Hill, Fiona

foreign policy expert on Russia and Eurasia; served as a top Russia/Europe advisor to Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump; testified in Trump's first impeachment inquiry; author of There Is Nothing for You Here

Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump

Lex Fridman Podcast · Nov 4, 2022

• Fiona Hill
• Vladimir Putin
• Donald Trump impeachment testimony
• Russia-Ukraine war origins
• NATO expansion debate
• Donbas and Crimea history
• 2016 election interference
• Soviet Union collapse
• nuclear escalation risk
• nonpartisan foreign policy

Core ideas

Hill traces her path from a declining coal-mining town in County Durham, northeast England — where her father lost repeated jobs as the mines closed and told her early on there was "nothing for her" there — to studying Russian, motivated as a teenager by the 1983 Able Archer nuclear scare (a NATO exercise the Soviets reportedly misread as preparation for a first strike) and encouraged by a great-uncle to "go talk to them" and understand why. She funded her Russian studies through a scholarship from the Durham miners' association, drawing a direct historical line between her home region's coal-and-steel industrial identity and the Donbas region of Ukraine, which she notes was founded by the same 19th-century Welsh industrialists and maintained decades of formal solidarity exchanges with British miners — using this to argue that Donbas's identity has historically been rooted in industrial-region culture rather than a simple Russian/Ukrainian ethnic binary, and that Russia's narrative equating Russian-language use with pro-Russian political identity misreads this the same way outside observers might mistake regional English industrial identity for something else.

Describing her time studying in Moscow in 1987-88 during Gorbachev's perestroika, she recounts empty shops, crumbling infrastructure, and a sense the Soviet system was failing even as reform debate flourished — and states her view that the USSR's dissolution in 1991 was substantially an elite-driven process (the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus effectively dissolving the union among themselves) rather than a broad popular uprising, a parallel she extends with concern to what she sees as elite-driven political polarization in the U.S. and UK today, where national politics increasingly gets treated as fixed tribal allegiance rather than genuine disagreement among people who still share a country. She describes her practice of studying newspapers "from all the different ideological vantage points" (a habit she credits to a neighbor and godfather) as a model for resisting misinformation, and states her deep discomfort — bordering on being personally "heartbroken" — with what she saw as officials, including herself, being falsely accused of partisan disloyalty ("deep state" coup-plotting) during the Trump administration for doing straightforward national-security work.

On Donald Trump, Hill offers a mixed assessment: she credits him with occasionally asking valid, uncomfortable questions that a more polite, consensus-bound bureaucracy would avoid (citing his criticism of European reliance on Russian gas alongside NATO spending complaints as substantively correct even if undiplomatically delivered), while stating plainly she believes he lacked any filter between impulse and speech, showed "zero self-awareness," and was, in her assessment, exploited by people around him — a dynamic she says left her at times feeling sorry for him rather than personally aggrieved. She states her view, developed through her impeachment testimony, that the Trump administration's handling of Ukraine (treating it as a vehicle for a personal political favor rather than a serious national-security partner) directly signaled to Putin and his circle that the U.S. did not take Ukraine's sovereignty seriously, which she considers a contributing factor — not an excuse — for the 2022 invasion; she is careful throughout to distinguish this kind of "we are to blame for not understanding consequences" framing from blaming the U.S. for Russia's choices, which she says she does not do. She criticizes what she calls a "circus" quality to the impeachment process itself on both sides — Republican grandstanding and a failure of duty she found personally disappointing, alongside what she considered Democratic over-eagerness to frame Trump as illegitimate from the outset — and separately argues that the widespread narrative that Russian interference "elected" Trump in 2016 was itself a damaging overcorrection: she states plainly that Americans elected Trump, that domestic institutional vulnerabilities (she cites the Comey letter and the Weiner laptop episode) did far more to affect the race's chaos than Russian influence operations, and that Putin's circle "loved" taking undeserved credit for the outcome regardless.

On Vladimir Putin, Hill offers an extended account of his trajectory: a technocratic, stabilizing first two presidential terms (curbing 1990s economic chaos, paying down debt, opening the economy) that she says shifted after his 2011-2012 return to the presidency, when he grew convinced — following the 2003 Iraq invasion, Kosovo's recognition, and the 2008 financial crisis exposing what he saw as Western incompetence — that the U.S. was fundamentally hostile to him, and increasingly obsessed with restoring a historical "Russian world" rather than domestic prosperity; she identifies the 2014 annexation of Crimea as, in her view, "the beginning of the end of Putin being a positive force" domestically. She describes him as someone who trusts almost no one fully, compartmentalizes information, prefers consuming raw intelligence over others' analysis, and — based on her own experience briefing senior officials — likely made the decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 with only a narrow circle's input, badly misjudging (per available polling and FSB assessments of Ukrainian sentiment) that language affinity would translate into political capitulation, a mistake she compares to underestimating how national identity can crystallize under attack (drawing a parallel to Finland's Winter War and to her own Ukrainian grandfather's wartime loyalty to the USSR). She states that Putin has likely genuinely calculated the use of tactical nuclear weapons as an option, framing the risk as fundamentally about his own estimate of whether such an act would produce the desired capitulation effect (drawing an explicit, carefully qualified analogy to debates over whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened Japan's surrender) rather than a fixed probability that can be read off from his personality alone, and separately notes his cited historical precedent argument — that great powers negotiate outcomes over the heads of smaller states — as the underlying logic behind Russian claims of NATO "provocation."

On U.S. policy responsibility, Hill states she considers NATO's 2008 "open door" declaration for Ukraine and Georgia (offering aspiration without any security guarantee) a genuine strategic blunder that predates and compounds — but in her view does not excuse or fully explain — Russia's subsequent actions, situating this within a longer history of Russian nationalist pressure on former Soviet states (including 1990s disputes over Ukraine's inherited nuclear arsenal and the Budapest Memorandum) that she says long predates NATO expansion as a stated grievance. She closes with reflections on Alexei Navalny (cautioning against Western audiences projecting a "pro-Western liberal" identity onto him rather than recognizing him as a Russian nationalist with his own illiberal positions), on why she believes no single figure's removal guarantees a better outcome given systemic momentum, and with personal advice for young people centered on using one's voice within community, listening across generational and ideological lines, and drawing hope from historical precedent that seemingly intractable conflicts and societal ruptures (citing post-WWII European reconciliation) have been overcome before.

Excerpts