<nettime> ‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340

‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO

   Putin is trying to take down the entire world order, the veteran Russia
   watcher said in an interview. But there are ways even ordinary
   Americans can fight back.

       Maura Reynolds is a senior editor at POLITICO Magazine.

   For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like
   a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin
   has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World
   War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

   That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most
   clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades,
   worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a
   reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during
   impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.

   I wanted to know what she’s been thinking as she’s watched the
   extraordinary footage of Russian tanks rolling across international
   borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can
   offer into his motivations and objectives.

   Hill spent many years studying history, and in our conversation, she
   repeatedly traced how long arcs and trends of European history are
   converging on Ukraine right now. We are already, she said, in the
   middle of a third World War, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.

   “Sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we
   said that we would never permit to happen again,” Hill told me.

   Those old historical patterns include Western businesses who fail to
   see how they help build a tyrant’s war chest, admirers enamored of an
   autocrat’s “strength” and politicians’ tendency to point fingers inward
   for political gain instead of working together for their nation’s
   security.

   But at the same time, Hill says it’s not too late to turn Putin back,
   and it’s a job not just for the Ukrainians or for NATO — it’s a job
   that ordinary Westerners and companies can assist in important ways
   once they grasp what’s at stake.

   “Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between
   democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a
   rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not
   taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be
   paying close attention to this.”

   There’s lots of danger ahead, she warned. Putin is increasingly
   operating emotionally and likely to use all the weapons at his
   disposal, including nuclear ones. It’s important not to have any
   illusions — but equally important not to lose hope.

   “Every time you think, ’No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he
   would,” Hill said. “And he wants us to know that, of course. It’s not
   that we should be intimidated and scared…. We have to prepare for those
   contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head
   them off.”

	////

   Maura Reynolds: You’ve been a Putin watcher for a long time, and you’ve
   written one of the best biographies of Putin. When you’ve been watching
   him over the past week, what have you been seeing that other people
   might be missing?

   Fiona Hill: Putin is usually more cynical and calculated than he came
   across in his most recent speeches. There’s evident visceral emotion in
   things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in
   Ukraine. The pretext is completely flimsy and almost nonsensical for
   anybody who’s not in the echo chamber or the bubble of propaganda in
   Russia itself. I mean, demanding to the Ukrainian military that they
   essentially overthrow their own government or lay down their arms and
   surrender because they are being commanded by [1]a bunch of drug-addled
   Nazi fascists? There’s just no sense to that. It beggars the
   imagination.

   Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We
   saw the same thing in [2]the Russian response at the United Nations.
   The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have
   been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same
   thing in Ukraine.”

   This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous
   because there are few checks and balances around Putin. He spotlighted
   this during the performance of the National Security Council meeting,
   where it became very clear that this was his decision. He was in a way
   taking full responsibility for war, and even the heads of his security
   and intelligence services looked like they’ve been thrown off guard by
   how fast things were moving.

   Reynolds: So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some
   kind of logical plan?

   Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a
   very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly
   Europe, on notice that [3]Moscow would not accept the further expansion
   of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to
   Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.

   Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National
   Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in
   response to the NATO [4]Open Door declaration. One of our assessments
   was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive
   Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea,
   but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia.
   And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the
   invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because
   the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But
   we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this
   potential outcome and our relations with Russia.

   Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the
   Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?

   Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the
   Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands
   of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once
   part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause. Putin has
   articulated an idea of there being a “[5]Russky Mir” or a “Russian
   World.” The [6]recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia
   states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi
   narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This
   idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in
   different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.

   I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all
   seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin
   during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the
   different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said,
   repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times.
   And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet
   leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists,
   because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian
   lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into
   the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine
   that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again
   with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change,
   and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for
   Moscow to dominate now.

   Reynolds: Dominance in what way?

   Hill: It doesn’t mean that he’s going to annex all of them and make
   them part of the Russian Federation like they’ve done with Crimea. You
   can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making
   sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by
   Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring
   they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security
   networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.

   We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back
   toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the
   West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a
   little-noticed act, [7]Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement
   with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been
   resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made
   itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and
   Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in
   Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by
   Moscow.

   But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what
   Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It
   belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map,
   literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.”
   He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets.
   When we look at old maps of Europe — probably the maps he’s been
   looking at — you find all kinds of strange entities, like the [8]Sanjak
   of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that?
   These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and
   were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in
   contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is
   not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.

   Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?

   Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way. Before
   this last week, he had multiple different options to choose from. He’d
   given himself the option of being able to go in in full force as he’s
   doing now, but he could also have focused on retaking the rest of the
   administrative territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. He could have seized
   the Sea of Azov, which he’s probably going to do anyway, and then
   joined up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Crimea as well as the
   lands in between and all the way down to Odessa. In fact, Putin
   initially tried this in 2014 — to create “[9]Novorossiya,” or “New
   Russia,” but that failed when local support for joining Russia didn’t
   materialize.

