Putin’s historical magical mystery tour

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Putin’s historical magical mystery tour’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator, the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Russia and the west. My guest is Fiona Hill, who’s been a senior adviser on Russia in both the White House and for America’s National Intelligence Council. Ukraine’s expected to go on the offensive in the coming weeks. So are we approaching the decisive moment in the Ukraine war?

[SOUND OF PARADE]

On May the ninth, Vladimir Putin reviewed the troops in Red Square during Russia’s traditional Victory Day parade, which marks the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945. Some observers noticed that the number of both tanks and troops on display in Moscow was down on previous years. Could this be because of the losses sustained during the Ukraine war? Or might there be another explanation perhaps to do with security concerns?

One person who keeps a particularly close eye on developments in Russia is Fiona Hill. She’s made a career as a Russia expert in academia and in the US government, serving in both Democratic and Republican administrations. Dr Hill angered some of her Democratic friends when she took a job in the Trump White House, and she angered Trump himself and his followers when she gave damning testimony about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine when he was impeached by Congress in 2019. Fiona Hill also made a point that Trump often denied that there had indeed been Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Fiona Hill
The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our own intelligence agencies confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.

Gideon Rachman
Fiona Hill is an old friend of mine. We met at a conference in Berlin recently. Afterwards, we sat down to talk. I began our discussion by asking Fiona about the much anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive. Will it be the crucial moment?

Fiona Hill
Well, I think that you know, part of the issue here is that we’ve made it an important moment. We’ve seen, of course, what has been a grinding war going on. We’ve all made the analogies with world war one. We’ve all seen, you know, the pictures, if we haven’t actually been there in person, of the front lines, places like Bakhmut. But, you know, this is kind of really the dilemma because when we look back at previous wars, we look back at world war one, we think of Verdun as being the decisive battlefield in France, of course, where you see the collapse of the German Reich and the Kaiser, although all of the devastation is in France itself. We start to think of all of the operations that we had in Normandy with the Normandy landings and, you know, armies fighting through different battles. And we think of them as consequential. And some of them might have been in pushing the tide one way or another. But in this case right now, in case of Ukraine, we have started to conjure up the idea of a consequential battle before it’s happened.

Gideon Rachman
I suppose it does remind me a bit, though, of the build-up to D-Day, you know, . . . 

Fiona Hill
Well, yes, exactly.

Gideon Rachman
 . . . where people [inaudible] was coming.

Fiona Hill
Exactly. It was coming, but they didn’t know whether it would be decisive in the way that they wanted it to be. And I think that that’s actually what it is that I’m worried about, that we build it up and it doesn’t necessarily go in the direction which we were hoping for, which doesn’t mean to say that it’s a massive Ukrainian defeat on the contrary, but it’s just it doesn’t turn the tide in any way.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, it was interesting when I was in Kyiv about a month ago, some people were saying, yes, this will be a decisive moment. But when we spoke to the Ukrainian foreign minister, Kuleba, he said don’t talk like that.

Fiona Hill
Yes, I agree with him. I think we shouldn’t be talking like that. I think that what it is telling us is more about where those of us who were not on the battlefields of Ukraine are in all of this, that there is just a mass revulsion, not just a kind of fatigue with a war, but a mass revulsion that we’re back to world war one, world war two, 20th-century slaughter again, and that you have, you know, people like Vladimir Putin talking about putting hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who were previously civilians working in IT or in air traffic control or in the city governments all the way around Russia on to a battlefield and just putting them out there like cannon fodder. We said we would never do this again, and here we are. So I think a lot of people want it to stop. We’ve had the pope talking about this very openly, for example. But he’s just really reflecting a sentiment that really, we’re gonna be presiding over this carnage? I mean, is this where we are morally and is this kind of where we’ve got to at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century?

Gideon Rachman
What’s your answer to that question?

Fiona Hill
I have to say that, you know, very sadly, this is where we’ve got to because there is a pattern in this. This is a 20th-century war. And I think we have to recognise it’s kind of like the last gasp of European imperial wars. In so far as Russia is the last standing continental land empire, Britain actually still has some elements of the older empires scattered overseas. But you know, with the exception of Russia, Austria, Hungary, Ottoman and other continental empires in Europe have disintegrated. We kind of moved on and Europe itself moved on into a whole different way of thinking about Europe. Looking forward, not back to all of the history. But first, you know, Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of history, you know, countries getting rid of a grip of history. Russia’s still in it. History, never ended for Vladimir Putin and the people around him. I think actually history ended for quite a lot of Russians. They were living their best lives over the last 20 years, moving on, being fully part of Europe. Obviously, it’s been a shock to the system there. But, you know, they’ve been pulled back to the 20th century wars because they . . . 

