Why Is Putin Escalating the War in Ukraine?

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

I’m Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and this is “The Foreign Affairs Interview.”

Fiona Hill

He really has to look like he’s got some success—some major success—for all of this mayhem and carnage and horror that he has inflicted on Ukraine, and also then the huge setbacks that he has inflicted on Russia as a result of his decision to invade.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

Fiona Hill became a household name during the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. She had served as the Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Council, and warned that politically driven falsehoods were advancing Russian interests. 

Long before that moment, she had spent as much time as anyone in the West thinking about Vladimir Putin and what drives him. Her most recent essay in Foreign Affairs, titled “The World Putin Wants,” co-authored with Angela Stent, explores exactly that question. Now, the Russian military is losing ground in Ukraine, and Putin is increasingly boxed in. Fiona can help us understand what might be going on inside the Kremlin—and what Putin might do next.

Fiona Hill, thanks so much for joining us. 

Fiona Hill

Thanks, Dan. Great to be with you.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

I want to start with some of what’s happening in Ukraine today and some of what Putin’s announced. We’re recording this on Tuesday, and some of this may change by the time listeners are hearing this. But, you know, you’ve been watching Putin and studying his moves as closely and longer than almost anyone else in the U.S. foreign policy community. And you wrote in your recent Foreign Affairs piece that Putin constantly adapts his tactics, both to mitigate Western responses and in response to changes in the state of play on the battlefield.

What we’ve seen today are announcements about potential annexation of territory both in eastern Ukraine and southern Ukraine. We’ve seen some moves to reinforce mobilization on the Russian side. What do you make of these moves, and what do you think it suggests about Putin’s motives right now?

Fiona Hill

Well, I think it’s just as you said Dan, as you laid it out in the question—that this is classic Vladimir Putin adaptation to realities on the ground. So now what we’re seeing in real time, as we’re speaking, is a scramble. Because not only have the Ukrainians rolled back Russia in the Donbas region and around Kharkiv and are kind of pressing forward, but they’ve also made some inroads simultaneously in the region of Kherson. And, of course, we’ve had the International Atomic Energy Agency visiting Zaporizhzhia and calling for some kind of international effort to stabilize that nuclear plant—and the Russians are now firing on yet another Ukrainian nuclear plant in the region, upping the ante there. But Kherson becomes extraordinarily sensitive because the Russian government, Putin himself, the people around him, have made it very clear that they see Kherson now as part of that Russian territory that they can’t afford to let go. And, of course, it’s still Ukrainian territory.

And the announcement that we’ve just heard as we’re speaking now of the prospect of referenda right now in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—and there may be more in the next couple of days by the time that listeners are listening to this—shows that Putin is just trying to change the whole prospect on the battlefield. He’s already going to announce very quickly that these are part of Russia. 

This was, of course, the strategy that was undertaken in Crimea, but with a longer lead time. You had the announcement of referenda, you actually had some semblance of a referendum taking place there that nobody of course recognized, and then you had the larger announcements of annexation. 

But Putin is obviously accelerating all of this because he’s adapting an approach that he did before to what he sees as the exigencies of the situation. In fact, he doesn’t control the battlefield as he did previously. And this is probably tied into his whole attempt to do some form of stealth mobilization. Everyone anticipated that he would actually declare this special military operation to be a war, and in fact, a number of right-wing, hard-line bloggers and television personalities in Russia have been actually doing this over the last week or so since it became evident that Ukraine was gaining more of the upper hand in certain parts of this occupied territory, and calling for mobilization, but it’s very clear that Putin really can’t do this. But, if he accelerates the annexation of territory making that part of Russia, he can probably then as a result call up more people in defense of what is now Russian territory.

So he’s trying to deal with a situation by adapting all of the tried-and-true methods that he’s used for years here and in Ukraine and elsewhere to try to accelerate everything so that he can try to respond to the setbacks on the battlefield. Of course, we should have anticipated that; it’s really kind of now an escalation of these kinds of political interventions.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

This is not about him consolidating gains and kind of stepping back. This is an opportunity for him to escalate further and try to shift the dynamic in a way that he doesn’t have other options for doing at this point.

