Fiona Hill is a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Fiona's Books:
There Is Nothing for You Here: https://amzn.to/3TR0nN9
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin: https://amzn.to/3WiGU9F

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:19 - Education and career
12:05 - Donbas in the 20th century
20:23 - Soviet Union
30:58 - Donald Trump's foreign policy
42:58 - Testifying against Donald Trump
49:49 - US administrations
1:11:23 - Impeachment of Donald Trump
1:31:39 - Why people like Donald Trump
1:40:44 - Vladimir Putin
2:00:53 - Invasion of Ukraine
2:15:58 - NATO implication in Ukraine war
2:28:49 - Interviewing Vladimir Putin
2:41:17 - 2024 elections
2:44:25 - Alexei Navalny
2:48:58 - Nuclear war
3:00:49 - How Ukraine war will end
3:07:35 - Hope for the future
3:10:43 - Advice for young people

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We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well.

We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does.

He has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale.

He is a rational actor in his own context.

We've got to understand that he would take offense at something and he would take action over something.

It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessary to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly, or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.

What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon?

The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia.

She has served the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump.

She has made it to the White House from Humble Beginnings in the north of England, a story she tells in her book, There's Nothing for You Here.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill.

You came from humble beginning in a coal mining town in Northeast England.

So what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today?

I was born in 1965 and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already and you know basically my father by the time I came along had lost his job multiple times, every coal mine he worked in was closing down.

He was looking constantly for other work and he had no qualifications because at age 14, he'd gone down the mines.

His father had gone down the mines at 13, his great-grandfather around the same age.

I mean, you had a lot of people at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, 14.

They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, hey, you're gonna go down the mine like everybody else in your family.

And then he didn't really have any other qualifications to basically find another job beyond something in manual labor.

So he worked in a steel works, that didn't work out, a brick works, that closed down.

And then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom as a porter, an orderly, so basically somebody's just pushing people around.

So the big issue in my family was education.

The world is changing, it's changing really quickly.

For you to keep up with it, you're going to have to get educated and find a way out of this.

And very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here.

You're gonna have to, if you want to get ahead.

And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl I wouldn't.

I mean, actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy.

There was no expectation that I would go into industry.

There was some kind of idea that maybe if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse.

My mother was a midwife, and so she, at age 16, left school and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife.

I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools.

So there was an idea that women could get educated, and there was a range of things that you could do.

But the expectation then was, go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave.

So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years, as I was trying to sort of find my way through life and looking forward.

First of all, what does that even look like?

Getting educated, given the context of that place, you don't know, there's a whole world of mystery out there.

So how do you figure out what to actually do out there?

But was there moments, formative moments, either challenging or just inspiring, where you wondered about what you want to be, where you want to go?

I think like a lot of kids, you talk to people, particularly from blue collar backgrounds, say, what did you want to do?

At 1 point, as a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse.

I had a little nurse's uniform like my mother.

I didn't really know what that meant, but I used to go around pretending to be a nurse.

I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy, and I used to read this.

Also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area, and I'd be out in the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers with their animals, and I'd see vets coming along and watching people deal with the livestock.

There was a famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot.

It became here in the United States as well, was a TV miniseries.

He'd written a book and he was the vet for 1 of my great aunt's dogs.

People were always talking about him and I thought, I could be a vet.

And then 1 day I saw 1 of the local vets with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field.

got his hand stuck and the cow was kicking him.

So I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education.

But the whole sense was you had to apply your education.

It wasn't an education for education's sake.

And when I was about 14 or 15, my local member of parliament came to the school.

And it was 1 of these pep talks for kids in these deprived areas.

He had been quite prominent in local education.

And now he was a member of parliament, he himself had come from a really hard scrabble background and had risen up through education.

He'd even gone to Oxford and done philosophy, politics, and economics.

And he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really gonna get ahead and go to elite institutions, look, you can get an education.

You don't have to be held back by your circumstances.

But if you do get an education, it's a privilege and you need to do something with it.

So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do?

Okay, an education is a qualification, it's to do something.

Most people around me I knew didn't have careers.

I mean, my dad didn't really have a career, he had jobs.

My mom thought of her nursing as a career though, and it genuinely was, and she was out there trying to help women survive childbirth.

