YouSaid · the spoken record

Fiona Hill

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244

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2022-11-04

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2022-11-04

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1. “You convince yourself over time, yeah. Look, the longer You're in a position like Putin 22 years now, come up with 23 years. Could be out there for 36 years. You become more and more rigid. I mean, this is again, you know, something that you see in history. You know, you look at people through history moved from kind of being kind of left-wing in their perspectives to hard right. They kind of have a kind of a sort of an ossification or a rigidity emerges in their views. I mean, again, I used to have these arguments with Professor Pice about Lenin because he would talk about Lenin. But he didn't change his mind from being 18. Have you not thought about that? I mean, it's like, we're not formed, fully formed individuals at 18.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Mean, he does live in a certain box like we all do. And, you know, again, his world experience is not as extensive as, you know, you would hope it would be. But that's why you have to really pay attention. That's where we've messed up. That's where we haven't really paid a lot of attention to what he's been saying. He's been telegraphing this grievance dissatisfaction. I'm going to do something for years.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “When you watch those interviews and things with him, and I've been at many of these sessions, it's been hours of him parrying questions. And it's like watching a boxer sparring, you know, the kind of training bout. Yeah, come on, give me another one, you know, and it's kind of like, and he prides himself and he's made mistakes. Often, but the breadth of the issues that he's often covered has been interested, has been fascinating. I used to just take kind of really detailed notes about this because you learn a ton. But it's not about his worldview again.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I mean, when I watched many of Putin's speeches just in Russian, not looking at any of the subtitles or anything, and it's just watching the word that his body language is at the time when he's saying things, the way that you smoke, he'll sneer. He'll laugh, he'll add lib, you know, kind of from something that obviously kind of, you know, wasn't there on the prepared speech. And it's really critical. And, you know, kind of a lot, some people speak, you know, like Trump, it's just kind of just. Words. Putin, the words are very important. Trumpets, the atmosphere, it's kind of the way you feel about things. It's the buzz you get, you know, it's revving people up. It's the kind of slogans. And Putin is, you know, he's conveying a lot in what he's saying there.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Body language, the way that he sits back in the chair and slouches, the kind of the way that he makes fun of people and uses irony. It's just lost. And it needs to be conveyed.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “In the word that he speaks because a lot of menace sometimes for things deliberately, other times there's lots of humor and he's telling a joke for a particular reason. And a lot of it is, I mean, he actually uses the richness of the Russian language and the crudity of language that can't be conveyed in English.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “You just lose the nuance, you lose the feel, you know, you almost need kind of the interpretive actor doing the kind of the interpretation for that. You need to match it as much as you can in the way that you do voiceovers in film. The best way to talk to Putin is one-on-one in his own language. I mean, I have a really great friend here who is one of the best interpreters of Putin is often asked by the media to interpret for him, who does just, he was at the institute that I was. I mean, I know him from that kind of period. And he is just excellent, just like Pavel Plashenka was absolutely phenomenal at interpreting Gorbachev. Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately because Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes and sometimes was, you know, Gorbachev himself would joke that Pelashinko spoke better for Gorbachev than Gorbachev could himself. But Putin is actually quite precise and”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “And often it's, you know, the kind of the person who translates, it's different. You know, some of our best translators are women. But, you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's way of speaking. And a macho way of speaking and a crude way of speaking. Be that Putin, or I've seen that happen with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, and it gets translated by a much more refined, you know, female speaker. You've just lost the whole thing. And many of the translators on the Russian side are not competent in English in the way that you would hope they are. It's not just that they're not native speakers. They're just not trained to the same high standards they used to be in the past.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Often, you know, what translators do is they, you know, they take this little shorthand note like journalists do. And afterwards, you know, they've just been caught up in the moment and they haven't got the big picture. Consecutive translation is different. You know, kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood of big chunks of dialogue that have already been there. But, you know, sometimes you might not get that right either. And it breaks up the flow of the discussion.”

