This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: “The Historical and Magical Visit of Putin’s Mystery”
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Gideon RachmanHello and welcome to Rachman. I’m Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator at the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Russia and the West. My guest is Fiona Hill, who served as a senior adviser on Russia at the White House. and for the U. S. National Intelligence Council. Ukraine is expected to go on the offensive in the coming weeks. Are we reaching the decisive moment of the war in Ukraine?
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On May 9, Vladimir Putin checked troops on Red Square, the classic Victory Day parade in Russia, marking the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945. Recent years. Is it because of the losses suffered in the war in Ukraine?Or can there be some other explanation perhaps similar to the security issues?
Fiona Hill is a user who closely follows developments in Russia. She has made a career as a Russia expert in academia and in the U. S. government. He is a U. S. citizen, serving in both Democratic and Republican administrations. La Dra. Hill angered some of his Democratic friends when he took on a job in the Trump White House, and he infuriated Trump himself and his supporters when he gave damning testimony about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine when he was impeached by Congress in 2019. Fiona Hill also made a point that Trump has denied there was Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The unfortunate fact is that Russia was the foreign force that systematically attacked our democratic establishments in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our own intelligence agencies shown in bipartisan congressional reports. This is indisputable, even if some of the underlying main points will have to remain ranked.
Gideon RachmanFiona Hill is an old friend of mine. We met at a convention in Berlin recently. Then we sat down to talk. I began our discussion by asking Fiona about the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive. Will this be the moment?
Fiona Hill Well, I think you know, the component of the challenge here is that we made it a great time. We have seen, of course, what has been a bitter war. We have all made analogies with the First World War. We’ve all seen, you know, the images, if we haven’t been there in person, of the front lines, put up as Bakhmut. But, you know, it’s a bit of a dilemma because when you look at past wars, you look at the first global war, you think of Verdun as the decisive battlefield in France, of course, where you see the cave in the German Reich and the Kaiser, even though all the devastation was in France itself. We started thinking about all the operations we had in Normandy with the Normandy landings and, you know, the armies that fought in other wars. And we to be consistent. And some of them might have driven the tide in some way. But in this case at this time, in the case of Ukraine, we begin to communicate about the concept of a consequential war before it happens.
Gideon Rachman I guess it reminds me a little bit, though, of D-Day, you know, Array. . .
Fiona HillWell, yes, exactly.
Gédéon Rachman . ArrayArray where other people came [inaudible].
It’s happening, but they didn’t know if it would be decisive as they wanted. And I think that’s what worries me, that we’re building it and that it’s not necessarily going in the direction that we expected. , which does not mean that it is a massive defeat of Ukraine, on the contrary, but it is just that it does not oppose the situation.
Gideon Rachman yes, I mean, it was attractive when I was in Kiev about a month ago, other people were saying, yes, this will be a watershed moment. But when we spoke to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba he said not to communicate like that. .
Fiona HillYes, I agree with him. I don’t think we deserve to communicate like this. I think what it’s telling us is more about where we are, those of us who weren’t on the Ukrainian battlefields, that there’s just mass revulsion, not just some kind of war fatigue, but mass revulsion that we’re back in the first war. world war 2, the bloodbath of the 20th century, and you have, you know, other people like Vladimir Putin communicating about putting a bunch of thousands of Russian foot soldiers who used to be civilians working in IT or the air traffic control or city governments all around Russia on a battlefield and just take them out as cannon fodder. We said we would never do it again and here we are. So I think a lot of other people need it to stop. The Pope spoke about it very openly, for example. But does it simply reflect a sentiment that Array we are going to preside over this carnage? I mean, is this where we are morally and is this where we were given at the beginning of the current decade of the 21st century?
Gideon RachmanWhat is your answer to this question?