Gideon Rachman
And indeed, beyond. I mean, he talks about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great . . . 

Fiona Hill
Exactly! He’s actually not just taking us back to the 20th century. He’s taking us back to the 10th century because he talks about 988, which is the Christianisation of Rus, you know, some old mythical forebears of the Russian people. And Putin is taking us on this magical mystery tour of a past that’s just from a Russian perspective. And I think, you know, part of the problem we’ve had is that Europe has found it very difficult to deal with it, and in the United States it’s difficult to deal with as well, because, you know, as we know from all the various polling and testing in US schools, we have a very loose grasp in the United States of history. We have loose grasp, I think, of history in the United Kingdom and in many other countries as well. And so Putin is able to sort of dominate this historical landscape. Putin’s dragged us back to these earlier times, and we’re now gonna have to get used to thinking in these old patterns . . . 

Gideon Rachman
But do you think we have the resilience there, because I was talking again at the Munich Security Conference to a, you know, western securocrat, put it that way. He was saying, although we’d done a lot, we should be putting our economies on a semi-wartime footing. We’re not doing enough. What do you think?

Fiona Hill
Well, that’s what I was gonna get to. I mean, I much earlier on in the conflict felt this idea of world war three and got a lot of pushback from people. But what I meant by that was this is just exactly the structural point. You know, world war three doesn’t have to mean a kind of a big absolutist showdown, absolute victory over Russia. But when we look back to the other two wars that we called world wars, which all started off in a European context and had knock-on effects of the system-changing wars. They were also structurally very similar. I mean, part of the pushback we’ve had in the rest of the world is, isn’t this just another territorial conflict? Because of course, world war one and world war two were also territorial conflicts . . . 

Gideon Rachman
And that was the phrase DeSantis used.

Fiona Hill
That’s right. But it’s more than that because it’s about territorial conquest. It’s not just about where the borders are, but are you actually conquering people? You know, it’s about identity and it’s about the future. And it’s incredibly devastating. We have the largest land battles that we’ve seen in Europe since world war two. We have millions of refugees. Again, the largest refugee crisis in Europe. You know, notwithstanding what we already saw from the war in Syria and the other migration flows. That’s what I meant when I said we’ve unfortunately got to go back to that 20th-century frame of thinking about we have to deal with the exigencies of a war economy. But what we always have to do is think about the future here. We do not want to be irreversibly putting ourselves back into these old pathways.

Now when we look at Sweden and Finland, for example, wanting to join Nato, it’s not because they want to go back to the Nato of the 1950s or the 1960s or the 1980s. They want to think about new mechanisms and new security structures. But Nato and the collective defence is gonna have to be one of the principles that we work with. I mean that to me is one of the biggest changes and there’s something that really should be jolting. You know, the Finns spent the entire post-world war two and cold war period being prepared to defend themselves because they were left alone after being attacked in 1939. They fought the Soviets off during the winter war, but they lost a vast amount of territory, and they’re always prepared to make sure they could defend the territory that they had. And yet the same time, the Finns were some of the most progressive, in that neutral term of the word, people in Europe, and what did they do? They built up their own domestic resilience. They were preparing themselves to fight the Russians off to the last person they could. Remember they can take up to 280,000 people. That’s extraordinary! You know, a small, hundreds of millions of people. Everybody knew exactly what they would have to do in the event of an invasion. They’ve mined their border to an extreme level. So I think everybody would be quite shocked about. But they’ve also tackled corruption. They’ve tackled inequality. They’ve put an emphasis on their educational system and they’ve tried to have as much of a cohesive approach as they possibly can to all of the domestic politics, socio-economic and every issue. And that’s what we’re gonna have to do as well.

Gideon Rachman
But some people say, yes, I mean, there are these question marks about western resilience, staying power, but Russia’s in terrible trouble; that, you know, Putin miscalculated, that he’s lost. I don’t know what’s the figure you would . . . 200,000 people?