   2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Listening to the translation to the Russian and the translation, you know, in real time, and I haven't been able to translate this institute, it's really difficult. Look, an interpreter is a trend in the moment to do something, the synchroni, the synchronized or the real-time translation. So translation is an art as well as a skill. You're doing simultaneous translation, that's the word in English, and it's synchroni pirivod in Russian, you're kind of focused in the moment on the fragments of the discussion and trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can. And when you come out of that, you can't relay the entire conversation.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And I think, you know, if you were engaged with him in Russian, while you're actually literally speaking the same language, because there's so much lost in translation, I used to jump out my skin listening to some of the phone calls. Because, you know, the way that they kind of relayed. With an interpreter”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “So he asked people he trusts to do things because you know he knows they'll do them and he knows that they'll do them well which is why you know he has his old buddies from you know St. Petersburg because he's known for a very long time and he knows that they want to try to pull a fast one over him but he also knows their strengths and their weaknesses and what they can be trusted to do. I mean, he's learning that, you know, some of the people in the military that he thought were competent or people on other things are not, right? And he intends to actually have a lot of loyalty to people as well. Or he also kind of thinks it's best to keep them inside the tent and outside. And he moves them around. You know, he kind of, okay, you know, he gives them multiple chances to redeem themselves if they don't. It's not like he has them done in. I mean, yeah, there is a lot of that in the system. But the people that he's worked with for a long time, he moves them around to something else, perhaps where they can do less harm.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah, an open discussion. You know, actually, I said, you asked me before about that issue of trust, and he often says he only trusts himself. And I said, you know, he's often distrustful of people, but he does trust some people for certain things where he knows it's within their competence.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Kind of know, well, what about what you've done? Oh, no, you've done that about, you know, and there's always this whataboutism. I mean, it often say, well, you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that. The United States invaded Iraq. What's the difference between what I'm doing and all of the things that you've been doing here? I mean, what you would have to try to do is kind of elicit information about why or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time and why he thinks it.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Influence you inform and influence that's kind of part of the way that he always operates. So what you would have to be trying to think about, so what is it you would want to elicit information from him? You're trying to understand the guy's worldview. And what we're trying to also understand is if there's any room there where he might compromise on something. So, if your goal was to go in there, you know, to talk about Ukraine at this particular moment. I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen in the sort of the meetings we've had with Putin just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yeah, I remember what I said before that Putin always tries to reverse things. He wants to hear the questions that people have Because remember, he himself at different points has been a recruiter, which is, you know, the way that you're operating now as well, right? You're asking an awful lot of questions. Your questions also betray oftentimes where you're thinking about things, the kind of context. Kind of any kind of dialogue like this reveals a lot about the other person. And I've actually often noticed in these settings that Putin likes to have a lot of give and take. So I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation with you. But again, he would always be trying to”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “We've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense at something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessarily to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly or take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I think there is a lot of tension. I mean, I've seen it. I've seen it inside of the government now, you know, and people can push back. And that's why I speak out and I try to lay it out so that everybody can kind of figure out for themselves. I said the same to you as I say to everybody. This is how I see the situation. And this is how we can analyze it here. Now look, do I think that we've handled the whole Russia account fears? Well, no, we haven't. I mean, we've taken our eyes off the ball many times. We've failed to understand the way that people like Putin think. You know, you talked earlier about, you know, we need to have empathy for all the people who like Trump or like Biden and some other things. We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “For being more ruthless than you had before because they wanted to clamp down. In the United States, I mean, I can say whatever I want. It doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House. And even if I have been an advisor to this president, that president, and the other, doesn't mean I'm basically speaking on behalf of the US government. But there's kind of always an assumption from the Russians that, you know, when people, you know, say this and people do advocate one thing or over another, that it's operating, there's a lot of mirror imaging. Thinking that we're operating in the same kind of way. So yes, there are, of course, constituencies who think like that and would love it to be back to that. And there are many people out there with their own peace plans. All kinds of people out there.