Putin Is Rational in His Own Context. Fiona Hill Spent a Lifetime Learning It

Fiona Hill was born in 1965 in a County Durham coal town, in the years when British coal was already in decline. By the time she arrived, her father had lost job after job: every pit he worked in closed. He had gone down the mine at fourteen, his father at thirteen, earlier generations at twelve or thirteen. Nobody in the family was educated past that point, because the expectation on every street was the same: you would go down the mine like everyone else.

Without qualifications, he moved through manual work that also vanished — a steelworks, a brickworks — and ended as a porter in a National Health Service hospital, pushing patients. There was no path to retrain. The family conversation, Hill tells Lex Fridman, collapsed onto one subject: education. The world was changing fast; to keep up, you needed qualifications and a way out. Very early, her father told her, "There's nothing for you here." The line later became the title of her memoir.

Being a girl, she says, was an advantage. There was no expectation she would go into industry. Her mother had left school at sixteen, trained as a nurse, then as a midwife; relatives taught in local schools. Women in the family already treated education as a real occupation, not a decoration. The instruction was to do something with your life — and the accompanying sense that you would probably have to leave. That mix, circling her through her teenage years, is the origin story of a White House Russia adviser with a Northeast English accent the impeachment cameras made famous.

Like many working-class children, Hill tried on jobs she could actually see. She had a Nurse Nancy magazine and a little uniform like her mother's. In the semi-rural fields she watched vets with livestock; James Herriot, already famous in print and on television, had treated a great-aunt's dog. Then she saw a local vet with his arm stuck inside a cow that was kicking him, and she dropped the idea. Education, in that household, was never for its own sake. It was a qualification to *do* something.

Around fourteen, a local MP who had come from a hard-scrabble background and read philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford gave the class a pep talk. You can get an education, he said; circumstances need not hold you. If you get one, it is a privilege, and you must use it. Most people around her had jobs, not careers. Her mother's nursing was the exception — grim dining-table stories of breached births and fistulas that made Hill sure she would not follow. What cinched the choice was timing. County Durham, even as industry and local government collapsed, still funded education and exchanges with Germany, France, and the old textile town of Kostroma near Yaroslavl.

The Euro-missile crisis had hung over her from 1977. In 1983, during NATO's Able Archer exercises, the Soviets misread U.S. intentions as preparation for a first nuclear strike — a near-miss she only fully understood later. As a teenager she was prepped for Armageddon: *Threads*, *The Day After*, public-service ads telling families to find a room without windows. Their house was too small for that. Her father hung thick curtains against the flash; they tried squeezing into the cupboard under the stairs, "like Harry Potter." A great-uncle, Charlie, who had fought in World War II, gave her the assignment that stuck: she was good at languages, so she should study Russian and "figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up." Britain, America, and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies. Something had gone wrong. She pictured herself in a big headset at a future arms-control summit.

Few schools in her impoverished region taught Russian. She would have to start from scratch, with an intensive summer course she could not afford, in the year of the 1984 miners' strike. County Durham's miners had ties with Donbas going back to the 1920s. Studying Russian history, she found the industrial regions had been built up at the same time, often by the same industrialists. Donetsk had been Hughesovka, founded by a Welsh industrialist who brought Welsh miners to develop coal and steel. The early Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin had worked in the Newcastle shipyards. In 1984, miners from Donbas, the Ruhr, and Poland sent solidarity money to Durham.

Uncle Charlie told her there were scholarships for miners' children. At Red Hills, the miners' hall, the Durham men had pooled resources into something like their own parliament: lectures, soccer teams, writing circles of the kind George Orwell knew in other pit districts. The application was the easiest she ever made. Her father came; staff pulled his employment cards from a tray, asked how much she needed for travel and basic expenses, and wrote a check. "Thanks to the miners of Donbas" and the money held by the Durham Miners Association, she got her first Russian tuition. A discarded community still had the institutions to fund its own.