Fiona Hill

Yeah, I mean he’ll basically be saying now that he’s defending Russian territory, this is something different. He’s going to have to mobilize people in defense of that territory—just like, you know, Crimea has been absorbed into the Russian Federation by every means possible since 2014. I mean again, we do not recognize this, but this is just doing this from his perspective. And then he can use that as a platform, you know, for further projection.

And the dynamic is also changing domestically for Putin in terms of public and political opinion. I mean again, these hard-line bloggers and commentators coming out and calling for a foreign war seem to criticize him. I think that that’s actually all orchestrated, or certainly permitted, because he’s testing the waters to see whether, in fact, there is support for mobilization. But you know there’s getting all kinds of mixed messaging coming out of the Russian domestic polity right now. We just had a pretty outspoken pronouncement by Alla Pugacheva—one of the most famous of Russian popular singers from the 1980s all the way through today—who appeals to the same kind of constituency and generation of people that Putin himself relies on for at least some passive support for the war. Her husband, Maxim Galkin, was singled out for being outspoken against the war. He’s been designated as a foreign agent. She’s now saying that she should be a foreign agent as well. Although she carefully chose her words, it’s clearly now indicative of the fact that many people are dissatisfied with this. So Putin is increasingly starting to find his room for maneuver at home on the domestic front constrained and then having to be more innovative in his adaptations on the battlefield as a result.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

There’s been lots of speculation about how much Vladimir Putin knows he’s very isolated. It’s not clear what kind of information is going to him whether his commanders and officials around him are able to give him bad news. What is your assessment of how much he knows about how this war has been going and how that might inform his decision making?

Fiona Hill

Look, I think we should recognize that he probably knows quite a lot. But also we and the Ukrainians also have a lot of limitations about the actual battlefield. You know we always use the expression “the fog of war.” It’s very difficult to get a lot of detailed information. I mean we’re obviously, on the U.S. side, picking up a lot from all sources. Putin will be as well. But again, it’s really how he interprets that information that’s key. Remember, he is an intel operative. He tends to be somebody who probably wants less analysis and more of the raw information himself to process. I think he’s well aware of some of the domestic issues again, which is why we’re seeing this creativity in the way that he’s approaching things right now. He knows of the domestic constraints.

But of course, he made, right from the very beginning, a huge strategic blunder because he relied on—again—the information he had about the top of Ukrainian politics. It’s pretty clear that, as has already been, I think, well publicized, that Putin made this decision to invade Ukraine on the understanding—his assumption and his assessment—that Zelensky would flee and that the whole Ukrainian government would crumble, both at the central and then the local and regional levels, and that he had bought off enough corrupt oligarchs or corrupt politicians to basically transform the Ukrainian government into some kind of puppet government. Well of course, that didn’t work out because he hadn’t factored in the Ukrainian people and their response to things, and I think that what we’re really seeing here is a classic case of people not really having sufficient of the kind of information that they need to make an assessment.

Putin always believes that you can tweak something at the top. And so, in response to what’s happening on the domestic level, he’ll tread very carefully with people like Alla Pugacheva and others—but other opposition people, put them right out of contention—and he’s still looking for ways on the ground in Ukraine of turning this to his advantage. And there’s all kinds of different ways that he can do this. It’s also not just a question of how he commits himself to the battlefield in Ukraine—or to basically declaring territory Russia’s and therefore off limits and then heightens the intensity of the conflict with Ukraine and therefore with the West—but how he can exploit other tensions that are emerging. And, you know, there are a lot of them, aren’t there? I mean, there’s the response in Europe to the prospect of an extraordinarily cold winter, which may or may not happen meteorologically, but in terms of the energy cutoffs there’s all the responses to everything that they’re doing with the Ukrainian electrical grid shelling infrastructure. 

There are all kinds of different ways here that Putin is going to be testing out to see if he can gain or regain some of the advantage. And so part of it is based on his assessment of information, but part of it is just him relying on things that he’s done before and the tools that he has at his disposal. So I think we should be very careful of assuming that because he doesn’t have different kinds of information, or perhaps he’s not always listening to people that he should, that he won’t find some method that might be quite effective of changing the tides in his favor.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

So your sense is that in the Western debate at this point there’s, in some ways, an underestimation of Putin, the tools available to him, his savvy, his understanding that we should be a little bit warier than some people are about his prospects.