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Oh, there's always going to be people who like that part, that approach. Of course there is. But then they don't necessarily dominate. That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about. I mean, you know, Putin can, you know, read, you know, all the various articles and hear the kind of pronouncements of people. But, you know, this gets back to, you know, the way that the United States operates. Putin saw that, you know, Trump wanted to have a top-down vertical of power and other presidents have wanted to have that. But the United States is a pretty messy place. And we have all kinds of different viewpoints. Now, of course, we know that in Russia, everything, even criticism the Kremlin is usually fairly orchestrated, usually to kind of flush out, you know, what people think about things when we had these hardliners saying, you know, we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less, and that the army wasn't doing enough. It was in many respects kind of encouraged by the Kremlin to see how people reacted to that, you know, to kind of actually create a concept.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Has to be handled in a way that Ukraine has agency. Because if Ukraine doesn't have urgency, nobody else has agency either. Nobody else has any kind of decision-making power. And, you know, we have an environment in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players. There's the United States and Russia and China. And maybe occasionally there might be India and perhaps Brazil or some other South Africa or some other country like maybe the BRICS at some point. But, you know, ultimately, it's like the oldest, big powers resolve everything. And so this war is also about Russia's right and Putin's right, you know, to determine things, strong man to strong man, big country to big country, and determine where things happen next. That's why he's talking about things being provoked and it's being the United States' fault.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Which now means the United States and Russia just sit down and thrash everything out. And so, I mean, Putin, by saying, look, it was provoked. It's the United States, it's NATO. It's a proxy war or it's this or it's that or this is going to be a nuclear confrontation. It's like the Cuban missile crisis. It's the Euro missile crisis. It's basically just saying, you know, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union, the United States worked things out. I want to go back to the whole period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Rig and just kind of got together and figured things out, or even better, back to Yalta Potsdam and Tehran and the big meetings at the end of World War II where we resolved the whole future security. We've had a war, we've had the Cold War, now we've got another war, we've got a real war, hot war, we've got a war in Ukraine. It should be the United States and Russia that sought this out. So this is where we see the United States waffling about as well, trying to kind of like figure out how to handle this because”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “From Poland or Hungary or kind of France and Britain. Years and years and years, senior people like Putin and people around me in the Kremlin have demanded a return to the kind of what they call the old concept of Europe or the concert of Vienna where the big guys”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “You know, Germany and Turkey, and you know, other countries. And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden. They didn't have to join NATO. They didn't want to join NATO for a long time. They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel. And the other countries partner with NATO. But once they thought that their security was really at risk, they wanted to be part of it. And so, you know, kind of you're now really seeing that NATO is something other than just being, you know, a creature or an instrument of the United States. But that's how Putin always saw it. So, you know, what this debate about NATO is all about, or Russia being provoked, is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower bipolar relationship where everything is negotiated with the United States. It's to try to deny that your Kran or Belarus, well, Belarus has been absorbed by this point, you know, by Russia or Moldova or Kazakhstan or any of the other countries have any kind of agency.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Close as possible. So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative. It could have been an association with China joining an association with Latin America or Africa or something else like that. But of course NATO has all of those larger connotations of it being the Cold War opposing entity. And Putin has always seen NATO as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact, which is in other words just something dominated completely by the United States. Now that of course is why getting back to Trump again. Trump was always going to the Europeans. If this is really supposed to be collective security in a mutual defense pact why are you guys not paying? Why does the US states pay for everything? But NATO was actually conceived as collective defense, you know, mutual security and it was set up by the United States along with the UK and France and”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “The Russian Federation, in terms of its sort of devolution of authority, it had the war in Chechnya, which yelts in stupidly sparked off in 1994. You had Tatarstan, one of the regions, the all-rich regions, basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow. The whole place was kind of seemed like it was falling apart so that you couldn't do anything on Ukraine because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And then when basically Russia starts to get its back together again, all of these security nationalist types who would never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind of move away, they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank, but they did want the core states in their view to come back. And Moldova was part of that, even if it's not Slavic, but they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan and probably Kazakhstan as well, which wasn't really thought about being part of Central Asia back in the fold.