Fiona Hill
The recent statements from Bakhmut are shocking. Even the lower estimates are shocking, ’Cause you think about the losses for the Soviet Union. Again, 270mn people as opposed to Russia, 140mn in the 10 years of Afghanistan. They seem to have lost that in Bakhmut alone multiple times over. Putin’s thinking of that preponderance of cannon fodder, that he’s just got more people. And we’ve seen, of course, in Bakhmut the Wagner Group picking people up out of jails, but also, again, throwing all these civilians. We’ve seen a million people thereabouts leaving Russia, constant efforts to evade the draft. Some people are kind of, I think, now hunkering down and trying to avoid it in different ways. But it’s very clear that Putin is gonna continue to have this stealth draft taking people up as long as this war continues. And, you know, I think this is the dilemma that we have when you say how long can this continue? And fortunately, we see a certain resilience in authoritarian, almost verging on totalitarian states, which we look at the repressive apparatus in Russia now. They’re very brittle, they’re extraordinarily vulnerable to shocks. But because it’s all about control and negative output and you’re marshalling all of your resources towards one effort. You’ve got a war economy, you’ve got a war policy, you’ve got propaganda. Everything is now geared towards the war because Putin is not trying to give Russians anything else at this moment. So I think we have to make sure that we block him from getting as much support as we possibly can. Be that dual-use technologies, you know, coming from those countries, I mean, trying to head off the Iranians in terms of more weapons supplies and all the rumours that Iran is thinking about throwing their lot in big time. You know, North Korea, of course we’ve to make sure that there’s engagement with China to make sure that China knows what the stakes are for Europe and, you know, really itself in this conflict. We’ve got to make sure that our own political spaces are basically pushing back on Putin. I mean, there’s still this kind of resilience of the idea of Putin as a kind of a strong man’s . . . you wrote about this in your book, the strongman’s icon. You know, I mean, how many pictures or T-shirts have we seen with Putin with his aviator sunglasses on? You know, the contrast with Joe Biden also has the same kinds of aviator sunglasses but is a very different sort of approach to this. I mean, Putin’s no longer baring his chest and, you know, kind of riding around on horseback and things but . . . 

Gideon Rachman
What do you get, do you think he’s ill?

Fiona Hill
I think he’s just getting older and he could be ill. But we have to be very careful about speculating on that. So we have to be mindful that could be a possibility, but also be laser-focused on all of the eventualities and the likelihood that he could still be with us for quite some time. But I think, you know, what we do see is an enormous amount of tensions in the system. We see it coming from the hardliners in the military and the kind of these security bloggers who are around the Kremlin who are, you know, sort of under the control of the Kremlin, but sometimes not really who are pushing for a harder line on the wall. You can see it in the military itself, where there’s a great deal of resentment from not being consulted and all the generals and others who have died at the front. There’s a lot of disquiet there. And if we think back to the Gorbachev period, of course, I mean, you remember August, you know, of 1991 where there was a coup against Gorbachev by hardliners. That’s entirely possible that something like that could also happen. The question is how many of the people around him are really suffering directly from this in terms of casualties? We can’t say when the tipping points are with any accuracy.

Gideon Rachman
You used to run the National Intelligence Council. So how, from your knowledge of that, and then what in the White House, how good a handle would you guess the people are doing that kind of job now would have on what’s going on inside Russia?

Fiona Hill
Well, you can see from the intelligence sharing, let’s just say, that was done with the public ahead of the war that got a pretty good handle on what was gonna happen. But you can’t always say what the triggers are gonna be. And that’s kind of, for Putin, that’s also extremely dangerous. He is the wild card in the system. And then there are a lot of other wild cards, you know, that could come into play, because there is then the question of his health. There’s the health of a key number of people around him. Putin is extraordinarily dependent on the loyalty of the system and of key players in it.

Gideon Rachman
So this drone attack on the Kremlin, if that’s what it was, doesn’t look like what it was. How much of a blow to them would that be?

Fiona Hill
Well, it depends if it’s a false flag.

Gideon Rachman
Do you think it might be?

Fiona Hill
I mean, there’s a lot of people who do think it was a false flag. It could be teenagers. Look what we found out about that latest leak of classified information. I’ve made some joke to somebody it was some teenager.