Fiona Hill

Well, I think we should just be more cautious across the board because, look, we’ve gone from thinking of the man as infallible and capable of all kinds of genius acts to now thinking “my God, look, he completely messed up, and so he’s going to continue to do so”—you know, the beginning of the end. Well, Putin, again as an operative, somebody who is a contingency planner, will, as I said, be looking for other ways in which he may be able to have an impact. And before he launched the war, he saw the situation as pretty propitious in Europe as well as in Ukraine because of all the stresses and strains that he had identified, and those are all still there. So he’s going to be looking for ways in which to exploit them. So the point of saying all of this is that we should continue to be vigilant and attentive and not rule the guy out. He’ll be looking now as to what chits can he apply here, what favors can he call in, what other pressure that he can apply.

Now, it’s not to say that he’ll succeed, that’s also worth bearing in mind, but we have to really take a 360 degree look here at everything that Putin has at his disposal. It’s not just energy. We see with grain that he’s now trying to change the terms of the agreement that was made with the United Nations and Turkey on grain exports from Ukraine for example, so there’s all kinds of things that we have to be attentive to here.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

When you talk about tools that Putin has to change the dynamic on the battlefield, I think most people’s minds go straight to nuclear or chemical weapons. Do you worry about him escalating through use of a tactical nuke or, you know, some kind of other WMD? What scares you on that front, and do you share the fear that he grows more dangerous as things go worse for him on the battlefield?

Fiona Hill

Well, first of all I don’t think we should be scared about this and filled with fear at the prospect. We had to deal with this throughout the whole Soviet period because the Soviet Union had the use of tactical military weapons and nuclear weapons within their military doctrine. So we’ve already been there. And there are different dimensions of this. Putin obviously could do something for demonstration effect. 

There’s been discussion already about what he might do, and you can be sure that the U.S. government—and others—are pressing the point about being very careful about what he does here behind the scenes. Because I mean, we had a doctrine about this as well during the Soviet period, and we’ve also been discussing our own nuclear posture, and we still have contacts behind the scenes. 

And Russia is not the only country in the world with tactical nuclear weapons. It’s also China, you know, we’ve seen recently President Xi expressing some concerns—President Modi of India, that may be one of the motivations for him speaking out quite publicly in the last week at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization about this being a time for peace, not war, for example. So remember, there are other nuclear powers and nuclear players here who are paying close attention as well. Not just the United States or our European and NATO allies.

So again, I mean, there’s a possibility of a demonstration, of the explosion of a tactical nuclear weapon, but he would have crossed a pretty serious threshold where others would react as well. There is also the possibility of making some sort of demonstration effect with nuclear submarines coming close to the territory of a NATO member, like the Kola Peninsula in Norway, for example. The test of a nuclear weapon in Novaya Zemlya, the testing site up in the Arctic—again, you know, not too far away from Norway, which would be of great concern. Not just to us, but to other of our European and NATO allies as well. 

And then we’ve got to think about the fact that he’s already rhetorically deployed nuclear weapons, by the fact that he’s done all this saber rattling, and then he’s also targeting civilian nuclear power to give everyone the full spectrum of concerns about nuclear fissile material. That’s playing obviously into the energy debates in Europe as well, but he’s already seeing what he can do to manipulate this. And so I think the important part is for us to keep continuing to push back. You know, for the United States to make it very clear that this is impermissible, and for other countries to do that as well. 

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

There’s a lot I want to pursue there, but let’s start with the Russia-China relationship. I think we’ve all kind of watched with fascination, trying to understand what exactly is going on between Xi Jinping and Putin and what, you know, these kinds of statements and press conferences on the sidelines and meetings actually mean. What is your sense of that relationship and the extent to which Xi is willing to kind of continue supporting Putin here or restrain him? Is there any kind of opportunity for American diplomacy here that would put some check on Putin’s actions?