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Work with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to get them to give up the nuclear weapons. And back in the early period of that four, you go back, and I mean, I was writing about this at the time, I wrote a report called Back in the USSR, which is kind of on the website of the Kennedy School with some other colleagues. And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations coming out of Moscow, the defense ministry and the Duma, the parliament and others, that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace. And, you know, kind of Ukraine might have to be brought to order. So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now were happening then, irrespective of NATO. Basically, the problem was always Ukraine getting away. Yeltsin himself when he unraveled the Soviet Union, didn't really want it to unravel, but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring the countries back again. Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its economy imploded. It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “In the early 1990s, when Ukraine became an independent state, it inherited that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union. Basically, whatever was stationed or positioned in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine. It's strategic and kind of basically intermediate and tactical nuclear weapons. And, you know, in the United States at the time, we had all this panic about what was going to happen with all of that. I was a scientist and kind of technically it would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this. I mean, the targeting was done centrally. They were actually stationed there. But nonetheless, Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, suddenly became nuclear powers. And Ash Carter, the former U.S. defense secret, Hughes, just died tragically in Dave was talking about talking together today. It was part of a whole team of Americans and others who tried to.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “At other Russian Empire period, it becomes on a different trajectory like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, another country. It becomes a different place. It moves into a different space and that's part of it. But if you go back again to the period at the very beginning of the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, well, there's no discussion about NATO at that point and NATO enlargement. There is a lot of pressure again, as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine trying to bring it back in the fold and wanting to make what was then this mechanism for divorce more of a mechanism for remanaged Commonwealth of Independent States.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Important for understanding Putin's psyche. So I think we have to go back much further than it's not just talking about kind of NATO and what that means. NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine going in a different direction from Russia, just as so is the European Union. Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after Ukraine has sought an association agreement with the European Union, not with NATO at that particular point, even though the EU on the security, common security and defence policy basically has all kinds of connections with NATO at various different levels in Europe. It was all about Europe and going on a different economic and political and ultimately legal path because if you have an association agreement, eventually you get into the acquis communautaire and it just transforms the country completely and Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Look, I think the whole situation here is very complicated, and you have to take a much longer view than what happened in 2008 with the open door for Ukraine and Georgia, which actually, by the way, I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear, because there wasn't any kind of thinking through about what the implications of that would be and what it actually would mean for Ukraine's security, and also bearing in mind what Putin had already said about NATO expansion, it came in the wake of the recognition by the United States pretty unilaterally of Kosovo. And it also comes in the wake of what I mentioned before, the invasion of Iraq, which really begins very...”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “I mean, that kind of happened in Britain in the colonial kind of period as well. Why was the United Kingdom doing, committing atrocities and basically fighting these colonial wars? Northern Ireland. Why was the United Kingdom still kind of militarily occupying Ireland? Cyprus, there's all kinds of instances where we look at this thing. What Russia is doing now, Putin is trying to occupy another country, irrespective of the historical linkages and the kind of the larger meta-narratives that he's trying to put forward there.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Why you were there, you know, particularly after Pearl Harbor and what had happened. It was harder to explain Vietnam and Korea and many that there wasn't that's kind of going to be a problem for Putin. That's why there is a problem for Putin. All of his explanations... Being questioned, you know, sort of off on NATO or this or that or the other. And, you know, kind of liberating Ukraine from Nazis or kind of basically stopping the persecution of Russian speakers and all of this has now got lost in just this horrific destruction. And that's what happened in Vietnam as well. It became a great degradation of the Russian military with atrocities and people wondering why on earth the United States was in Vietnam.