She learned to read maps by industry, not by capital. The Northeast was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, "the industrial version of Silicon Valley," a melting pot from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the English Midlands. Donbas was the same: people from everywhere, older rural communities underneath. Trouble starts, she says, "when somebody else tries to impose an identity like on you from the outside." That, in her view, is Donbas. Moscow's claim that Russian speakers belong to Russia is the claim she answers with home: English was the lingua franca of her region, yet Welsh and Irish speakers built a distinct industrial identity anyway. Language, religion, and pay are not always the bonds that win. An identity used as a mobilizing tool can override them.

When Hill first went to the Soviet Union in 1987, to the Maurice Thorez Translators Institute in Moscow, she was struck by how familiar it felt: one big working-class culture on a national stage. Northern England had been nationalized — British Steel, British Coal, British Rail, British Shipbuilding — after the private sector was devastated in the war. The Soviet Union was that pattern at empire scale. People did not work for themselves; they worked for somebody else, and it distorted how they saw the world. She still speaks Russian; a few sentences with Fridman, she jokes, would be "a big mystery for everybody."

She arrived in September 1987, at the peak of perestroika, weeks from the INF Treaty that ended the missile crisis of her teens. Gorbachev was opening the country: she traveled to the Caucasus, Central Asia, and as far as Khabarovsk. It was also the millennium of the Christianization of Rus, 988, a revival of the Orthodox Church as a public actor — something she did not expect to witness, and a theme that later became central to Putin's story. Moscow was her first big city. First opera and first ballet were at the Bolshoi. Then the terror of the nuclear superpower dropped away. Ordinary people, in an ordinary place, were not doing well.

It was the era of *defitsit*. Supply and demand had come apart under central planning. In a Hungarian boot shop next to her hall of residence, every pair was the same size and color — all women's, no men's. In County Durham the shops were shuttered because nobody had money: when she left for university in 1984, youth unemployment was about 90 percent, and some towns had 50 percent male unemployment as steel and railway wagon works closed. In Moscow people had money and nothing to buy. The city was physically falling apart: sinkholes, balconies dropping off buildings. A year or so after she left, already in Soviet studies at Harvard, the union unraveled. She resists the word collapse. Gorbachev had sparked so many fights among elites, and so much loss of faith on the periphery, that in 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus simply ended it.

Fridman asks how often, in a thousand reruns of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union would fall. Hill points to Vladislav Zubok's *Collapse*: it was an elite project. Traveling the late-1980s Soviet Union, she did not meet people who wanted the country to disappear. She worries about a rhyme in America — colleagues talk of "soft secession" between red and blue states — though the mechanics are different, and she agrees with Fridman that few Texans actually want to leave. Complaining about government is not the same as dismantling the state. What does worry her is elite factionalism overlaying national politics on local life. When she arrived in the United States in 1989, she rarely knew anyone's party or religion. She does now.

Hill served in the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump administrations, always on Eurasia and Russia, including as a top adviser on Russia and Europe to Trump. In the 2019 impeachment inquiry she said she took great pride in being a nonpartisan foreign-policy expert. To her that means refusing an ideological lens on the analysis, and refusing to take one party's side. American parties still confound her: big tents, loose movements, an à la carte menu. Trump could be a Democrat, then a Republican, and usurp a party apparatus without an ideological vetting. Affiliation, she says, has come to look like a sports team. A relative kept a book titled *100 Reasons for Voting for a Democrat*. It was blank.

Fridman offers a test: if you cannot name one good thing Trump or Biden did, you have picked a tribe. Hill agrees, and goes further. Trump often asked why something was being done at all, in a form most officials would not use. The real-estate developer in him swung a wrecking ball at sacred edifices, and he often had no answer for what came next. The questions, she says, still had to be asked. Fridman argues that lack of civility can be a strength against comfortable bureaucracy; Hill draws a line at name-calling and incitement to violence. Those, she says, get you nowhere.