Gideon Rachman
This is in the US.

Fiona Hill
And the US, yeah. I made some joke to a colleague — well, it could be teenagers, you know, hacking into a database. And actually, it was not far from the truth. I mean, I did it as a quip, not in a public discussion, but in a private discussion with someone, because it looked kind of weird. And I said, what if it was like the Jackass equivalent of international espionage? It proved to be exactly that. So, I mean, we don’t know yet what this is, just like there’s a lot of speculation about Nord Stream 2. I mean, initially I thought Nord Stream 2 was the Russians, because, you know, when I look back to past patterns, Putin comes out of a history of sabotage operations. He brags about his own father during world war two being in a destruction battalion, going behind enemy lines into Estonia, destroying all kinds of infrastructure so that the Nazis couldn’t use it. So my initial thought was, wow, you know, they destroyed that so that it would put pressure on Germany and Europe at the time when there was all this sort of debate about could they get through the war or maybe to kind of heighten that debate. Now I kind of wonder, was it other actors for Ukraine, for example? There’s all kinds of private actors. There’s all kinds of things that are completely possible. But in the case of this drone, the Russians intend to obviously use it. Peskov says it’s the United States and, you notice very cleverly what Peskov did too, he said: “Well we know that the United States has been providing targeting information.” Now where does he know the from? From this crazy release on the Discord site of information, which as you know, suggests that. So he’s kind of trolling us at the same time but it’s leaving for Russia open the justification for doing something really nasty at some point either in retaliation against the United States in some fashion or certainly retaliatory against Ukraine. I think, you know, what we have to do is we need to be tracking all of this really closely just to kind of get a full assessment and understand the context of things.

Gideon Rachman
I mean, there’s so much that’s contingent, you know, what’s gonna happen in the offensive, what could happen inside Russia? Is it worth even talking yet about trying to envisage what our future relationship with Russia would be after the war? Or is it just not even something that’s worth considering for the moment? Because we’re still in the middle of it.

Fiona Hill
No, because we don’t know what that Russia’s gonna look like, you know. So you have to be careful about that. But I do think that we should be looking to the future of Russia. First of all, if we look back over Russian history, we see all kinds of outcomes. We see one repressive government following another, but we also see reform as following a period of repression. We can go back to the Crimean war of the 1850s where Nicholas I totally overextended in trying to exert Russian power in the Black Sea, didn’t expect that there would be a European reaction, next gets the French, the Brits and the Ottomans joining forces, entirely unexpectedly, and of course it gave Britain the Battle of Balaclava, the Charge of the Light Brigade. Nightingale also.

Gideon Rachman
Florence Nightingale.

Fiona Hill
Florence Nightingale, the National Health service, thank you very much, and public health, you know, but it also pushed Russia eventually into a reformist period with the emancipation of the serfs. So I mean there’s you know, kind of analogies there where you see why reformist periods by necessity follow on from this kind of period of some debacle on the military or the security front. Again, you can also see, you know, more repression emerging out of things. So I think we have to be prepared for a bit of a wild ride. We might end up with, you know, a series of weak governments ahead, you know, we can pick plenty of other settings where you have a kind of a rapid change of leaders.

Gideon Rachman
So we don’t yet know whether the European security order, the future has to be built against Russia as it currently is, or whether there could be a place for Russia in a kind of friendly concert of nations.

Fiona Hill
But there can be a place for Russians at the moment as well. We’ve got a huge diaspora of Russians. Not all of these are opposed to the war, because we’ve got a lot of business people and others who picked up dual citizenship. You know, how do we try to figure out how to work with Russians in the places that we have them inside of Europe? Now we’ve done that before. I mean, the classic example is it was the German high command helping to facilitate Vladimir Lenin returning to Russia in the throes of the kind of revolution. I don’t think we want to start doing that kind of thing again. That didn’t turn out well for anybody.

Gideon Rachman
No.