Fiona Hill I have to say, you know, very sadly, that’s where we have to go because there’s a trend in this. This is a 20th century war. And I think we have to recognize that it is like the last gasp of the European imperial wars. Since Russia is the last continental land empire, Britain still has some elements of the old empires scattered abroad. But you know, unless Russia, Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and other continental empires in Europe disintegrated. We have evolved and Europe itself has moved into a whole new way of thinking about Europe. In the meantime, don’t go back to the whole story. But first, you know, Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of hitale, you know, countries getting rid of hitale. Russia is still at it. The unfinished story of Vladimir Putin and the people around him. I think the story is over for quite a few Russians. They were living their most productive life in the last 20 years, moving forward, being completely part of Europe. Obviously, it was a surprise for the formula there. But, you know, they were brought back to the wars of the 20th century because. . . ArrayArray
Gideon Rachman And, indeed, beyond. I mean, he’s talking about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. . .
Fiona Hill exactly! In fact, it does not simply take us back to the twentieth century. It takes us back to the tenth century because it speaks of 988, which is the Christianization of Rus, you know, old mythical ancestors of the Russian people. And Putin takes us on this magical and mysterious excursion from an afterlife that is only from the Russian point of view. And I think, you know, the component of the challenge that we’ve had is that Europe has had a lot of trouble dealing with that, and in the United States, it’s also hard to manage, because, as we know from all the other surveys and tests in American schools, we have a very vague understanding of the history of the United States. I think we have a poor understanding of history in the UK and also in many other countries. And so, Putin will dominate this historical landscape. Putin has taken us back to ancient times, and now we will have to get used to thinking according to those old patterns. . .
Gideon Rachman But do you think we have resilience there, because he was still speaking at the Munich Security Conference to a, you know, a Western securocrat, to put it that way?He said, we have done a lot, we deserve to put our economies on a semi-war basis. We’re not doing enough. What do you think?
Fiona HillWell, that’s what I mean. I mean, long before the conflict, I felt this concept of World War III and gained a lot of resistance from the people. But what I meant by that is that this is precisely the structural point. You know, World War III doesn’t necessarily mean some kind of wonderful absolutist confrontation, an absolute victory over Russia. But when we turn to the other two wars we call global wars, all of which started in a European context and reverberated into the wars that replaced the system. They were also structurally very similar. I mean, the component of hindsight that we’ve had in the rest of the world is, is it rarely just some other territorial dispute?Because, of course, the First and Second World Wars were also territorial conflicts. . .
Gideon Rachman And that phrase, two sentences.
Fiona Hill That’s right. But it is more than that because it is about territorial conquest. It’s not just about where the borders are, but are you winning people over?You know, it’s a question of identity and it’s a long-term issue. Incredibly devastating. We have the biggest land battles we’ve seen in Europe since World War II. We have millions of refugees. Again, the biggest refugee crisis in Europe. You know, despite what we’ve already noticed about the war in Syria and other migration flows. That is what I meant when I said that unfortunately we have to go back to that twentieth century. century of thinking that we have to deal with the demands of a war economy. But what we still have to do is think long-term here. We don’t need to go back irreversibly to those old ways.
Now, when you look at Sweden and Finland, for example, who need to join NATO, it’s not because they need to go back to the NATO of the 1950s, 1960s or 1980s. They need to think about new mechanisms and new security structures. But NATO and collective defense are becoming one of the principles by which we work. I mean, for me, this is one of the biggest adjustments and there’s something that really deserves to be shaken. You know, the Finns spent the entire postwar and bloodless war era preparing to protect themselves because they were left alone after being attacked in 1939. They fought the Soviets through the winter of the war, but they lost a lot of territory, and they are at all times in a position to ensure that they can only protect the territory they had. And yet, at the same time, the Finns were among the most progressive, in this impartial term of the word, the other people of Europe, and what did they do? They have built their own internal resilience. They were preparing to fight the Russians to every last person imaginable. Not that they can accommodate up to 280,000 other people. It’s ordinary! You know, a little bit, a lot of millions of other people. They all knew exactly what they would have to do in the event of an invasion. They have undermined their border to an excessive level. So I think everyone would be pretty surprised. But they also tackled corruption. They tackled inequality. They pointed to their school formula and tried to have a technique that was as coherent as possible with all the internal politics, the socioeconomics and all the problems. And that’s also what we’re going to have to do.