Europe was in her portfolio. Trump kept asking why the United States spent so much on NATO defense if Europe was paying Russia billions for gas — the Nord Stream 2 fight, a U.S. concern since the 1970s and 1980s. A European defense minister told her he was saying the same things former Defense Secretary Robert Gates had said; it was the way he said it. They took offense, and then they would not act. The work, for Hill's team, was to massage the delivery so the message — often "spot on" about the gap between what people said and what they did — could land. Maximum pressure, kept on in the right way, sometimes moved NATO issues that had not moved before. It was overshadowed by how he treated people.

The heart of her testimony, she says, is a straight line to the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and those around him concluded that the United States did not care about Ukraine, that it was a game. For Trump it looked personal: asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a favor tied to the 2020 election. Generally, they thought Washington was using Ukraine as an instrument in domestic politics. Even before the scandal, people around Putin such as Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia's Security Council, would ask, "What's Ukraine to you? We don't get it. Why do you even care?" They decided America was not serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity. Putin also thought he could manipulate U.S. political space — and, she says, he could — by seeding the idea that Ukraine was a burden that had played inside American elections.

Trump was convinced Ukrainians had intervened against him, a mix of aides diverting attention from Russia's 2016 interference and Russians poisoning the well. What Hill tried to get across was a national-security imperative: separate domestic politics from foreign policy. The mess around impeachment, and the parallel policies toward Ukraine, contributed to the war now being fought. Asked whether testifying against a president broke her heart, she says no. She was deeply disappointed. She had been a starry-eyed immigrant, already disabused about American racial history, but still a believer in the competence of U.S. institutions. She had watched the National Intelligence Council wrestle with the botched Iraq analysis. Then she found herself in an Alice-through-the-looking-glass version of American politics.

What was heartbreaking was watching principles thrown out the window, and having to defend colleagues who were getting death threats for doing their jobs. Nonpartisan officials were attacked from left and right, especially the right — deep state, coup plotters, patriotism questioned. Many were immigrants and refugees; many had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were, she says, what actually made America great: people from everywhere trying to form a more perfect union. Instead they were treated as dirt in a game. She thought: are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland? Fine. She had chosen America. She was all in. "These guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots and they're ruining it."

Fridman zooms out from personal attacks to results. Bush's great mistake is Iraq — how it was invaded, how the decision was made. Obama, who rose as a rare early opponent of that war, presided over more drone strikes and a military machine that grew rather than shrank, and he did not leave Afghanistan. Trump's chaos, in the steelman, is a wrench in the gears: every gear hates it, but maybe the system is forced to reconsider. Hill is for questioning and shaking things up. The question is what you put in place if you bring the system down.

She reaches for revolutionaries: rigidity of thought, and narcissism. It takes a strong sense of self to want the presidency; many presidents have been narcissists in degree. Lenin, she notes, formed his views around eighteen and never shook them. Trump, had he brought in other perspectives and listened instead of dividing people against each other, might have used the disruption. Instead it was "a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature." Factionalism made Americans forget they were Americans and think they were red or blue teams — a recipe, she says, that runs toward the Nika riots in Constantinople, when Hippodrome factions pulled the city apart.

Bush and Obama also governed in narrow circles: Cheney's executive focus; Obama and "the bright young things," intellectually sure of himself; Bush calling himself "the decider." Trump's version was not listening to anybody at all. Science, she says, got COVID vaccines through years of sharing results. Government is siloed, Congress campaigns constantly, the senior executive service is aging, and skilled younger people are poached to consultancies and Silicon Valley after being lambasted as not real public servants. She wants fewer political appointments, more professional ones, term limits in spirit if not in law, and teams that mix generations. Nonpartisan experts exist; a charged environment forces them to take sides. Standing up against a president clinging to power, she argues, is not automatically a partisan act. It can be a defense of the system.

Looking back, Hill thinks the impeachment weakened the country in how it was conducted. It was a civics lesson and an exercise of responsibility, then it failed to show accountability. She saw dereliction especially among Republican members who should have embraced Congress's prerogatives; she also disliked Democratic grandstanding and the refusal to admit that some had called Trump illegitimate from the start, so that many voters read the whole thing as 2016 continued. On the Republican side, someone winked at her in the middle of it: don't take this personally, it's a game. From outside, the gold-standard country looked careless with itself.