Fiona Hill
But I think, you know, what we do want to do is start to think about how can we work with technocrats, Russian students, different generations. This is people who are not part of the oligarch class close to the Kremlin. Start thinking about Russia in a weird way where it’s kind of an occupied state with, you know, all kinds of people in exile in different places. So I think we’ve got to kind of look out there and thinking that, you know, this war is now into its second year. But a lot of people are scared. They’re being repressed. We have to understand that a lot of people are just trying to survive now in the system, when you’ve got people like Vladimir Kara-Murza getting 25 years for making political comments, Ilya Yashin, you know, extensive prison terms, people like Alexei Navalny pretty much almost a lifetime. It’s strange to me the way that they’re extending the terms, you can see how difficult is it for even the most brave person from stepping up. So we have to, I think, have a bit of empathy here. I mean, how many people, you know, listening to this podcast or any of us would stand up under those circumstances? And it’s extraordinarily difficult to imagine yourself doing that. And if you don’t get collective action and collective pushback — and we saw that run out of steam and momentum early on because of the repressive apparatus of the state, it makes it very difficult to . . . let’s just not write all the Russians off. Let’s think creatively about how we can engage, you know, universities in your various different networks, city governments, thinking about, you know, can you reach out to people from particular regions and cities? How can we think beyond just the old paradigms of the central government or the government versus the opposition? And so I think about the different groups of people that we can work with. The most important thing, of course, is to work with Ukrainians, and it shouldn’t be an either-or proposition here because I think you help Ukraine over the longer term if you have goodwill among groups of Russians going forward, as well as the willingness to admit on the part of many Russians just what the country has done.

Gideon Rachman
And it seems to be almost . . . well, it is accepted amongst Americans that in the big picture, China is the largest challenge and that Russia’s the problem now. But China is the big issue. Now, are we just slightly getting ahead of ourselves because it’s Russia that’s launched . . . 

Fiona Hill
I don’t agree with that and I worry that the more we talk about China, the more difficult it makes it to resolve this issue, because we need the broad support of the international community, the United Nations General Assembly. And we have lots of resolutions, but we need help and support in resolving this because it is having global ramifications, this war. I mean, yes, every war does, and it’s terrible what’s happening in Sudan now and what’s going on in Yemen and Syria. We should be doing more on all these fronts. So maybe we can start with this conflict in setting precedents for the future about how as a larger community we will deal with these, because it’s a knock-on effects of food and the food-fertiliser cycle; it’s the militarisation. I think bioweapons are gonna be sloshing around now, you know, when we’ll be trying to move away from landmines. It’s a knock-on of energy trade patterns. It’s like another major disruption on top of everything that’s happened with Covid and everything else. But the United States is pushing this paradigm of this idea as well, that the future’s aren’t all gonna be about a clash between the US and China. The rest of the world doesn’t want to be part of that. And the more that we’re talking about this, the more the other countries start to think, well, uh-huh, hang on a second, Ukraine is a proxy war between the US and China, not even between US and Russia. And that disincentivises then China and other countries to get involved in trying to create a diplomatic solution to this. And I think there’s a lot that needs to be done here to get it out of this paradigm that this is somehow part of a larger struggle between US and China. The problem in the United States is trying to maintain support in a very polarised domestic environment. So this is very difficult because Ukraine’s become a kind of a domestic issue. So what we have to be making very clear is that Ukraine is very meaningful for that whole post-world war two UN charter. It should be meaningful for other countries as well. But we’re now starting to see, well, China’s watching because it’s a way of getting the Republican party or some factions of the Republican party and some of the political stalwarts to enter their . . . 

Gideon Rachman
To maintain their (inaudible) in Ukraine.

Fiona Hill
 . . . In Ukraine, exactly, it’s backfiring. So many other countries and leaders and elites say, well, hang on then . . . 

Gideon Rachman
This all about American power.

Fiona Hill
. . . while this is all about China, it’s all about American power. And then it also backfires where others say, well, then we have to get rid of this whole Russia stuff to move on with China. And of course, Russia is getting more and more dependent on China. People are constantly saying, is that a way we can play that? Well, Russia’s got nowhere to go but China. I mean, China’s not rushing towards Russia. But China’s view is, you know, the enemy of my enemy is grace is very useful here. So they’ve got more incentive of keeping this going and they don’t want Russia to lose because there’s a lot of countries out there in the world and it’s not just who we might think who see Russia as a hedge as well on armaments like India because they’re worried about China. This is such a complicated set of things to factor in here. They worry about China in the Himalayas, but there’s countries like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan in central Asia, Kazakhstan, probably, you know, to some degree as well that worry about a complete implosion of Russia, what it means to their economies and are they really stuck with just China.