Gideon Rachman But some other people say, yes, I mean, there are those question marks about Western resilience, resistance, but Russia has terrible problems; which, you know, Putin miscalculated, which is lost. I don’t know what number you would make. . . 200,000 more people?
Fiona HillBakhmut’s recent statements are shocking. Even the lowest estimates are shocking, because you think about the losses of the Soviet Union. Again, 270 million against Russia, 140 million within 10 years from Afghanistan. They seem to have lost this only to Bakhmut on several occasions. Putin thinks of this preponderance of cannon fodder, which only has more people. And we saw, of course, in Bakhmut, Wagner’s organization getting other people out of jails, but also, again, getting all those civilians out. We have seen a million or more people leave Russia, constant efforts to escape conscription. Some other people are, I think, crouching and hunting to avoid it in other ways. But it’s very transparent that Putin is going to continue to have this stealth draft that makes other people get carried away while this war continues. And, you know, I think that’s the dilemma we have when you say how long can this go on? And fortunately, we see limited resilience in the authoritarian, near-totalitarian states whose repressive apparatus we are going after in Russia now. They are very fragile, they are extremely vulnerable to shock. But because it’s all about control and negative production, you muster all your resources into one individual effort. You have a war economy, you have a war policy, you have propaganda. It’s all about the war now because Putin is rarely very interested in giving the Russians anything else at this point. So I think we want to make sure that we prevent him from getting as much help as possible. Whether it’s dual-use technology, you know, coming from those countries, I mean the hunt to prevent the Iranians from supplying more weapons and all the rumors that Iran is making plans to cast its spell in general. You know, North Korea, of course, we have to make sure that there is an engagement with China to make sure that China knows what is at stake for Europe and, you know, for themselves in this conflict. We want to make it clear that our own political spaces necessarily push Putin back. I mean, there’s that kind of resilience about the concept of Putin as some kind of strongman. ArrayArray you wrote it in your book, the icon of the strong man. You know, I mean, how many pictures or T-shirts have we seen of Putin in his aviator sunglasses? You know, the Joe Biden contrast also has the same types of aviator sunglasses, but it’s a very different version of that. I mean, Putin doesn’t show his chest anymore and, you know, he still rides a horse and stuff. ArrayArray
Gideon RachmanWhat’s wrong with you, do you think he’s sick?
Fiona Hill I think he’s getting old and might be sick. But we have to be very careful before speculating on that. Therefore, we must be aware that this may only be a possibility, but we must also focus on all scenarios and the probability that he is still with us for some time. But I think what we’re seeing is a lot of tension in the system. We see it coming from extremists in the military and the kind of those security bloggers who are around the Kremlin who are, you know, under Kremlin control, but infrequently they don’t actually push for a harder line on the wall. You can see it in the army itself, where there is a lot of resentment for not being consulted and for all the generals and so on who died on the front lines. There is a lot of fear there. And if we remember the Gorbachev period, of course, I mean, don’t forget about August 1991, when there was a coup against Gorbachev through extremists. It is entirely conceivable that something like this could also happen. The question is how many other people around you are experiencing this directly in terms of loss? We cannot tell precisely when tipping issues are.
Gideon Rachman You run the National Intelligence Council. So, based on your wisdom of this, and then what about the White House, how much do you think the other people who make these kinds of paintings would have an intelligent concept of what’s going on in internal Russia??
Fiona HillWell, you can see from the intelligence sharing, let’s say this was done with the public before the war, which gave a pretty clever concept of what was going to happen. But you can’t say what the triggers will be. it’s a little, for Putin, it’s also incredibly dangerous. It is the wild card of the formula. And then there are a lot of other wild cards, you know, that can come into play, because then there’s the question of your fitness. There is the physical state of a key number of other people around you. Putin is incredibly dependent on the loyalty of the formula and its protagonists.
Gideon Rachman So this drone attack on the Kremlin, if that’s what it was, doesn’t look like what it was. How bad would that be for them?
Fiona Hill, because it depends on whether it is a false flag.
Gideon RachmanDo you think this may be the case?
Fiona Hill I mean, there are a lot of other people who think it’s a false flag. They may just be teenagers. Check out what we discovered about this new leak of classified information. I played a joke on someone, he was a teenager.
