does it matter for him? Is it a problem that he will have to solve, to be in a situation which I don’t think is where he intended to be, and I don’t think is where the West even intended to put him.

Where winning in Ukraine means that there is no path forward out of economic crisis for the Russian economy, genuinely, for the foreseeable future, because how can — given what the West has said, how can they accept both a Russian dominated Ukraine and a normalization of economic ties with Russia?

fiona hill

Well, I mean, you were obviously describing the kind of engagement we’re having with Iran right now, right? I mean, basically, it’s exactly the same sort of framing. Over time, that pain will be felt. And the Putin regime has a lot of repressive capacity. But eventually, it’s not just the guys around him who don’t have all of their infrastructure abroad in terms of mistresses, wives, children — you know, hangers on — and all kinds of property and yachts. I mean, the hard guys around him in the military just don’t have that. But there are sufficient people, including large swathes of the population, who want all of their plans as well — not just for skiing holidays in Italy, but you for their kids to go to school or to study abroad, as they leave school for college, and people who were used to going on vacation. I mean, I don’t think they’re going to be all flocking to China on vacation, or North Korea, or wherever else is kind of left open for them — certainly not Syria.

And so Turkey — another place that’s going to be out of bounds, because the flights aren’t going to be there. I mean, after a period, that does become very difficult to manage, apart from through repression. And you know, how much appetite is the larger group around Putin going to have for continuous repression, because that then — it takes you back to the Soviet period that Putin himself has denounced.

And so what we would have to do is to try to, then, as you’re suggesting in the way that you framed this, frame things in a similar sort of way — to have a discussion with Putin through appropriate interlocutors behind the scenes to try to find a pathway out of this.

ezra klein

Do we have reasonable lines of communication to him and his regime? And here, I don’t just mean for multilateral negotiations. I also mean for the possibility of spillover accidents in a war, of a mistargeting situation, leading to something — or some NATO territory being bombed, the kinds of things that can lead to terrible, accidental escalation. Do we currently know how to talk to each other?

fiona hill

We do. I mean, we had that in Syria, by the way, for exactly that reason. We’ve still got old connections between the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his counterpart. We were trying to get connections now for the Secretary of Defense. Those had kind of broken down in the past because of the Russians constantly accusing us of different things, which made it very difficult for us to engage with them.

NATO is obviously reaching out. There’s a lot of discussion about making sure that we do have — precisely about the same kinds of deconfliction that we had on the ground in Syria. And we’re talking about humanitarian corridors, giving the opportunity for Ukrainians to flee the conflict zone, getting assistance, this kind of thing. We’ve already had it on the ground in Donbass, with the O.S.C.E. monitoring mission, and the things that are — sometimes there’s been casualties there.

But you can be pretty sure that this is top of the agenda right now. Part of the complications is exactly how Putin will get information from the ground. That colors his views. And I think it gets to that larger point that you’re asking there. It’s not just the mil-mil contacts, the military to military contacts that we have, but who is getting messages into Putin? You know, what does he take away from when a Macron calls. And, for example, what’s he hearing from his own people?

How do you get messages in? At different times, business people have conveyed messages. People that he trusts, that are close to him have. But in time of war — and it’s unlikely that they’re going to be able to be on the phone with Putin, or to see him in person — it’s still going to be those military and intelligence people. And they have a pretty dark view. So we have to make sure that we — Bill Burns, our director of Central Intelligence, who knows Russia extraordinarily well, for example — similar counterparts around Europe and globally.

You know, what can we use in our established networks to create more channels, coordinated, to head off just that kind of risks that you’ve outlined? We’re thinking about this all the time.

ezra klein

Well, let’s hope it works. I really appreciate the time you spent here with us. This has been very, very, very enlightening, if a little scary. Always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

fiona hill

Well, it depends on what the audience really wants to learn about. But I think if we’re thinking about the conflict in Ukraine right now, and you know, what’s happened historically there, I would highly recommend Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands” to kind of give a sense about the horrible ironies and twists in history that have brought Vladimir Putin to be, in the name of de-nazifying Ukraine, to be, in fact, doing the very same things that the Germans did during World War II in the same space, and all the complexities that were there as well.