Gideon Rachman
OK. Well, last question. You’ve been very preoccupied recently not just about the traditional foreign policy questions, but increasingly about the domestic resilience of our own societies. And you famously fell out with your former boss, Donald Trump. He is running again. How worried are you about the domestic political situation in the United States?

Fiona Hill
Yeah, well, I was never really in with him, you know, to start with, but I think the issue that we’ve had with Trump is he’s the classic populist politician. The fact that he promises enormous amounts of benefits to the people who are gonna vote for him and he doesn’t really deliver. But when it come to some of the core of his voters, when we think about how he was elected in the electoral college with 70, 80,000 people in three states and the midwest; Pennsylvania, Michigan and also Wisconsin, but I mean there were lots of voters in Ohio and in other states as well in the electoral college. A lot of that was based on grievances as a result of regional inequality. These are the states that got left behind in the big shifts in industry. You can basically see him still feeding into the same pattern of grievance. Now there’s the political identity aspect to this, but it’s really kind of emerging out of that sense of people not being fully participatory in the larger system and not getting benefits out of it. Everything is changing. You know, they lost their socio-economic positions, their identity, and it’s tied into that; the culture changing as the demography changes. Trump’s got an awful lot that he can basically tap into there. He’s whipped it up consistently right since the beginning of his first campaigns, you know, going back to 2015 and onwards. And I’m extraordinary worried about this. I mean, this is incredibly dangerous. We’ve all, you know, seen this script before, and here is Putin doing this in Russia. I mean, the reason that we’re where we are today is that Putin emerged out of the 1990s in Russia to try to transform the economy, which was just shock, you know, therapy and lots of people unemployed, lots of people losing their identity, the collapse of the Soviet Union. There’s grievances all emerging. Putin playing on them, promising to make Russia great again. And now we have a full-blown authoritarian state that’s marauding around its neighbours. I’m not sure the United States has to be marauding around the neighbours, there’s more of a sort of isolationist, you know, back to our country, strand.

Gideon Rachman
The country itself (inaudible ). . . 

Fiona Hill
Well, the country itself could very well implode under these pressures, particularly for a minority government, because it’s hard to envisage Trump winning the popular vote. He hasn’t, yes. But Putin wins the popular vote because there’s no parties, there’s no checks and balances in the system. But that’s what Trump wants to have. He’s making this all about the presidency, and it’s all about the power of the presidency, the power of the individual, not the executive branch, but of him as well. He’s promising to be people’s retribution, their vengeance, their champion.

Gideon Rachman
His language has . . . 

Fiona Hill
His language has become more extreme. It’s very much like the language of Putin. This is a man who effected a coup. It didn’t succeed, but it was a coup nonetheless. And he’s got the congressional policy behind him in this. This is all the things that we’ve seen, you know, right out of history and the way that autocrats and authoritarian leaders emerge. That’s where the United States is heading. And again, it’s tied into these underlying inequalities and grievances.

Now, the Biden administration, Biden himself and some of the people around him, definitely recognised all of this and the whole Build Back Better and the whole series of various acts including the Inflation Reduction Act is meant to actually address regional inequality. And this is where I start to worry more broadly, tying this back to Russia and the Ukraine. The European Union and Germany and a few other countries individually, UK included, was levelling up, have rediscovered regional policy, recognising that these regional inequalities are leading to political polarisation and outcomes that nobody really likes. But if it’s not sustained, you don’t have both the focus and the policy bandwidth and the resources to do this. Then you know you’re not gonna succeed. And we’ve got a heck of a lot of diversion of attention and resources to the war in Ukraine. Ultimately, our democratic systems have to deliver.

And there’s been polling after polling done by whole ranges of think tanks and governments that show that when people are asked about democracy, yes, personal and individual freedoms and rights of assembly are important, but always in the sort of top three is prosperity and improvement of economic situation. And in some countries, people very openly say that I would just have less of democracy however they define it, if my personal circumstance would improve more. And that’s where the Trumps and Putins and others come in. Now, Putin’s just ruptured that completely in Russia. You know, I’ll send you to the front, and you can die in Bakhmut or somewhere else. And Trump never came through.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Gideon Rachman
That was Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution talking to me in Berlin. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next week.