If you have time to read or listen to one thing today, I highly recommend this fascinating interview by Ezra Klein with Fiona Hill. Here’s the introduction:
If there is to be an off ramp in Ukraine, a deal, something to stop the fighting here, it’s going to need to be something that Putin, Zelensky, and the West can all agree on. And as hard as that kind of deal was to imagine a month ago, it is harder now, because — think about how all of the actors and factors here have changed. Vladimir Putin, he had a very optimistic view of how this was going to go.
He thought he was going to roll in, and Ukraine would be full of people with ethnic Russian heritage, with Russian fellow feeling. They’re going to welcome the Russians as liberators. That is not how they welcomed the Russians. So now, Putin fears the thing he fears most, which is humiliation. He’s trying to secure not just Ukraine, but now his regime survival, and his very place in history. The stakes of this war have completely changed for him.
The Ukrainian people have united under President Zelensky’s remarkable leadership. Their sense of national identity, their sense of who they are and where they belong in the world is completely different now. They are not going to allow themselves to be mere pawns in games of great power politics. The idea that this could just be carved up between Russia and the U.S. and Europe, that’s a fantasy.
And on that, the meaning of Ukraine, the stakes of Ukraine, they’ve changed for the United States and Europe too. To the extent the West thought much about Ukraine, they thought about it in terms of Russia, or just a troubling geopolitical conundrum. But now, Ukraine represents the values of the West, or at least the values West claims to hold, made manifest. And values, values are a lot harder to compromise on.
I’m recording this on Monday, and the Kremlin has just made new demands. They want Ukraine to forswear joining any security blocs like NATO. They want Ukraine to recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and to declare much of Eastern Ukraine as independent and functionally under Russian control. And then, depending on how you read their comments, they are insisting on the complete demilitarization of Ukraine.
It is very, very, very hard to imagine Zelensky agreeing to much of that at all, but is there something here that could be agreed to — is there a deal that could give all sides here a way out? If anyone would know the answer, it is my guest today. Fiona Hill served as a National Intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She was senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council under President Trump.
She’s the author of the books “Mr. Putin: Operative In The Kremlin” and “There Is Nothing for You Here.” And she’s been thinking about the strategic and geopolitical and national questions of the region for decades. And so she lays out the factors, forces, and the psychology of the various players really well here
Hill makes several points that are super important to understand. First, all the things we have seen and heard about Putin’s ambitions seem to be true. Yes, he sees himself in the mode of Peter the Great and wishes to restore the old Russian Empire. And he obviously miscalculated the Ukrainian and global response to his actions. She makes this observation which I think is so important:
EZRA KLEIN: Putting aside the question of malevolence, is he on some level right that the U.S. and the West are in the business of regime change, not just in Russia, but in Ukraine, in some of the other places you mentioned and didn’t mention. I’ve been thinking a bit about this narrative by the political scientist, Samuel Charap, who has been arguing that you can’t understand Russia’s actions in the region without understanding this is a two way contest for influence in Ukraine.
We’ve done a lot over the past 15, 20 years to try to bring them closer to us, not just opening NATO, but supporting Western leaders, training a generation of military officers, actually arming them, integrating them into E.U. licensing and trade and regulatory regimes. And so he sees that there’s being a genuine, constant expansionary pressure from us that he’s now trying to beat back. Is there a validity to that view?
FIONA HILL: Well, sure. I mean, that’s the way that Putin definitely sees things. And, you know, for many people in the United States, elsewhere, see that too, as that kind of competition. There is still a lot of holdover. But what that does is totally deny any agency on the part of Ukraine, or any other country for that matter. So we’re always framing it like this — with all due respect to all my colleagues who do this from the IR perspective.
If you think around the world as well, many countries have fought for their independence precisely because people themselves want to. What about the United States, for example? We look back in U.S. history, this is like 1812. And the US has had the French, we’ve had the Spanish. We’ve had the British Empire, obviously. We’ve had all kinds of manifestations, and we have our own version of our own history. We might look very different, you know, from a different vantage point.
Think about all of the other countries of Europe that have got their independence from the dissolution of empires, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, Finland. You know, Sweden was once an empire, and had kind of basically dominion over many of these lands as well. The United Kingdom — you know, Ireland is an independent country now as well. A lot of what’s happening now is a kind of a post-colonial, post-imperial impulse on the part of Russia, this kind of feeling that it can’t possibly be lands and peoples want to go their own way.
But there must be some other malevolent force there. And when a country makes an appeal to another country for association, or to different international franchise — let’s put it that way — and wants to be part of that, that’s seen as that other entity, be it NATO or the European Union, or bilateral relations with the U.S. or anything else, that the other— those countries are acting with malevolent force to pull them away.