I think if people are trying to understand the whole NATO history, and you know, what the Russians are basically putting out there — but again, be cautious about always framing it in this direction — but there’s a new book out by Mary E. Sarotte on the whole evolution of this discussions about NATO and NATO enlargement that goes into all of the documents, and interviewing of the people who took part in this, called “Not One Inch.”

And that gets back to the kind of period with Mikhail Gorbachev, and then onwards, about all of the discussions about NATO expansion. And then if you want to kind of understand the U.S.-Russia relationship, there’s twin books by Angela Stent, one, “The Limits of Partnership,” which traces the ups and downs of the U.S.-Russia relationship since the end of the Cold War. And you know, how we’ve tried over and over again to reset the relationship and failed miserably, and why that’s the case.

You know, partly — you know, miscalculations on our part, because we have mishandled a lot of this as well. And then her companion book to this is “Putin’s World,” which is the way that Putin kind of thinks about his interactions with all the other countries. It’s kind of like — it’s a sort of an extension from not just the U.S., but the global look. And I think if people read those, they’d get a really good sense of where we are right now.

But Putin is always thinking in history, so I could also say there’s some good history books. My old professor from Harvard, Richard Pipes’s book on Russia, “Under The Old Regime,” the kind of imperial thinking about the empire. And then his book on the formation of the Soviet Union, which Putin’s always going on about, about what Lenin and the communists did to kind of create this mess that he’s only just trying to rectify today.

ezra klein

Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

fiona hill

Thanks so much, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]

narrator

“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roge Karma, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. This episode was fact checked by Michelle Harris and Andrea Lopez-Rosado. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lin.

Vladimir Putin was looking for a swift invasion that would halt Ukraine’s drift toward the West, reveal NATO’s fractures and weaknesses and solidify Russia as a global power. In response, the West threatened moderate sanctions, but ultimately showed little interest in stepping between Russia and Ukraine.

Then came the war, and everything changed. Russia’s invasion met with valiant Ukrainian resistance. President Volodymyr Zelensky became an international hero. NATO countries unified behind a truly punishing sanctions regime and significant military support. Russia’s attack strengthened Ukraine’s national identity — and its desire to join the European Union. A conflict that the U.S. and Europe were treating as purely strategic is now a conflict about the West’s most fundamental values.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Much of this has felt hopeful, even inspiring, to those watching from the comfort of home. But it has the potential to unleash a truly terrifying spiral of escalation. Putin, feeling backed into a corner, has raised the stakes. Last week, he called the West’s sanctions akin to an act of war and has put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on alert. And the global wave of support for Ukraine has made it increasingly difficult for Western leaders to de-escalate. In the fog of war, it isn’t hard to imagine an accident or miscommunication that triggers a World War III-like scenario.

So what does a settlement here look like? What does Putin want? What would Zelensky accept? What will Europe and the U.S. sign onto? Is there any deal that could work for all the players?

There are few people better positioned to answer those questions than Fiona Hill. Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. She served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council under Donald Trump and as a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasian affairs under Barack Obama and George W. Bush. And she is the co-author of the influential Putin biography “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.”

We discuss how Putin’s motivations and ambitions have changed dramatically in the last decade, why Ukrainian identity is absolutely central to understanding this conflict, whether NATO expansionism is responsible for the current conflict, the different pathways the war could take, how political incentives have created a spiral of escalation for Russia, Ukraine and the West, whether the economic pain of the sanctions can incentivize regime change in Moscow, the possibility of China playing a mediating role in resolving the conflict, the dangers of backing Putin into a corner, whether Putin is willing to use nuclear weapons, what de-escalation could look like at this point, and much more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)

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Credit...The New York Times

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Andrea López-Cruzado; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

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