Gideon Rachman is in the United States.
Fiona Hill And the United States, yes. I pranked a colleague, well, they may just be teenagers, you know, hacking into a database. And indeed, that was not far from the truth. I mean, I did it as a joke, not in a public chat, but in a personal chat with someone, because it looked kind of weird. And I said, what if it was like the Jackass equivalent of foreign espionage? It turned out to be just that. So, I mean, we still don’t know what it is, just like there are a lot of hypotheses about Nord Stream 2. I mean, first of all, I think Nord Stream 2 was the Russians, because, you know, when I think back on Beyond models, Putin emerges from a history of sabotage operations. He boasts that his own father in WWII was in a destruction squad, going to enemy lines in Estonia, destroying all kinds of infrastructure so the Nazis just wouldn’t use it. So my initial thought was, wow, you know, they destroyed this so that it would put pressure on Germany and Europe when there was all this kind of debate about going through the war or being able to accentuate this debate. Now I wonder a bit, were they other players from Ukraine, for example? There are all kinds of personal actors. There are all sorts of things that are completely possible. But in the case of this drone, the Russians clearly intend to use it. Peskov says it’s the United States and, you know, that’s actually very smart what Peskov also did, as he said, when we know that the United States provided, pointing to the data on what they received from that crazy Discord data release. which, as you know, suggests. So he’s trolling us at the same time, but that leaves Russia with an open justification to do something literally bad at some point, whether it’s in retaliation against the US in some way or in retaliation against Ukraine. I think what we want to do is stick to all of this a lot just to get a full assessment and get a sense of the context of things.
Gideon RachmanI mean, there are so many contingents, you know, what’s going to happen on the offensive, what’s going to happen in internal Russia?Is it worth talking about imagining what our long-term relations with Russia would be like after The War?Or is it rarely something worth contemplating right now?Because we’re right in the middle.
Fiona HillNo, because we don’t know what this Russia will look like, you know. So you have to pay attention to that. But I think we take a look at Russia’s future. First of all, if we take a look at Russian history, we see all kinds of results. We see one repressive government succeeding another, but we also see reforms as a result of an era of repression. We can go back to the Crimean War of the 1850s, when Nicholas I was completely hit while trying to exert Russian force in the Black Sea, without expecting that there would be an (inaudible) European reaction: the French, the British and the Ottomans joined forces in a totally unforeseen way and of course, giving Britain the Battle of Balaclava, the rhythm of the Gentile brigade.
Gideon Rachman, Florence Nightingale.
Fiona HillFlorence Nightingale, the service (inaudible), thank you very much, in public health, you know, but she also led Russia, regardless, into a reformist era with the emancipation of serfs. So I mean there are, you know, kind of analogies where you see why reformist eras necessarily adhere to this kind of debacle in the army or on the security front. Again, you can also see, you know, more repression emerging from things. So I think we have to prepare for a madness. race. We can end up with, you know, a series of weak governments coming, you know, we can decide in many other contexts where you have an immediate kind of replacement of leadership.
Gideon Rachman, therefore, it is not yet known whether the European security order, in the long run, will have to be built opposite to Russia as it is now, or whether there can only be one position for Russia in some kind of friendly conception of the nation.
Fiona Hill, but possibly there would also be a position for the Russians at this time. We have a massive diaspora of Russians. Not all are businessmen (inaudible) and others who have acquired dual citizenship. How do you fit with the Russians in the positions where we have them in Europe?Now we have done that. I mean, the classic example is that it was the German high command that helped facilitate Lenin’s return to Russia in the midst of some kind of revolution. I don’t think we should do that again. It didn’t go well for anyone.
Gideon Rachman does not.
