Friday, Mar 11, 2022 • 34min

Putin’s Endgame: A Conversation With Fiona Hill

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Ending the war in Ukraine very much depends on how and when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia allows it to end. In an interview for his podcast “The Ezra Klein Show,” the opinion columnist Ezra Klein spoke with one of the world’s leading experts on Mr. Putin, Fiona Hill, a foreign policy adviser for three United States presidents. Today, we run the discussion between Ms. Hill and Ezra Klein about how Mr. Putin is approaching this moment, and the right and wrong ways for the West to engage him. Guest: Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

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Fiona Hill

Ezra Klein

Michael Barbaro

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Michael Barbaro

00:31

I'm

Michael Barbaro

. This is The Daily. Ending the war in

Ukraine

very much depends on how and when

Vladimir Putin

allows it to end. In an interview for his podcast, the

Ezra Klein

Show, my colleague opinion columnist

Ezra Klein

spoke with one of the world's leading experts on

Putin

, Fiona Hill

, a foreign policy advisor for the last three American presidents, about exactly how

Putin

is approaching this moment and the right ways and wrong ways for the West to engage him. It's Friday, March 11th.

Ezra Klein

01:22

Fiona Hill

, welcome to the show.

Fiona Hill

01:24

Oh, thanks so much,

Ezra

Ezra Klein

01:26

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

01:44

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, you know, 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 you suddenly framed it in this way as well.

02:18

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 know, you and the State and particularly in the case of

Putin

have become fused together.

02:40

And you can just see it in the staging of everything. I mean, we can all observe it is outside witnesses to his actions. The way that he sets up meetings, the rooms that he meets in with statuary of famous Czars and Czarina is of the past, including, you know,

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 and made everything personal in his pronouncements on the conflict in

Ukraine

03:08

So for him, the State and

Vladimir Putin

have become fused together and what I feel about when he gets 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

03:21

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

Fiona Hill

03:25

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 just kind of a poll that

Putin

is at the top of.

03:47

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

04:01

Before we get into how

Putin

sees the Russian lands - because we're gonna spend a bit of time there today - I want to ask about how he understands the West, because I'm not hearing that analyze 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

04:25

Well, his model of us is quite negative, to say the least. And everything that we see today, just underscores that

Putin

believes that we're literally out to get him. You know, 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 of

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.

04:52

Every time he looked at something that happened, for example, in the so-called colored revolutions or uprisings, the Arab spring, what happened, you saw

Hosni Mubarak

, the longstanding leader of

Egypt

, basically pushed out of power and you know, ending up in a prison cell, you know, for example. Even worse you saw

Muhammad Gaddafi

shot by rebel forces in what looked like a drainage pipe and you know, 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 you know his hanging in

Iraq

05:27

This is what

Putin

thinks about, he thinks that

the United States

is in the business of regime change and they're always throughout history, there's been some malevolent force mostly coming from the West, he's 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.

05:49

So unfortunately right now even all of the events of the present are feeding into that kind of mentality.

Ezra Klein

05:56

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?

06:09

I've been thinking 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.

That 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

licensing and trade and regulatory regimes.

06:37

And so he sees that there is being a genuine constant expansionary pressure from us that he's now trying to beat back. Is there validity to that view?

Fiona Hill

06:46

Well, sure, I mean, you know, that's the way that

Putin

definitely sees things. But what that does is totally deny any urgency on the part of

Ukraine

or any other country for that matter. Right? 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?

07:04

You know, we look back in

history, this is like 1812. And you know, the

has had French, you know, we've had the Spanish, we've had you know, the British empire. Obviously, we've had all kinds of manifestations and you know, we have our own version of our own history. You know, might look very different, you know, from a different vantage point.

07:22

You know, you think about all of the other countries of

Europe

that have got their independence from the dissolution of empires.

Poland

, the Czech Republic and

Slovakia Republic

Finland

Sweden

was once an empire and had, you know, kind of basically dominion over many of these lands as well. The

United Kingdom

, you know,

Ireland

is an independent country now as well.

07:43

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 that lands and peoples want to go their own way, but there must be some other malevolent force there.

07:58

And when a country makes an appeal to another country, you know, for association in order to, you know, different international franchise, let's put it that way and wants to be part of that that's seen as that other entity that

NATO

the European Union

or you know, bilateral relations with the US, or anything else that the other those countries are acting with malevolent force to pull them away.

08:20

So what

Putin

can't make sense of in fact most people looking at it seemed 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

for their security, then a lot of that is their decision as well.

08:37

So when we frame it that way, we completely and utterly negate the opinions and the beliefs, and the aspirations of other people on the ground. That's what

Putin

is trying to do all the time. So he's really done a great job in propaganda internationally and we feed into it all the time. And to get it to this framed as a conflict of proxy conflict between

Russia

and

the United States

and

Russia

and

NATO

for

Ukraine

09:03

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're not going to annex

Ukraine

is not gonna come like

Puerto Rico

and you become 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

09:22

There's something he's been emphasizing that seems to me to be very much part of that, 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

Ukraine

and

Russia,

or arms, training.