Fiona Hill

Well there’s always an opportunity for diplomacy if we do it carefully and focus on issues where—you know, the Chinese have mutual interests, and nuclear issues are one of those as well as food security, because we have to remember that China itself has difficulties with its own agricultural production. And then also the downturn in their own economic growth because of their zero-COVID policy and all the other disruptions that, you know, others have experienced. So things are not actually perfect for China either, and if we are careful in the way that we interact with them there may be room to keep encouraging China to exert some, let’s just say, restraining pressure on Russia on issues like this; for example, on contemplating the use of a tactical nuclear weapon or something else in that sphere. 

But I think in terms of the Chinese reaction, we also have to be somewhat cautious about—I doubt greatly that Xi and the Chinese establishment are really completely changing their minds about Russia. It’s obviously very useful for them to have Russia as a partner. I don’t think the partnership is limitless, as they announced it was in February before the invasion, but it’s certainly extremely useful for China. And Xi, having thrown in his lot with Putin, can’t really afford for Putin to fail. Especially not before the Party Congress where that would also dent Xi’s own reputation if he looks like he was backing a losing horse and hadn’t probably factored in all the things that might go wrong in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like Putin, he obviously thought this was going to be over very quickly and that then we’d be dealing with a much different dynamic that would be more proficuous for China, not just for Russia here—and of course, that hasn’t happened. But I do still think, nonetheless, that it was significant, that China was very restrained and somewhat more chilly in the responses than they had been before at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

Keeping in mind your caution that we shouldn’t kind of overcorrect our image of Putin being ten feet tall to make him two feet tall, what is your sense of the kind of state of his power within Russia? Is there meaningful opposition? Is there, you know, any chance that he would lose power in the near term? If, say, there were a kind of resounding military defeat in Ukraine, would that threaten his hold on power, or is it just too hard to say anything from the outside?

Fiona Hill

No, I do think that this is certainly diminishing his power. It diminishes his luster or the strongman image, and that in itself is significant. Putin in 2024 has to be reaffirmed as the president of Russia and much of his allure and his grip internally has been based on the fact that he was the most popular political figure. Now, of course, that’s because he’s eclipsed anybody who could potentially emerge of the opposition—Alexei Navalny being a case in point sitting in a penal colony—but it’s also because there was some genuine support for Putin, active support. And now it seems much more passive because Putin basically made a bargain with the vast majority of people in Russia that, you know, they could have a great life—particularly in places like Moscow and St Petersburg and the kind of big cities—but that would come at not paying too much attention to what else was going on behind the scenes. But that’s also very problematic, because not paying too much attention to what’s going on behind the scenes and not being involved and trying to be kind of politically neutral, it means it’s very difficult to mobilize people as well. 

So the apathy—at least that’s what it looks like on the surface—or the passivity, or the active avoidance, which might be more true of what’s happening in Ukraine, becomes a bit of a nightmare if he has to try to push people into action. There’s a whole generation of people who’ve grown up outside of the Soviet system, who have all kinds of expectations of having a good life. You know, we’ve seen all of the pictures of life going on as usual in Moscow—very different from if you’re right there on the border in Belgorod or in Crimea. For example, where previously people were on vacation, now they’re really worried about the ongoing effects of the war.

But I think you know a lot of those generation of people—Alla Pugacheva, I mentioned before, is from a different generation, the Soviet generation—you know, who remember the standoff with the West. But anybody who’s in their forties and onwards, the forties and below or even early fifties and below, doesn’t remember that. And in fact, over the last 22 years, their whole outlook has been shaped by the fact that they were living a good life, maybe their best lives. They had all this opportunity to travel, and they weren’t really being asked to do anything very much.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

And at some point does that become a threat to his power, his ability to stay in power? Is there any real mechanism for unseating him?

Fiona Hill

It does become a threat to his power, but that’s the problem, is the mechanism, right? We look at that in other contexts—in the United Kingdom for example, which has been whipping through prime ministers, you know, because of lack of confidence in the prime minister and because of the party system—there isn’t really a mechanism for that in Russia. Putin isn’t part of a party. Highly unlikely that there would be any kind of equivalent of impeachment in the Russian Duma because it’s all been turned into sort of a rubber stamp, but there is the fact of the election in 2024. Now if it isn’t a full on war, how would he justify not holding an election? I mean, we could imagine in Ukraine, which also has an election in 2024, that in a series of wartime, in a crisis, that they wouldn’t hold one, and they would agree to do one as soon as basically hostilities have ceased. But how does Putin explain, you know, all of this in that context? So the mechanism might come in the form of the presidential election.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

Is there any prospect of a coup, or some group of people around Putin taking action?