So what Putin can’t make sense of — in fact, most people are looking at it seem to not be able to make sense of — the people of Ukraine actually kind of want to live like people of Ukraine, in their own state, and make their own decisions. If they want to associate with the European Union and NATO offers their security, then a lot of that is their decision as well. So when we frame it that way, we completely and utterly negate the opinions and the beliefs and the aspirations of the people on the ground.
That’s what Putin is trying to do all the time. So he’s really doing a great job in propaganda, internationally. And we feed into it all the time. And to get this framed as a conflict, a proxy conflict between Russia and the United States, Russia and NATO for Ukraine — well, why do we want Ukraine? People keep asking that. We don’t want Ukraine. The United States does not want Ukraine. Just to make it very clear, we don’t want to annex Ukraine. It’s not going to become like Puerto Rico, you know, like an additional state.
We’re not annexing part of it. This is not World War II or the Cold War. We are not occupying Europe anymore.
EZRA KLEIN: There’s something he’s been emphasizing that seems to me to be very much part of that idea, which is — I think we’re comfortable in a geopolitical moment, like this talking about security interests, Ukraine and NATO, Ukraine and the E.U., Ukraine and Russia, arms, training. Something that Putin has emphasized in a number of speeches is identity.
FIONA HILL: Yes.
EZRA KLEIN: Language, ethnicity — and this seems, to me, to have been a profound miscalculation in exactly the way you just described. But he seems to understand Ukraine is full of Russians. I mean, of course, it does have many people who were part of Russia, who speak Russian, who identify as more ethnically Russian. But he does — he seems to have vastly overestimated the potency and ubiquity of that identity, such that he seemed to believe he’d get a lot less resistance than he has.
But also his fear, as far as I can tell from some of his speeches, is not just that Ukraine is going to fall into a NATO security umbrella, but there’s going to be a Westernization or even a Ukrainianization of the identity of the Ukrainian people. And once that is done, then Russia can’t get them back, because then you are just occupying a land, not reintegrating with your brothers and sisters.
And that seems very important in his thinking, and also to have been very wrong in a way that, now, if anything, he’s made it even worse, right? I mean, nothing has done more for Ukrainian identity than this invasion. But I’m curious what you think of that, because he talks about it a lot, but I don’t hear it discussed very often.
FIONA HILL: Ezra, you’re spot on. So it’s very possible to be living in Ukraine and be somebody like Volodymyr Zelensky, Volodymyr being a name that would suggest Ukrainian nationalist version of Vladimir — by the way, after the great grandparents of Kyiv that Putin is also fighting over, it’s being fought over, the versions of the name. Volodymyr, Ukrainian version, Vladimir, the Russian version. And Putin is — it’s the battle of the Volodymyr’s and the Vladimir’s.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy also happens to be a Russian speaking Jew. And I think he’s blowing Putin’s mind, because in that kind of capacity, he can’t figure him out. He’s trying to say that Ukrainians are being led by a bunch of — this is bizarre labeling — drug addled, neo-Nazi fascists. Well, it’s a little hard to say that about somebody who’s completely sober, very clearly — Volodymyr Zelensky — and happens to be Jewish, and who has lost family in the Holocaust, and is very proud of his Jewish identity as well as Ukrainian identity, and his identity as a Russian speaker.
And this is the problem that everybody is falling into in the modern era right now. Putin has been trying to put himself forward in many respects as the kind of leader, not just of the Slavic part of the world, the Russian part of the world, this idea of Russkiy Mir — all of the Russian speakers who are scattered around not just Ukraine, but also Belarus and northern parts of Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Republics, or the Russian diaspora abroad, which he reaches out to.
But he’s got this idea of — kind of a white, Christian, Russian Orthodox Russia that is leading, then, the kind of peoples who are opposed to these other kinds of identity politics. So he’s right there in the middle of it, and I think he’s talked himself in to that idea that there can only be one particular form of identity. And just as you say, I think the main impetus for this is he saw that Ukraine was moving away.
So what we’re seeing here is almost, in a way, a kind of a battle for people to be able to espouse their own identities, as complex as they may be, because Ukraine is full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. There are many Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, but who would be Russian speaking. There are millions of Ukrainian citizens working in Russia. And there are lots of people in Ukraine who speak Russian, but now feel a very strong identity tied to place, and to history and shared culture, especially for the last 30 years.
They don’t want to go back to whatever version of Ukraine, or multiple versions of Ukraine — because it seems that Vladimir Putin wants to carve the whole country up — that he is presenting to them. They want the right to decide for themselves.
That’s just a small part of the interview and there is much more to chew over. The situation is extremely complicated and without any easy answers. Hill suggests that the bellicose rhetoric coming from some quarters (Lindsey Graham, obviously, although she doesn’t name him) is counter productive and that the US and Europe need to ensure that the focus their public comments on Ukraine and not some great clash of superpowers. And she sees some possibilities for leverage with the sanctions, which is good to hear. She sees this playing out over years.
Again, highly recommend.