   Now, if he can, he is going to take the whole country. We have to face
   up to this fact. Although we haven’t seen the full Russian invasion
   force deployed yet, he’s certainly got the troops to move into the
   whole country.

   Reynolds: You say he has an adequate number of troops to move in, but
   does he have enough to occupy the whole country?

   Hill: If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force
   to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he
   doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up,
   maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets
   or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying
   that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even
   suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.

   In 2015, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was at the Munich Security
   Conference after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. And
   [10]he talked about Ukraine not being a country, saying pointedly that
   there are many minority groups in Ukraine — there are Poles and there
   are Romanians, there are Hungarians and Russians. And he goes on
   essentially almost inviting the rest of Europe to divide Ukraine up.

   So what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but
   really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and
   other places where there’s a division of the country between the
   officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on
   the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a
   fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different
   statuses.

   Reynolds: So step by step, in ways that we haven’t always appreciated
   in the West, Putin has brought back a lot of these countries that were
   independent after the Soviet collapse back under his umbrella. The only
   country that has so far evaded Putin’s grip has been Ukraine.

   Hill: Ukraine, correct. Because it’s bigger and because of its
   strategic location. That’s what Russia wants to ensure, or Putin wants
   to ensure, that Ukraine like the other countries, has no other option
   than subjugation to Russia.

   Reynolds: How much of what we’re seeing now is tied to Putin’s own
   electoral schedule? He seized Crimea in 2014, and that helped to boost
   his ratings and ensure his future reelection. He’s got another election
   coming up in 2024. Is any of this tied to that?

   Hill: I think it is. In 2020, [11]Putin had the Russian Constitution
   amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two
   six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to
   re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender
   might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony.
   Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one
   would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it
   works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing
   show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the
   affirmation of all the population.

   Behind the scenes it’s fairly clear that there’s a lot of apathy in the
   system, that many people support Putin because there’s no one else.
   People who don’t support him at all will probably not turn out to vote.
   The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of
   Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his
   ratings.

   It may not just be the presidential calendar, the electoral calendar.
   He’s going to be 70 in October. And 70 you know, in the larger scheme
   of things, is not that old. There are plenty of politicians out there
   that are way over 70.

   Reynolds: But it’s old for Russians.

   Hill: It’s old for Russians. And Putin’s not looking so great, he’s
   been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having
   back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be
   that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something
   else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by
   personal factors.

   He may have a sense that time is marching on — it’s 22 years, after
   all, and the likelihood after that kind of time of a Russian leader
   leaving voluntarily or through elections is pretty slim. Most leaders
   leave either like Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko thought
   that he might leave, as the result of massive protests, or they die in
   office.

   The only other person who has been Russian leader in modern times
   longer than Putin is Stalin, and Stalin died in office.

   Reynolds: Putin came to power after a series of operations that many
   have seen as a kind of false flag — [12]bombings of buildings around
   Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a
   war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime
   president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult
   time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less
   than two years before he needs to stand for election again. Am I wrong
   to see that pattern?

   Hill: No, I don’t think you are. There’s definitely a pattern here.
   Part of Putin’s persona as president is that he is a ruthless tough
   guy, the strong man who is the champion and protector of Russia. And
   that’s why Russia needs him. If all was peaceful and quiet, why would
   you need Vladimir Putin? If you think of other wartime leaders —
   Winston Churchill comes to mind — in peacetime, Winston Churchill got
   voted out of office.

   Reynolds: Speaking of Chechnya, I have been thinking that this is the
   largest ground military operation that Russia has fought since
   Chechnya. What did we learn about the Russian military then that’s
   relevant now?

   Hill: It’s very important, that you bring this point up because people
   are saying Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since
   World War II. The first largest military action in Europe since World
   War II was actually in Chechnya, because Chechnya is part of Russia.
   [13]This was a devastating conflict that dragged on for years, with two
   rounds of war after a brief truce, and tens of thousands of military
   and civilian casualties. The regional capital of Grozny was leveled.
   The casualties were predominantly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers.
   The Chechens fought back, and this became a military debacle on
   Russia’s own soil. Analysts called it “[14]the nadir of the Russian
   army.” After NATO’s intervention in the Balkan wars in the same
   timeframe in the 1990s, Moscow even worried that NATO might intervene.

   Reynolds: What have we learned about NATO in the last two months?

   Hill: In many respects, not good things, initially. Although now we see
   a significant rallying of the political and diplomatic forces, serious
   consultations and a spur to action in response to bolster NATO’s
   military defenses.