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Korea is divided. I mean, I don't know if it's successful, but kind of, I mean, there was a solution found that, you know, some people are promoting in this case as well of a sort of division and a, you know, the DMZ and one side over the other and kind of perpetuating a division, which I think is particularly successful. But if you think about World War I and World War II, the United States came in under some very specific sets of circumstances. In World War I, they did kind of come in to help, you know, kind of liberate parts of Europe, France, and the UK and everything else, Great Britain in the war towards the end of it. World War II, there was that whole debate about whether the United States should even be part of the war. I mean, we know it wasn't fought to, you know, overturn the Holocaust and all of the kind of things you kind of wish it would be fought for, but it was because of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese pulling in. Ultimately, it was easy to explain.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Maybe he should kind of read some European authors on Russian history, not just reading Laminosa for Russian historians on Russian history, because you might see something from a very different perspective. Look, in the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, right? I mean, they saw Vietnam as kind of weak, manipulated by, you know, kind of external forces, China, Soviet Union. But the Vietnamese fought for their own country. They suddenly became Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh became basically a kind of a wartime fighter and leader in a way that perhaps people wouldn't have understood either.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “It's that whole counterfactual, right? Yeah, because I mean, if you kind of, that's why we all need in the United States to really examine our own history. Because there's a lot of lessons from that, that we should treat very cautiously. It doesn't mean that history repeats or even rhymes, the old axiom all the time, but there are a lot of things that you can take away differently from putting a different perspective and a different slant on the same set of events. I mean, I always used to wonder, like, how many books can be written on the French Revolution or even on the Russian Revolution? You know, I studied with Richard Pipes. I remember he was really offended after he'd written his grip, Magnusopus on the Russian Revolution two volumes that other people would, you know, kind of write about the Russian Revolution. He said, I've written it all. And I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't. It's like, that might be some completely different angle there that you haven't really thought of. And that's Putin. You know, I remember Pescoff saying Putin reads history all the time, Russian history. And I thought, well, maybe she should read some world history.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “World War II, Stalin had to revive nationalism. Including in the republics and Central Asia and elsewhere, to revive nationalism. Ukraine suddenly found nationalism, you know, in a kind of sense of”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Look what was happening to Russian speakers. You know, we were defenders. We were not invaders. I think, again, the special military operation idea, no, I think it's flipping, obviously, in the way that with the war going on there. But Putin wasn't kind of looking at what would happen Most of the kind of glory parts of Russian history when you kind of go in, you chase Napoleon back to Paris or you chase the Germans back to Berlin, you put the flag above the Reichstag. That's a very different set of affairs when he'd been fighting a defensive one. You've been invaded from a world where you invade someone else. And even the most fractured populations like you had in the Soviet Union that point Ronnie round and World War I, fell apart. I mean, the Tsar didn't manage to rally everybody around. The whole thing fell”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Before that, Dadaif and Mascardith, I mean, they were willing to make a compromise, but they wouldn't have had the same position that Kadidif has had. So I think that, again, it's your perspective and where you stand and which bit of history you start to read. And that's why I said that, I think Putin, it's again, it's the information, the way that he processes it. I think most Russians also can't believe that they've done something wrong in Ukraine. I mean, maybe at this point things are changing a bit. But that's why there was so much kind of support for this right way. I mean, I have Russian friends again to support, look what was happening in Daniette. Look what was, you know, the Ukrainians were doing to our guys.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “I mean, obviously, Afghanistan, but that was more complicated because it was also supposed to be an intervention, right? I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to Afghanistan. It was to try to prop up or reinstall a leader there. Syria, you were in there to help your guy, Bashar al-Assad, you know, turn away the opposition. Chechnya was a debacle. The Chechens fought back big time. And it was only by dint of horrible violent persistence and ruthlessness and nasty, dirty tricks that kind of Putin prevailed there. And then, you know, you wonder, did he prevail? Because what happened? You know, Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part of the Russian Federation. And Ramzan Kadyrov, you know, plays power games in Moscow. His predecessors, even his father and others wouldn't have done that. Ahmed Khadira.