She had taken an oath of office and, earlier, of citizenship. After Russia's 2016 influence operation she went into the administration because the house was on fire. She knew the place and the people; she did not take Russia as an extension of self. Putin's operation, she says, was a classic Soviet-style influence campaign that went beyond anything they anticipated because of social media and American fragility. A Russian ambassador, hearing U.S. complaints, asked whether America was a banana republic so vulnerable to such efforts. He had a point. Putin did not start America's domestic fires; he added accelerant.

Putin and Trump, she argues, operated in parallel, not in collusion: both understood performance and free attention. Putin is a political performance artist with a Kremlin machine behind him. What the Russians wanted was the *perception* that they had steered the election. The huge Democratic mistake, which she kept pushing against, was to say they had elected Trump. "Americans elected Donald Trump." The Electoral College was not Putin's invention; neither were Comey, Clinton's emails, or Anthony Weiner's laptop. Kremlin champagne corks popped because others needed a meta-explanation. They knew they had not done it. They loved to take credit. People then lost faith in election integrity over a hack of minds, not of machines. The bigger threat than bot armies, she says, is how people process information: a lack of critical thinking. Her godfather used to spread out every Sunday paper from *The Guardian* to *The Sun* and show a teenager how vantage points work. Everyone, she says, should have that.

Why does Trump arouse so much emotion? Hill does not feel deranged by him. She felt sorry for a man so wrapped up in himself, so open to manipulation, with zero self-awareness. She also felt sorry that he became president. Fridman insists critics must load in that roughly half the country voted for him — more in 2020 than in 2016 — and empathize with what voters saw. She agrees: personal histories and places shape views. The presidency, though, is a personality contest, a hybrid of head of state, chief executive, and commander in chief. Some voted because he stuck a middle finger to the establishment, the same hunger for change that elected Obama; some of her relatives found Obama's voice beautiful and Trump exciting. "Could you have a beer with this person" still does more work than platforms.

Asked in what ways Putin has been good and bad for Russia, Hill starts with the first two presidential terms. Chechnya was a black period he did not start — Yeltsin did — but the FSB he had headed wrapped it up, with atrocities and a strange feudal fealty to Ramzan Kadyrov that distorted the federation toward the security services. On the rest of the ledger he stabilized the economy, built an impressive team of technocrats at the central bank and finance ministry, paid off debts, opened the country for business. By the end of those terms, putting Chechnya aside, "Russians were living their best lives": labor paid, taxes drawn from extractive industries, more pluralism than Yeltsin's chaos.

The shift comes when he returns in 2011–2012. He has become convinced the United States is out to get him, a belief Hill traces through Iraq in 2003, Kosovo in 2008, and NATO expansion, and through the 2008–2009 financial crash that, as prime minister, showed him the West was incompetent. His return met protests; like Americans who could not believe Trump was elected without interference, Putin believed the West had stirred Moscow and St. Petersburg via NGOs and embassy funding. Somewhere in those years he begins to obsess about Ukraine and about reconstituting the Russian world. He has always called the Soviet collapse the great catastrophe of the twentieth century; he starts criticizing Lenin and saying Ukrainians and Russians are one people. The ledger flips: he is no longer focused on Russia's prosperity and future, but on the past.

Annexing Crimea in 2014 is, in her view, the beginning of the end of Putin as a positive force. Listen to the March 2014 speech and you hear the foreshadowing: historical obsession, himself fused with the state as a modern tsar, the West out to get him, a messianic mission. The people around him matter less as individual puppeteers than as a shared worldview. A restorationist wing in the security services wanted Orthodoxy back as an instrument of the state. Putin spent perestroika in Dresden watching East Germany fall, short of information. He compartmentalizes; he has said the only person he trusts is himself. COVID isolation, she is convinced, hardened him. Briefers get two minutes at a long table. He is an operative, not a military planner, who prefers raw intelligence to someone else's analysis. He clearly made the decision to invade beyond the back of most of the security establishment, with a handful of people.