Fiona Hill

Well, we’ve seen that before; obviously Mikhail Gorbachev, Nikita Khrushchev—both, you know, reformers who were seen to be sticking their necks out and were effectively removed as the result of coups. So it is plausible that there could be some group of elites who try to move Putin onto some kind of different path and then run up to the 2024 election if things are seen to have gone really badly for him. 

Of course, that’s one of the things that he’s trying to head off because it’s hard to imagine Putin doing what Nikita Krushchev did, which is retiring to a dacha; or with Gorbachev setting his own foundation doing ads for Pizza Hut or Louis Vuitton, all the different things that you know Gorbachev did at one point. I mean, that’s just not really in Putin’s MO. We’ve seen that he built himself a lavish palace potentially for purposes of retirement down on the Black Sea, thanks to Alexei Navalny’s exposé, but it was always very hard to envisage him doing this.

So all of this basically underscores that we’re in a really difficult and really very dangerous, very volatile, and very uncertain period here, and we’re just going to have to watch it all very carefully, because there are all kinds of different pathways that this could take.

But again, you know, back to all of your whole set of questions here, that means that he really has to look like he’s got some success—some major success—for all of this mayhem and carnage and horror that he has inflicted on Ukraine, and also then the huge setback that he has inflicted on Russia, as a result of his decision to invade.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

We’ll be back after a short break.

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Dan Kurtz-Phelan

I want to talk a bit about American policy options here, but I want to start by looking back a bit. You’ve been really centrally involved in U.S. policy toward Russia over the past couple of decades. You were the National Intelligence Officer for Russia when George W. Bush took steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. You were Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, as listeners surely know. What, as you reflect over this couple of decades of history— now, really five presidents have been struggling to figure out what to do with Putin in power in Russia—what should we have done differently? What could we have done differently to avert the outcome, to avert the situation we’re in now? Is there anything you would change as you go back?

Fiona Hill

I mean, there’s lots of junctions along the way that I think, you know, we messed up. But I think part of the problem that we’ve had—it’s actually rooted in one of the issues that is actually at the heart of the success of America’s democracy: you know, that we have not just changes of government, but we bring in new people to freshen up our perspectives and to have a different direction in our policy. But at the same time that becomes a huge source of weakness because we’ve just been reflecting on the fact that Vladimir Putin has been in place for twenty-two years now. I mean, for people like me and others who’ve been watching him all the time, a lot of what he’s doing isn’t all that surprising. But we have not configured ourselves as a polity and within our institutions to track that consistently the whole time. 

And sometimes some of our smaller allies, with their so-called boutique intelligence and other political structures, have been much more effective at this. You know, the Estonians never lost track of this. The Poles didn’t. The Swedes and the Finns didn’t—hence why Sweden and Finland are now, you know, joining NATO. The Norwegians have been, you know, all on this all of the time. And although our intelligence communities have actually done a pretty good job, especially in the run-up to the invasion, of being able to kind of predict what Putin was going to do and to be able to actually say right that he was going to invade, we’ve also pulled away a lot of that expertise and deflected them or reassigned them to other areas. 

So I think that, you know, one of the things that would have been very valuable to us was, as we had in the Soviet period, we had a lot of continuity in terms of the attention that was paid to Russia and what was going on there. Now, one would argue that “Okay, well we had all of that back in the Soviet period, and people didn’t see the Soviet Union about to collapse,” because obviously you can’t always predict the actual moment and the method and the means in which, you know, something will be pulled apart. But when I was at the National Intelligence—because I went back on all the reports and the briefings that were produced by the intelligence community in that period—they had actually quite accurately understood and analyzed and reported on the brittle nature of the system and all of the problems that might lead it to fall apart. It’s just that they hadn’t actually understood that Boris Yeltsin would end up being the person who pulled the Soviet Union apart after the sequence of events, because that’s always kind of more difficult, obviously, to get a handle on. 