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded in 1941. You see, the problem is, Putin always reads history from one perspective over another. I think most countries. Basically, rise to their own defense. So, this is actually one of the first times that Russia has been on the offensive rather than on the defensive. Know, so there's kind of a bit of a flip there”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “It depends on where you are, not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that, but also in Kiev and Kharkiv, you know, was kind of predominantly Russian-speaking city. But Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian literature, you know, at different points. People have different views. I grew up in the north of England. We don't feel like the south of England. There's been a massive divide between North and South and England for millennia, not just centuries. So, you know, people feel differently depending on where they live and, you know, kind of where they grew up. And Putin just didn't see that. He didn't see that.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia, but the people who spoke Russian might have moved on because they suddenly had other opportunities and other windows on the world. I mean, look what's happened in Scotland, for example. Most people in Scotland speak English. The Scottish language is not the standard bearer of Scottish identity. It's almost a civic identity, different identity than not just national identity, just like you see in Ukraine. And there's lots of English people have moved to Scotland and now think of themselves as Scottish or Brazilians or Italians, all kinds of people who've moved in there. It's a smaller population, obviously. It's not the scale of Ukraine, but people feel differently. And there's been a devolution of power. And when Brexit happened, Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all and wanted to kind of still be having a window on Europe. And that's kind of historic. And lots of people in Ukraine have looked west, not east.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “It was more like Afghanistan, but they didn't realize that because again, Ukrainians are us. There's this kind of inability to think that people might think differently and might want something different and that 30 years of independence actually has an impact on people and their psyches. And if I look back to the 1990s, I mean, I remember being in seminars in Harvard at the time and we were doing a lot of research on what was happening in the former Soviet Union at the time because the early 1990s, just after the whole players fell apart. And there was already under Yeltsin this kind of idea of Russians abroad, Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers, and the need to bring them back in. And I remember we had seminars at the time where we talked about at some point there'd be some people in Russia that would actually believe that”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's this kind of if he looks back into the past, you're right, though, he wasn't involved in 68 or 56 or what happened in the 1980s in Poland.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity or how people would react in the time and not understanding people's linkages and kind of importance of place, the way that people feel about who they are in a certain set of circumstance in a place.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Fell apart. So Putin was thinking, and I'm pretty sure based on polling and the FSB having infiltrated an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchies we're now seeing is quite apparent with some of the dismissals in Ukraine. It was pretty sure that he would get traction and that it would be like 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levy, as it's called, a kind of cohort of people who come into the KGB under Yuri Andorropov. And Yuri Andropov has presided over a lot of these anti-dissident, you know, kind of movements inside of Russia itself and how you suppress opposition, but also over, you know, how you deal with the uprisings in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And there's all these lessons from this that, you know, you can put everything back in the box. And yeah, there might be a bit of violence and a bit of fighting, but ultimately.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “I think he pretty much thought it because I think he thought that kind of Zelensky wasn't very popular. There was an awful lot of pro-Russian sentiment in whatever way he thinks that is because people have Russian speakers and that they're kind of in polling. expressed affinity with Russia. I mean, certainly in Crimea, that worked out because a majority of the population had higher sentiments of feelings of affinity with Russia. And obviously that kind of, they got traction there. But it's more complicated. We talked about Donbass before about being a kind of melting pot when they tried the same thing in Donbass. Danetsk and Lukansk because it tried in Crimea in 2014. Didn't kind of pan out. In fact, you know, a whole war broke out. They tried, you know, to kind of many of the major cities that are now under attack, including Odessa, to kind of foment pro-Russian movements. And they're completely...”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “They go and they start, well, Vladimir Vladimirich, they're revving up to get to the point and then he cuts them off. So you think about that and then you think about, well, what information has he got? And then, how does he process it? And is he suspicious of it? Does he not believe it? And what inside of his own history then leads him to make one judgment over another? He clearly thought the Ukrainians would fall apart in five seconds.”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “And then, you know, people aren't really prepared. What they wanted to convey, and they're, you know, they'd prepared a nice sort of fulsome PowerPoint-like approach. We never even got there. And so God knows what, you know, he took away from it at the end of it. And that's, you know, think about Putin. He's going to be kind of impatient. We see the televised things where he, you know, kind of sits at a table a bit like, you know, people won't necessarily see us here. And he puts his hands on the table and he looks across at the person and he says so. Tell me, you know. What's the main things I need to know? And of course, the person's mind probably goes blank. Kind of the thought of, oh God, what's the main thing”

    2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source