   But we also need to think about it this way. We have had a long-term
   policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of
   thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize
   risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national
   security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold
   War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we
   could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t
   take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now
   see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the
   possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s
   negative response to successive expansions. Think about Swiss Re or AIG
   or Lloyds of London — when the hazard was massive, like during
   Hurricane Katrina or the global financial crisis in 2008, those
   insurance companies got into major trouble. They and their clients
   found themselves underwater. And this is kind of what NATO members are
   learning now.

   Reynolds: And then there’s the nuclear element. Many people have
   thought that we’d never see a large ground war in Europe or a direct
   confrontation between NATO and Russia, because it could quickly
   escalate into a nuclear conflict. How close are we getting to that?

   Hill: Well, we’re right there. Basically, what President Putin has said
   quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in
   Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve “[15]never had
   in [their] history.” And he has put Russia’s [16]nuclear forces on high
   alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.

   Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured
   out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and
   Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you
   know, Donald, we have these [17]hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was
   saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you
   will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace
   in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to
   shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would
   be on the table.

   Reynolds: Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?

   Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to
   use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in
   some respects. Russian operatives poisoned [18]Alexander Litvinenko
   with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and
   polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man
   visited. He died a horrible death as a result.

   The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent,
   [19]Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain
   twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the
   doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t
   die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and
   anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok
   killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored
   it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box
   where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve
   agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time
   was in [20]Alexander Navalny’s underpants.

   So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got
   that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he
   wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that,
   of course.

   It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared. That’s exactly what
   he wants us to be. We have to prepare for those contingencies and
   figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.

   Reynolds: So how do we deal with it? Are sanctions enough?

   Hill: Well, we can’t just deal with it as the United States on our own.
   First of all, this has to be an international response.

   Reynolds: Larger than NATO?

   Hill: It has to be larger than NATO. Now I’m not saying that that means
   an international military response that’s larger than NATO, but the
   push back has to be international.

   We first have to think about what Vladimir Putin has done and the
   nature of what we’re facing. People don’t want to talk about Adolf
   Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. Obviously the
   major element when you talk about World War II, which is overwhelming,
   is the Holocaust and the absolute decimation of the Jewish population
   of Europe, as well as the Roma-Sinti people.

   But let’s focus here on the territorial expansionism of Germany, what
   Germany did under Hitler in that period: seizure of the Sudetenland and
   the Anschluss or annexation of Austria, all on the basis that they were
   German speakers. The invasion of Poland. The treaty with the Soviet
   Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, that also enabled the Soviet Union
   to take portions of Poland but then became a prelude to Operation
   Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Invasions of
   France and all of the countries surrounding Germany, including Denmark
   and further afield to Norway. Germany eventually engaged in a burst of
   massive territorial expansion and occupation. Eventually the Soviet
   Union fought back. [21]Vladimir Putin’s own family suffered during the
   siege of Leningrad, and yet here is Vladimir Putin doing exactly the
   same thing.

   Reynolds: So, similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive
   historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and
   a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have
   independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?

   Hill: Correct. And he’s blaming others, for why this has happened, and
   getting us to blame ourselves.

   If people look back to the history of World War II, there were an awful
   lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before
   the invasion of Poland. In the United Kingdom[22], there was a whole
   host of British politicians who admired Hitler’s strength and his
   power, for doing what Great Powers do, before the horrors of the Blitz
   and the Holocaust finally penetrated.

   Reynolds: And you see this now.

   Hill: You totally see it. Unfortunately, we have [23]politicians and
   [24]public figures in the United States and around Europe who have
   embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a
   strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing: Because
   Ukraine is somehow not worthy of independence, because it’s either
   Russia’s historical lands or Ukrainians are Russians, or the Ukrainian
   leaders are — this is what Putin says — “drug addled, fascist Nazis” or
   whatever labels he wants to apply here.

   So sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we
   said that we would never permit to happen again. The other thing to
   think about in this larger historic context is how much the German
   business community helped facilitate the rise of Hitler. Right now,
   everyone who has been doing business in Russia or buying Russian gas
   and oil has contributed to Putin’s war chest. Our investments are not
   just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and
   its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for
   Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

   Reynolds: I gather you think that sanctions leveled by the government
   are inadequate to address this much larger threat?

   Hill: Absolutely. Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to
   have a major international response, where governments decide on their
   own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time
   until this is resolved. [25]We need a temporary suspension of business
   activity with Russia. Just as we wouldn’t be having a full-blown
   diplomatic negotiation for anything but a ceasefire and withdrawal
   while Ukraine is still being actively invaded, so it’s the same thing
   with business. Right now you’re fueling the invasion of Ukraine. So
   what we need is a suspension of business activity with Russia until
   Moscow ceases hostilities and withdraws its troops.