09:39

Something that

Putin

has emphasized in a number of speeches is identity 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 are part of

Russia

who speak Russian, who identify as more ethnically Russian.

10:01

But he does, he seems to have vastly overestimated the potency and ubiquity of that identity such that he seemed to believe he gets 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 gonna be a westernization or even a Ukrainian-ization of the identity of the Ukrainian people.

10:29

And once that is done then

Russia

can't get them back because then you are just occupying the 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

10:54

These are your 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, you know, Ukrainian nationalist version of Vladimir by the way after the great grandparents of

Kiev

, that

Putin

is also fighting over, it's been fought over the versions of the name. Volodymyr Ukrainian version, Vladimir the Russian version. And

Putin

is, you know, it's a battle of the Vladimirs and the Vladimirs.

11:20

Volodymyr Zelensky

also happens to be as Russian speaking do 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 bizarre labeling drug-addled neo nazi-fascists.

11:38

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, is the kind of leader, not just of the Slavic parts of the world, the Russian part of the world, this idea of Russky mir all of the Russian speakers who were scattered around, not just

Ukraine

, but also

Belarus

and northern parts of

Kazakhstan

and elsewhere in the former

Soviet Republic

or the Russian diaspora abroad, which he reaches out to.

12:19

But he's got this idea of a kind of a white Christian Russian Orthodox, you know,

Russia

that is leading then, you know, 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 into 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.

12:43

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 there may be because

Ukraine

is full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. There are many Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians In

Russia

, but who will 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.

13:14

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

13:27

I wanted you to continue on spooling 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

13:38

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 Russky 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 pretenses off now. And so what he wants to do is punish them severely and also punish us.

14:02

I mean, I feared many times before that if we 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, you know, we're very clearly laid out the two documents that were submitted to

the United States

and

NATO

back in December, that said no

Ukraine

and

NATO

, no

NATO

deployments in the lands of eastern

Europe,

that were made after 1997, which also suggests, you know, nothing about the expansion of

NATO

into countries like

Poland

and the

Baltic States

, you know, for example, and then the

pulling out of those same kind of territories and if not just they're even more of a pullout out of

Europe

as well, putting, you know, the

on notice too.

14:46

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 board is not just the rebel-held territories. The suggestion that that might be annexed to 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 swathes of former Soviet Republics unless they're in rushes on alliance.

15:16

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

has been picking up lots of threats.

15:37

So I have a picture that I was given of me and a whole bunch of you are 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 it's, you know,

Catherine The Great

who you know, basically annexed

Crimea

15:55

The other is

Peter The Great

, the first person who really created the Russian empire in the

battle of Poltava

Ukraine.

And then the other two are

Nicholas I

, who fought the debacle of the Crimean War, but was the hard czar are who, you know, basically made the world safer autocracy during all the uprisings of 1848. And the other is an

Alexander The Great,

Alexander I

who chased

Napoleon

out of Moscow all the way to Paris, you know, all across the.

16:23

And he's got this four around him and then there's he

Vladimir The Great

and he built this big statue of

Vladimir The Great

, you know, the Prince Of Kyiv, the grandparents, you know, outside of the

Kremlin

when this is really Volodymyr the Great, grand prince of Kyiv who you know, is also there in

Kyiv

as well and outside of the Ukrainian embassy in London and all the rest of it.

16:45

And so it's like a kind of a battle and he's putting a statuary all over the place. So this is a guy who kind of, you know, you hear about Jerusalem syndrome. Of people, you know, going to

Jerusalem

and thinking there Mary Magdalene or Jesus Christ or John the Baptist and he thinks he's one of these guys. He's

Catherine The Great

, where is

Peter The Great

and you know

Vladimir The Great

and you know, you look at that and you think, "Okay, you get where his headspace is".

Ezra Klein

17:09

But that is part of what makes his current position confusing to me. I can understand particularly 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.

17:28

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 measurements, wanting to on the one hand expand 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 entirely different posture with regard to defense spending.

18:04

It's a little harder for me to understand the endgame that looks good to him now.

Fiona Hill

18:08

Yes. And I think that's the problem. It's the same for him. The carefully laid plans of

Putin

and his men have gone awry. And they clearly thought that this would be over and done with in a couple of days, they thought that this would be very quick to be making some pronouncement about

Ukraine

. Now being under

Russia's

thrall.

18:25

I mean again, it sounds kind of pretty medieval, you know that in many respects as well, under you know, the dominance of the dominion of

Russia.

And that, you know, we'd then be moving on a different place. They didn't expect the massive backlash that they got.

18:37

Until 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.

18:48

So when

Macron

called him

President Macron

of France and said, "Hey, you've made a mistake".

Putin

had no other response and "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, that he was going to now throw everything that he's got at it to make sure that he succeeds in subjugating

Ukraine

Ezra Klein

19:10

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 a independent Ukrainian uprising and the United West punishing

Russia

with sanctions and economic devastation.