My mother had these horrific stories, basically over the dining room table, I wish she'd stop, she'd leave out her nursing books.

I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother, there'd be no reproduction on the planet.

It was just these grim, horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, my God, what?

So I thought, well, I don't necessarily want to go in that direction.

But it was the timing that really cinched things for me.

I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decline, deindustrialization, and the complete collapse of the local government system around me, still maintained money for education.

And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany and France, also in Russia in Kostroma near Yaroslavl, for example, an old textile town similar, down in its kind of region, but quite historic in the Russian context.

In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context.

And so it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages, I studied German, I studied French.

And then in 1983, there was the war scare, basically provoked by the Euro Missile Crisis.

So the stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War.

And this Euro missile crisis over SS-20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977, so when I was about 11 or 12, you know, all the way through into the later part of the 1980s.

And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict.

It was very much another rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The Soviets misread, although I didn't know this at the time, I know a lot of this after the fact, but the tension was palpable.

But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises, Operation Able Archer, that the United States was conducting and actually thought that the United States might be preparing for a first nuclear strike.

And that then set off a whole set of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union.

Eventually, it was recognized that all of this was really based on misperceptions.

Of course, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces, the INF Treaty.

But in 1983, that tension was just acute.

For as a teenager, we were basically being prepped the whole time for the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon.

There were TV series, films in the United States and the UK, threads the day after.

We had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast.

My house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window.

My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window, you know, and said if there was a nuclear flash, you know, we'd have to, you know, get down on the floor, not look up, but the curtains would help.

And we were like, this is ridiculous, Dad.

And we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs, a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter.

Or you have to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside.

And I thought, well, this isn't gonna work.

And 1 of my great uncles who had fought in World War II said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona.

Figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up.

Exactly, during World War II, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union had all been wartime allies.

And my uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something gone wrong here.

I thought, well, it's applying education.

I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the Soviet Union, and I'll see what I can do.

And I thought, well, maybe I could become a translator.

So I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset and in a best way, translating perhaps at some, you know, future arms control summits.

So how did the journey continue with learning Russian?

I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking how can I actually help understand or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species, how did it actually continue?

Well, I mean, I read everything I possibly could about nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and I started to try to teach myself Russian a little bit.

So it was always in context of nuclear war?

was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point, but also in historical context because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War II, so I tried to understand all of that.

And also, like many other people, I'd read Russian literature in translation.

I'd read War and Peace and I'd loved the book actually.

I mean, particularly the story parts of it.

I wasn't 1 really at that time when I was a teenager.

I thought Tolstoy went on a bit in terms of his series of The Great Man and of history and social change.

But when I was about 14, I was like, this man needed an editor.

Could you have just gone on with the story, what an amazing story, what an incredible book this is.

And then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I study Russian?

Because there were very few schools in my region, given the impoverishment of the region where you could study Russian.

So I would have to take Russian from scratch.

And this is where things get really quite interesting because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have, first of all, an intensive Russian language course in the summer, and I didn't have the money for that.

And the period is around the miners' strike in the United Kingdom in 1984.

Now the miners of County Durham had very interestingly had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbass going back to the 1920s.

And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between Bolshevik, Soviet Union, the early period after the Russian Revolution.

But even before that, during the imperial period in Russia, between the Northern England and the Russian Empire in the old industrial areas.

Basically big industrial areas like the northeast of England and places like Donbass were built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists.

And Donetsk in the Donbass region used to be called Husevka, because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help develop the coal mines there, and also the steelworks and others that we're hearing about all the time.

So I got very fascinated in all these linkages and famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union like Evgeny Zamyatin, worked in the shipyards in Newcastle, Pontine.

And there was just this whole set of connections.

And in 1984, when the miners strike took place, the miners of Donbass, along with other miners from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland, sent money in solidarity to the miners of Kandy Durham.

And there'd been these exchanges, as I said, going back and forth since the 1920s, formal exchanges between miners, the region, the miners' unions.

And I heard, again from the same great uncle who told me to study Russian, that there were actually scholarships for the children of miners, and it could be former miners as well, for their education.

And I should go along to the miners' hall, a place called Red Hills, where the miners of County Durham had actually pooled all of their resources and built up their own parliament and their own kind of place that they could talk among themselves to figure out how to enhance the welfare and well-being of their communities.