Hill is sure Putin thought Ukrainians would fall apart in seconds. Zelenskyy was unpopular; polling showed affinity with Russia among Russian speakers; Crimea had worked. The same playbook failed in Donbas in 2014 and in cities such as Odesa. He expected 1956 Hungary or 1968 Czechoslovakia: decapitate the opposition, local governments capitulate, Zelenskyy runs the way Yanukovych ran. He comes out of the Andropov cohort, schooled in suppressing dissent and putting uprisings back in the box. He mistook language and positive feeling toward Russia for identity, and missed how people feel about place when it is under attack.

Fridman objects that 2022 is not Chechnya or Syria: a wide front, the capital, a major nation. Hill agrees Putin did not think it would be that. Ukrainians were "us." There was an inability to imagine that thirty years of independence changes psyches. In 1990s Harvard seminars she already heard the Yeltsin-era talk of Russians in the near abroad who must be brought back — and the counter that Russian speakers might have moved on. Scotland is her analogy: English is not the standard of Scottish identity. Kharkiv was a Russian-speaking city and also a center of Ukrainian culture. Growing up in the north of England, she did not feel like the south. Putin just did not see it.

Fridman steelmans the miscalculation: if you had polled Ukrainians before the invasion, many might have predicted the government would flee. Hill answers with 1941: you might have said the same of the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded. Most countries rise to their own defense. This is one of the first times Russia has been on the offensive rather than the defensive. Glory in Russian memory is chasing Napoleon to Paris and hanging a flag over the Reichstag — defensive wars. Even fractured populations rally; Stalin had to revive nationalism, including in the republics, to fight World War II. Putin reads history from one angle. Peskov said he reads Russian history constantly. Hill's wish: he should read world history, and some European historians of Russia, not only Russian ones. The United States made the same mistake in Vietnam, seeing a country as a Chinese and Soviet proxy. The Vietnamese fought for themselves.

Was the invasion provoked by NATO? Hill says the situation is more complicated and older than 2008. She thought the NATO open door for Ukraine and Georgia was a strategic blunder: no thought-through implications, and it came after Kosovo and Iraq, both central to Putin's psyche. Crimea's annexation followed Ukraine's association agreement with the European Union, not NATO. An EU path, via the *acquis communautaire*, would transform Ukraine the way it transformed Poland and Slovakia. The deeper problem, from the early 1990s, was Ukraine getting away. Nationalists in Moscow pressed to turn the Commonwealth of Independent States into a rematch, not a divorce. Ukraine inherited Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil; accusations of dirty bombs flew from the Duma. Yeltsin lacked the wherewithal to pull neighbors back. When Russia recovered, security nationalists wanted the core states — Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, northern Kazakhstan — as close as possible. Anything that offered an alternative looked hostile. NATO carries Cold War connotations, and Putin treats it as a U.S.-dominated Warsaw Pact in reverse.

What the "provoked by NATO" line is really about, she argues, is a return to bipolar bargaining: the United States and Russia thrashing everything out, denying agency to Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, even France. Putin wants a concert of Vienna, or Yalta, or Reagan and Gorbachev. The war is also about a strongman's right to determine outcomes with other big countries. Yes, some in the American establishment like a three-power world; they do not dominate, and Moscow mirror-images U.S. messiness as if every article were White House policy. Hill's own verdict on the Russia account: the United States has taken its eye off the ball and failed to understand how Putin thinks. "We've gotta have strategic empathy about Putin as well." He has a context, a frame, a rationale. "He is a rational actor in his own context." The West is not necessarily to blame for its actions; it is to blame when it does not understand the consequences and act accordingly.

If Fridman sat down with Putin, Hill would warn that Putin uses questions the way a recruiter does, and that meetings often collapse into whataboutism — Iraq versus Ukraine. The best channel is one-on-one in Russian. She used to jump out of her skin on interpreted phone calls: simultaneous translation catches fragments and loses the picture; consecutive breaks the flow; a refined woman's voice rendering Putin's crude, menacing, funny Russian loses the man. Putin is precise; there is deliberate menace and timed jokes. Watch the smirk, the slouch, the ad lib. Trump works in atmosphere and slogans; Putin conveys a lot in the words. In conversation he spars like a boxer. He has been telegraphing grievance for years. The West did not pay attention. After twenty-two years in place, views ossify. Nobody, she says, should be in the job forever.