But I do think that if we’d had more of a consistent and continued focus and been able to keep some of the people in place throughout all of the successive changes in administration, and really set up mechanisms where they were paid more attention to and weren’t politicizing everything—you know, we might have been able to head things off. I mean, part of it is the politicization of our foreign policy as well over successive administrations.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

When you look at more recent history—had we had the expertise and had the right understanding of Putin, his motives—were there things we should have done differently post 2014 to better deter Putin from this most recent invasion?

Fiona Hill

I think, you know, part of the problem that we have is that as Americans—but like in other settings—we don’t look at things through a historic lens. You know, we tend to look at it through ideology, clashes of systems. You know, there was a belief that as soon as you had the collapse of the Soviet Union—the demise of the Communist Party, the disappearance of the socialist system—that you would have a complete transformation of Russia and all the other constituent republics. There was a complete lack of understanding of the history of all of this and the fact that there was a lot of continuity in terms of institutions, cultural perspectives, political outlooks between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and then that framed a lot of the thinking in the present as well—or at least in the immediate Cold War aftermath. And someone like Putin comes in not with an ideological basis, but this historical perspective—that this is really a problem of dealing with the transformation or the inability to transform an old empire. It’s the kind of thing that we’ve seen Britain grappling with, its role internationally. We’re going to see it even more so with the death of Queen Elizabeth II and that whole debate about what is Britain and what is its future there.

The United States, we always fail to see that we are an empire as well. We acquired all kinds of territory, and a lot of the tensions, you know, that emerge in the United States’ politics come from the nature of the system that’s been built up over hundreds of years and kind of a lot of continuity of, you know, thinking and perspectives and political institutions that have not been reformed over a long period of time. And that also shapes our outlook on the world. So I think that, you know, when you get to that—even before 2014 and the annexation of Crimea and the whole perspective that Putin then developed against Ukraine—was trying to understand where that came from.

It’s in that context that, of course, NATO was seen as an affront by Putin and many others around him. Just any institution that Ukraine wanted to join that took it further away from Russia would have been a problem, the European Union, any kind of other association. If Ukraine had joined some entity based on the G20—you know, for example, or some of the larger configuration of countries—that also would have been problematic. The view was that Ukraine was an intrinsic part of Russia, Russia’s patrimony, in the same way that China thinks of Taiwan, for example, and I think we just didn’t fully understand that. And that would have then, I think, made it incumbent on us to be thinking much longer and harder about what the effects would be or the reverberations from certain decisions.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

Given this understanding of what drives Putin, is there more that Washington, that the Biden administration, can be doing to better support Ukraine or deter Putin?

Fiona Hill

Well, I think that, you know, many of the things that we’re doing now we’ve got to continue to do, and we also have to work very closely with our European allies to try to make sure that we maintain this unified front. But I think that another thing that we’re going to have to do is start to think about what is it that we do with Russia over the longer term, because in the short to medium term obviously we’ve got to make sure that Putin cannot consolidate his group in Ukraine and doesn’t succeed in wiping Ukraine off the map and all the other things that he set out to do there. But over the longer term we’re going to think about, how do we engage with Russia moving forward? I mean, we’re not right there right now, but we need to be thinking about it. 

There are all these hundreds of thousands of Russians who’ve left, who don’t want to be part of this—who’ve left in protest, left because they’re being persecuted, who want to be part of a different Russia. There are Russians inside who are not the enablers of the war, who might be passive in their response to it because they’re fearful or they just, you know, feel that they can’t really do anything—that so many people feel that this is beyond their control. They can’t do anything to stop it. They haven’t committed war crimes—there’s all of the enablers in that passive sense, but that, you know, over time might want to take things in a different direction. There are definitely elites around Russia, including in the Russian military, who would like this to end. And so how can we engage with them?