Fiona Hill But I think, you know, what we have to do is start thinking about how we can work with technocrats, Russian students, other generations. These are other people who are not part of the elegance of the oligarchs close to the Kremlin. You start to think of Russia in a weird way where it’s kind of a busy state with, you know, all kinds of other people in exile in other places. So I think we have to look over there and think that, you know, this war is now in its year of timing. But many other people are afraid. They are suppressed. We have to realize that a lot of other people are just looking into the system now, when other people like Vladimir Kara-Murza get 25 years for making political comments, Ilya Yashin, you know, heavy criminal sentences, other people like Alexei Navalny to the max. lifetime. It’s weird to me the way they make bigger terms, you can see how complicated it is for even the bravest user to intervene. So I think we have to have a little bit of empathy here. I mean, how many other people, you know, listening to this podcast or any of us would stand up under those circumstances? And it’s extremely difficult to believe that you’re doing that. And if you don’t get collective action and collective rejection, and we’ve seen them fizzle out and fizzle out very quickly because of the repressive apparatus of the state, that makes it very complicated. ArrayArray, let’s not write off all Russians. Let’s think creatively about how we can involve, you know, universities in your other network paintings, city governments, thinking about, you know, can you succeed in other people from particular regions and cities? How do we think beyond the old paradigms of central government or government versus opposition? And then I think about the other equipment of other people that we can paint with. The most important thing, of course, is to work with the Ukrainians, and that shouldn’t be a proposition for any of you because I think you are helping Ukraine in the long run if you have goodwill among the Russian teams in the future, as well as the willingness to admit on the part of many Russians what the country has done.
Gideon Rachman And it turns out to be almost Array. . . well, among Americans it is accepted that, in general, China is the biggest challenge and Russia is the challenge now. But China is the big challenge. Now, are we getting a little ahead of ourselves because it is Russia that is launched. . .
Fiona HillI don’t agree with this and I am concerned that the more we communicate about China, the more difficult it is to solve this challenge, because we want the broad help of the foreign community, the United Nations General AssemblyArray And we have many resolutions, we still want assistance and help for this because this war has global ramifications. I mean, yes, every single war does, and it’s horrible what’s happening in Sudan right now and what’s happening in Yemen and Syria. We deserve to be doing more on all of those fronts. So maybe we can start this clash by setting a long-term precedent for how, as a larger community, we’re going to deal with it, because it’s a domino effect of food and the food and fertilizer cycle; It is militarization. I think bioweapons will spread now, you know, when we try to get away from land mines. It’s a ripple effect in energy trading patterns. It’s like another major disruption in the most sensitive of everything that’s happened with Covid and everything. But the United States is also pushing this paradigm of this idea, that in the long term it won’t just be a confrontation between the United States and China. The rest of the world doesn’t want to be a part of it. And the more we communicate about it, the more countries start to think, well, wait a second, Ukraine is a proxy war between the United States and China, not even between the United States and Russia. And that then discourages China and other countries from worrying about finding a diplomatic solution to this challenge. And I think there’s a lot to be done here to get out of that paradigm that is kind of a component of a bigger fight between the United States and China. The challenge in the United States is trying to sustain aid in a highly polarized domestic environment. So it’s very complicated because Ukraine has become a kind of national challenge. So what we have to say very obviously is that Ukraine is very vital to this post-war United Nations total charter. This also deserves to be significant for other countries. But now we’re starting to see, well, China is watching because it’s a way to bring in the Republican Party or certain factions of the Republican Party and some of the political stalwarts. ArrayArray
Gideon RachmanA his (inaudible) in Ukraine.
Fiona HillArray. . . In Ukraine, exactly, it is counterproductive. So many countries, leaders and elites say, well, hang in there. . .
Gideon RachmanAll about American power.
Fiona Hill. ArrayArray while everything revolves around China, everything revolves around American power. And then it also backfires when others say, well, we’ve got to get rid of all this Russian stuff and move on to China. And, of course, Russia is adjusting more and more to dependency on China. People are constantly saying, is this a way to play this? Well, Russia has nowhere to go unless it’s China. I mean, China is not rushing to Russia. But the point of view of China is, you know, enemy of my enemy, is that grace is very useful here. So they have more incentive to keep going and they don’t need Russia to lose because there are a lot of countries in the world and it’s not just the ones that we might think of that see Russia as a canopy on armaments like India because they’re worried about China. It’s such a confusing set of things up here. They’re worried about China in the Himalayas, but there are countries like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, probably to some degree as well, who are worried about a complete implosion of Russia, what that means for their economies. and they’re really stuck with just China.