She thinks the 2024 calendars — Putin, Zelenskyy, the United States — were already in the February 2022 calculus. He expected it over by March, then two years to prepare an election, with a Crimea-style ratings rocket. Almost nobody she met in Russia thought taking Crimea was a bad thing. She does not think he planned to annex all of Ukraine; he wanted something like Belarus, a new union, Ukraine removed as an independent factor, Crimea consolidated, maybe Donetsk and Luhansk. On Alexei Navalny, her point is not a hit job. He is not a Western stooge. He is a Russian nationalist and patriot who has played on ethnic tensions, wants different people in charge, and is not Lenin. Replacing one man with another from the same system is not a guarantee of a different Russia. Context constrains: Gorbachev, Khrushchev, even Britain's rapid turnover of Conservative prime ministers.

Would Russia use a tactical nuclear weapon? Putin, Hill says, is the sort of person who, given an instrument, wants to know how to use it: polonium, Novichok, Syria, and now General Sergei Surovikin, "General Armageddon." The question is his estimate that an outrage will make everyone back off — escalate to de-escalate, in Western jargon. He reads Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a war stopped by escalation. Big bombing campaigns often have the opposite effect: they make people fight, as in Ukraine. The task is to show him he will not get capitulation. The threat is already doing work. She argues he is using civilian plants — Chornobyl, Zaporizhzhia, Pivdennoukrainsk — as a dirty bomb, stirring radioactive dust, putting the IAEA into panic, cutting Ukrainian power, frightening Germans, and putting a tactical nuclear weapon on the table without a mushroom cloud. People start talking about Cuban Missile Crisis diplomacy and negotiating Ukraine away.

The United States, she believes, has several plans, depending on what, where, when, how. The field is no longer bipolar: China, North Korea, India and Pakistan, states that want capacity. If Ukraine's 1994 Budapest Memorandum bargain — nukes given up for promises of territorial integrity — is shown to be empty, Seoul, Tokyo, Riyadh, Ankara, and others will draw the lesson. Putin is thinking short term, still convinced he can win or freeze on his terms: Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, recognition, Zelenskyy gone. He declared war more explicitly on September 30. China is watching; it was the largest single investor in Ukraine before the war, and Xi does not want to look as if backing Putin was a mistake.

She hopes for a ceasefire and a negotiated solution, but only with Russia compromising, which is not where things are. For Ukraine, anything now is compromise at its expense: devastation, casualties, the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Russia is not opening a negotiation; it is demanding recognition of seizures. Ukraine has already won a moral, political, and military victory that is hard to see in the rubble — the Winter War, in which Finland lost territory and remained Finland. Putin has succeeded at devastation. That, she says, is an old Muscovite pattern: destruction is the point, teaching who is boss. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky left the penal colony, Putin said he had suffered enough. She does not think Putin feels Ukraine, or the West, has suffered enough. Hatred of Russians among Ukrainians may take a generation, as her World War I grandfather would not speak to the German exchange student in her house. Europe found a way with Germany. The question is what to do with Russia.

Hope, for Hill, is that people have gotten out of tough times before, and that people evolve even when Putin has gotten stuck. Institutions that kept the peace were neglected; they can be repaired if there is will. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Her advice to the young is local and small: she was eleven and in a Save the Whales network. Voices matter more when amplified without becoming voices of hate. Reach back a generation: if you are fourteen, help someone who is seven. There were black moods; an old woman once sat on a bench, put an arm around a crying child, and said it could not be that bad. Her father, Alf, once walked her to the rundown estate where the girl who bullied her lived with a grandfather who knew him. The bullying stopped. There is always a reason someone is doing something. She still tries to listen for the thread in common, even when people wanted harm to come to her. Fridman's last charge is that her words have power in a dangerous time. "Let's just keep it together."