And then thinking about how we move forward, I think the bigger problem, and the biggest problem that we’re going to have, is how Russia comes to terms with what it’s done. We know that in the history of these kinds of horrid episodes—I mean, tragedies and disasters or other European history—Germany had a real challenge on its hands to come to terms with what it had done in World War II. It didn’t really do much about World War I; still, actually, World War I isn’t a major discussion point in Germany, but World War II obviously is. And in Japan, you know, they’ve also been grappling with coming to terms with all the atrocities that they committed not just in World War II, but during the occupations of China and South Korea, for example. So how do we work on that as well? Because the only way that we are going to be able to engage with Russia down the line is if there’s a reckoning for what has happened in Ukraine. So I think we have to start thinking about all of that. Ukraine living next door to an implacable enemy that has committed so many atrocities on its territory is going to leave Ukraine in a state of insecurity in the long term as well.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

I was in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago and was struck by just, you know, the amount of anger toward Putin, but also toward Russians and including many of the troops that had been involved in some of the atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere, and that made it hard to really have any discussion about what an end to this war might look like, what kind of, you know—whether there’s some compromise solution on the horizon. The kind of Ukrainian message is: we expect to get back to 1991 borders, which means, you know, Crimea being back in Ukrainian hands. Is there some end to this war that you can imagine Putin accepting, some compromise that you can envision? Or do you think we’re girding for a long conflict that will be with us for years to come?

Fiona Hill

Well, I think the knock-on effects of this war are going to be with us for years to come, no doubt about it. This is causing all kinds of recalibrations and reconfigurations globally, not just regionally within Europe, and that level of hatred—understandable on the part of Ukrainians—is going to be very hard to address. This is a huge shock. This is like a horrible blow to larger familial relations in the sense that, you know, eleven million people within Russia had heritage in Ukraine. I mean Ukrainians themselves are designated as such in the Russian census.

And then, millions more with heritage in Ukraine—and vice versa inside of Ukraine with Russia. And then you’ve got Israel and, you know, other countries where you’ve got a large Russian-speaking émigré population, a lot of them—Germany as well—you know, coming from Ukraine and also Belarus and here in the United States—those rifts are going to ripple out in so many other different settings. This is going to be—have an impact on all kinds of other societies. So I think it will have to be also rooted in those people-to-people contacts and reconnecting again as well. So it’s not just an issue of reconstruction, reparations, it’s how does a society in Russia come to terms of what it’s done? And then how do, you know, the rest of us deal with that as well? And again, we do have experience of this in post-World War II period, and we have to think about it in the same way.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

I want to close by talking a bit about our own society. Much of your wonderful essay in Foreign Affairs last year—the title was “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory”—was about the way Putin exploits divisions and weaknesses in our own society. I think it’s been probably surprising to many people by the relatively committed response or bipartisan response to the war in Ukraine so far, but we will be in a presidential election season relatively soon. Donald Trump, who you also had the opportunity to observe in close proximity, is likely to be a factor in that campaign, whether he’s running or not. Do you see any signs that there might be a kind of weakening of support either driven by Trump or others? Do you kind of worry about our ability to stay in this for the long haul?

Fiona Hill

I do worry about this, and I think that this is the Achilles heel here. And Putin is banking on it, to be honest. He thinks that that’s exactly where his success will lie—in our inability to maintain collective action and to maintain unity inside countries like the United States or Italy or France and other places where he sees tensions—the United Kingdom, you know, could be an arena for all kinds of social upheaval very shortly, particularly if energy prices are increasing by 80 percent on October 1st, which is coming up pretty quickly. And then the aftermath of the death of the Queen and so many political changes, you know, for example. He feels that we will fall upon ourselves, and as a result not be able to stay on track. And so he’s banking on this. So, it’s incumbent upon us to address that fact and to be cognizant of it as we conduct our own politics. Again, any divisions that we have and the more exacerbated they are can be exploited by adversaries, be it Vladimir Putin or anyone else. 

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

That is a great note to end on. Fiona Hill, thank you so much for joining us.

Fiona Hill

Oh, thanks so much, Dan. Thank you for having me.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan

Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today’s show on ForeignAffairs.com. “The Foreign Affairs Interview” is produced by Kate Brannen, Julia Fleming-Dresser, and Markus Zakaria. Special thanks also to Grace Finlayson, Caitlin Joseph, Nora Revenaugh, Asher Ross, and Gabrielle Sierra. Our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every other Thursday. Thanks for listening.