   Reynolds: So ordinary companies…

   Hill: Ordinary companies should make a decision. This is the epitome of
   “ESG” that companies are saying is their priority right now — upholding
   standards of good Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance. Just
   like people didn’t want their money invested in South Africa during
   apartheid, do you really want to have your money invested in Russia
   during Russia’s brutal invasion and subjugation and carving up of
   Ukraine?

   If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested
   in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the
   boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every
   Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian
   companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it. If we look back to
   Germany in the runup to the Second World War, it was the major German
   enterprises that were being used in support of the war. And we’re
   seeing exactly the same thing now. Russia would not be able to afford
   this war were it not for the fact that oil and gas prices are
   ratcheting up. They’ve got enough in the war chest for now. But over
   the longer term, this will not be sustainable without the investment
   that comes into Russia and all of the Russian commodities, not just oil
   and gas, that are being purchased on world markets. And, our
   international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil
   production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also
   indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.

   This has to be an international response to push Russia to stop its
   military action. [26]India abstained in the United Nations, and you can
   see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might
   go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” —
   because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the
   type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a
   free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history
   borders have changed. Who cares?”

   Reynolds: And you do not think he will necessarily stop at Ukraine?

   Hill: Of course he won’t. Ukraine has become the front line in a
   struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or
   between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining
   a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not
   taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close
   attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others
   who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries
   have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade
   and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized
   world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has
   done.

   Reynolds: He’s blown up the rules-based international order.

   Hill: Exactly. What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia
   even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step
   in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out,
   someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople
   want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the
   Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery
   of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s
   operating in tandem with China.

   Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II
   analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a
   World War III.

   Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking
   of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but
   World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar
   period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold
   War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots
   in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire
   at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another
   reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with
   recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in
   Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman
   Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.

   All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier
   conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in
   2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just
   on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a
   long period of time.

   But this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a
   Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the
   [27]Tucker Carlsons and [28]Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The
   fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to
   Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any
   kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I
   mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them,
   some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public
   saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the
   U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war
   and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully
   seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time.
   I’ve been saying this for years.

   Reynolds: So just as the world didn’t see Hitler coming, we failed to
   see Putin coming?

   Hill: We shouldn’t have. He’s been around for 22 years now, and he has
   been coming to this point since 2008. I don’t think that he initially
   set off to do all of this, by the way, but the attitudes towards
   Ukraine and the feelings that all Ukraine belongs to Russia, the
   feelings of loss, they’ve all been there and building up.

   What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course,
   yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right
   to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in
   Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.

References

   1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/feb/25/putin-references-neo-nazis-and-drug-addicts-in-bizarre-speech-to-russian-security-council-video
   2. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1112802
   3. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/world/europe/11munich.html
   4. https://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/04-april/e0403h.html
   5. https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-orthodox-church-and-ukraine-christianization-greek-catholic-prince-vladimir-great-empire-invasion-11643296236
   6. https://huri.harvard.edu/news/putin-historical-unity
   7. https://eurasianet.org/ahead-of-ukraine-invasion-azerbaijan-and-russia-cement-alliance
   8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjak_of_Novi_Pazar
   9. https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/60249
  10. https://www.c-span.org/video/?324248-2/russian-foreign-minister-lavrov-munich-security-conference
  11. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/886440694/referendum-in-russia-passes-allowing-putin-to-remain-president-until-2036
  12. https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-russia-president-1999-chechnya-apartment-bombings/30097551.html
  13. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2000-03-01/russias-ruinous-chechen-war
  14. https://nationalinterest.org/article/russias-military-nadir-the-meaning-of-the-chechen-debacle-567
  15. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/world/europe/us-putin-nuclear-war-nato.html
  16. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-business-europe-moscow-2e4e1cf784f22b6afbe5a2f936725550
  17. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/magazine/hypersonic-missiles.html
  18. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039224996/russia-alexander-litvinenko-european-court-human-rights-putin
  19. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58635137
  20. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoning-underpants-ward/index.html
  21. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/world/europe/vladimir-putin-describes-loss-of-a-brother-at-ceremony.html
  22. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-british-high-society-fell-in-love-with-the-nazis
  23. https://prospect.org/world/strange-sympathy-far-left-putin/
  24. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin-ukraine-invasion-deepens-republican-divide
  25. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/news-and-insights/press-releases/bp-to-exit-rosneft-shareholding.html
  26. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-india-abstains-unsc-vote-russia-invasion-ukraine-7791712/
  27. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/25/tucker-carlson-fox-news-russia-putin
  28. https://www.axios.com/trump-said-crimea-is-russia-because-speak-russian-4409d81b-7952-4dd0-b6c7-2960cd127ab3.html
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