Gideon Rachman OK. Well, last question. You have been very involved recently not only with classic foreign policy issues, but also with the internal resilience of our own societies. And he fell out with his former boss, Donald Trump. How concerned are you about the domestic political scene in the United States?
Fiona Hill Yeah, well, I’ve never really been with him, you know, to begin with, but I think the challenge we had with Trump is that he’s the classic populist politician. The fact that he promises huge benefits to the other people who will vote for him and that he doesn’t actually keep his promises. But when it comes to part of the core of his electorate, when you think about how he got elected in the Electoral College with 70, 80,000 other people in 3 states and the Midwest; Pennsylvania, Michigan and also Wisconsin, but I mean there was also a lot of electorate in Ohio and other states in the Electoral College. Much of this was based on grievances resulting from regional inequality. These are the states that have been left in the great adjustments of the industry. Essentially, you can see that it continues to fuel the same grievance trend. Now, there’s the identity politics facet of this, but it really stems from this feeling that other people aren’t fully investing in the bigger formula and getting benefits from it. Everything is changing. You know, they lost their socioeconomic positions, their identity, and it’s connected to that; cultural adjustments as demographics change. Trump has a lot of things that he essentially can access. He’s consistently beaten him since the start of his first few seasons, you know, since 2015 and beyond. And I’m very worried about that. I mean, it’s incredibly dangerous. You know, we’ve all noticed this script before, and here’s Putin doing it in Russia. I mean, the reason we’re here today is because Putin came out of 1990s Russia to try to reshape the economy, which was just a surprise deal (inaudible) and a lot of other people unemployed, a lot of other people wasting his identity. the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are grievances that all arise. Putin plays with them, vowing to make Russia great again. And now we have a full-blown authoritarian state stalking its neighbors. I’m not sure the United States (inaudible) is hanging around the neighbors like it’s more of an isolationist kind of country, you know, contrarian country.
Gideon RachmanHimself (inaudibleArrayArrayArray
Fiona HillWell, the country itself may implode under those pressures, especially for a minority government, as it’s hard to believe Trump won the popular vote. He didn’t, yes. But Putin wins the popular vote because there are no parties, no checks and balances in the system. But that’s what Trump needs to have. All of that he does about the presidency, and everything revolves around the strength of the presidency, the strength of the individual, not of the executive, but also of him. It promises to be the punishment of the people, their revenge, their champion.
Gideon Rachman His language has . . .
Fiona Hill, her language has become more extreme. It looks a lot like Putin’s language. This is a guy who took a hit. It didn’t work, but it was still a blow. And he has a congressional policy on him in this area. That’s all we’ve seen, you know, directly from history and how autocrats and authoritarian leaders emerge. This is where États-Unis. Et arise again, this is similar to the underlying inequalities and grievances.
Now, the Biden administration, Biden himself and some of the other people around him, have definitely identified all of that and the total Build Back Better package and the total series of diverse laws, adding the Inflation Reduction Act, aims to address regional inequality. . And that’s where I start to worry more broadly, linking this to Russia and Ukraine. The European Union and Germany and some other countries individually, adding the United Kingdom, have stabilized, rediscovered regional politics, detecting that those regional inequalities lead to political polarization and outcomes that nobody likes. But if it doesn’t stick, you have neither the political direction nor the political bandwidth nor the resources to do it. Then you know you’re not going to succeed. And we have a lot of attention and resources diverted to the war in Ukraine. At the end of the day, our democratic systems will have to deliver on their promises.
And there have been vote after vote through a variety of think tanks and governments showing that when you ask other people about democracy, yes, private and individual freedoms and assembly rights are important, but in the third most sensible genre are prosperity and the economic scenario advanced. And in some countries, other people say very blatantly that I would have less democracy, but defined, if my private scenario advanced further. And that’s where Trump, Putin and others come in. Now Putin has just absolutely damaged that in Russia. You know, I will send you to the front, and you can die in Bakhmut or anywhere else. And Trump never came.
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Gideon Rachman was Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution talking to me in Berlin. Thanks for listening. And please register for me next week.
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