And they'd put money aside for education for minors.

There was all kinds of lecture series from the minors and all kinds of other activities supporting soccer teams and artistic circles and writing circles, for example.

People like George Orwell were involved in some of these writer's circles in other parts of Britain and mining communities, for example.

And so they told me I could go along and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian.

So I show up and it was the easiest application I've ever come across.

They asked me to verify that my dad had been a miner, and they looked up his employment record on little cards, kind of a little tray somewhere.

And then they asked me how much I needed to basically pay for the travel and some of the basic expenses for the study and they wrote me a check.

And so thanks to the miners of Donbass and this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham of the Durham Miners Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time before I embarked on my studies at university.

As you're speaking now, it's reminding me that there's a different way to look both at history and at geography and at different places.

And it echoes, and the experience of living there is more captured not by Moscow or Kiev, but by, at least historically, but by just being a mining town and industrial town.

Yeah, I mean, there are places in the United States, in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania, like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place.

And the northeast of England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley, which has its own, I would say, contours and frames.

And when you come to those industrial areas, your previous identities get submerged in that larger framework.

I've always looked at the world through that lens of being someone from the working class, the blue collar communities from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic connotations.

And It's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced over the last 30 years.

The people came from all over the place to work there.

Of course, it was a population that 1 might say is indigenous, might have gone back centuries there, But they would have been in the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England.

And people in the case of the northeast of England came from Wales, they came from further in the south of England, the Midlands, they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland.

I have all of that heritage in my own personal background.

And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry.

And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Donbass.

It's a place that's a part in many respects historically, and in terms of its evolution and development over time.

And particularly in the case of Russia, the Russians have tried to say, well, look, because most people speak Russian, there is the lingua franca.

I mean, in the North-Eastern Ring, of course, everyone spoke English, but lots of people were Irish speakers, Gaelic-Irish speakers or some of them might have certainly been Welsh speakers.

There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh as their first language who came there, But they created an identity.

It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster, the northern province of the whole of the Irish island, the part of Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom.

That was also a heavily industrialized area, high mass manufacturing, shipbuilding, for example.

Which is why when Ireland got its independence from the United Kingdom, Ulster, Belfast, and that whole region kind of clung on because it was again that melting pot.

It was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity.

And so that, for me, growing up in such a specific place with such a special, in many respects, heritage, gave me a different perspective on things.

When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there, I actually went to a translator's institute, what was then called the Maurice Therese, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages.

I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the north of England.

Because it was just like 1 big working class culture that had sort of broken out onto the national stage.

Everything in northern England was nationalized.

We had British steel, British coal, British rail, British shipbuilding.

Because after World War II, the private sector had been devastated and the state had to step in.

And of course, the Soviet Union is 1 great big giant nationalized economy when I get there.

And it's just the people's attitudes and outlooks are the same.

People didn't work for themselves, they always worked for somebody else.

And it had quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world.

Well, then I need to say something and everyone will think about what we're talking about.

Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody.

And you have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well.

For people wondering, the English speakers in the audience, you're really missing a lot from the few sentences we said there.

Yeah, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world.

So there you are in 1987 an exchange student in the Soviet Union.

Well that was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period that's just around the time of the peak of Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president.

Well, he wasn't quite president at that point, he was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, trying to transform the whole place.

So I arrived there in September of 1987, just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty.

It was just within weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euromissile Crisis by finally having an agreement on basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces.

And also, at this point, Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up.

So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before.

Not just in Moscow, which is where I was studying at the translators' institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia, went all the way to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, all the way around Moscow and there was, at this point, it was also the Kresenye Rus, which has become very important now.

This is the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but you know, 988, because I was there 87 to 88.

At this point, the Russian Orthodox church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period, you certainly have the church stepping out as a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion.

So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness.

Also, being in Moscow, this is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point.

The first time I got an opera, it's at the Bolshoi.

I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture.

When you're growing up in a mining region, there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing.

I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir.

My parents signed me up for absolutely everything they possibly could, education-wise, but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this.

So I was astounded by the wealth of the cultural experience that 1 could have in Moscow.

But the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs.

Because this was Moscow, I got this image about what it would look like.

I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, the big nuclear superpower.

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Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump | Lex Fridman Podcast #335