Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Fiona Hill

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Fiona Hill. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

About a month ago, I had Fiona Hill on the show. And I had Fiona Hill on the show, because Russia had invaded Ukraine, and no one in the West understands Russia’s strategic thinking, Vladimir Putin’s strategic ambitions as well as Hill. She served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She served as senior director for European and Russian Affairs at the National Security Council under President Trump.

She’s co-author of the book “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” and author of “There is Nothing for You Here.” And in that conversation, she gave an incredibly clear description of what it was Putin was trying to achieve then — what it was he thought he knew, what it was he thought he could get away with. But a lot has changed in a month of war. Ukraine successfully repelled Russia from Kyiv, at least for now.

Putin has seen that this is not a country he can quickly overwhelm, decapitate its leadership, and subjugate its population. He and the world have seen that Ukrainians are not Russians and don’t want to be. The Russian troops are not being greeted, to say the least, with chocolates and flowers. But that is not to say the war is over by any means. Russia is focusing its efforts on the East and the South. They’re trying to carve up the country — horrific, horrific pictures have emerged of civilian massacres at the hands of Russian forces.

There are calls to have Putin tried as a war criminal. And so I’d asked Hill over email if she saw an end in sight. And I had hoped — I hoped that she’d tell me she did. But no, she said she’d become more pessimistic about the possibility of a deal, and for that matter, a quick end to this conflict. And so I asked her back on the show to tell me why, to walk me through from her perspective, given all she knows — to walk me through what’s happened and what’s changed because of it. As always, my email — ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Fiona Hill, welcome back to the show.

FIONA HILL: Thanks, Ezra.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to back up a week or so ago, before the images of Russia’s atrocities — I think that’s the right word — against Ukrainian civilians came to worldwide attention. So Russia had pulled back somewhat from Kyiv. There were negotiations ongoing. There was some talk of neutrality on Ukraine’s part, and somewhat more reasonable demands on Russia’s part. They even talked about being open to Ukraine being part of the E.U.

So a week ago, how would you have described the state of the Russia-Ukraine War?

FIONA HILL: Well, look. I’ll be frank that I was quite skeptical, just personally thinking back to previous incidences of Russian negotiations in similar sorts of circumstances, and was quite cautiously watching all of this, wondering if they were just going to regroup and reassess, which to be honest, is where it seems to have come out. And it’s very clear that things haven’t gone according to the initial plan of the Russian invasion, and that there was now an effort to get as much information as they possibly could from the battlefield.

Of course, we’ve been hearing some conflicting stories about this as well, about how much information is actually getting to Vladimir Putin. And they were trying to kind of figure out whether they could still go forward with the original goals, which was clearly to subjugate Ukraine in many respects — to be able to seize territory, essentially dismember Ukraine, and marginalize Ukraine in international affairs. And I think it’s fair to say that we’re still seeing them do that.

EZRA KLEIN: Do you think, in looking at what they have done since, that you can divine the outcome of that reassessment?

FIONA HILL: Well, it’s clear that they’re going to try to secure as much territory as they possibly can in the East and the South, and spin this as if that was the plan all along, which — it was obviously the contingency and the backup plan in any case if they couldn’t take Kyiv, they couldn’t remove Zelensky, they couldn’t completely change the trajectory of the whole country, then there was certainly this great interest that we’ve seen all the way along.

Since 2014, when they annexed Crimea, of taking the territory of the Donbas region, Eastern Ukraine, the separatist regions — the whole of the regions, which Putin and the Russian Duma have recently recognized as being independent, all of Donetsk and Luhansk, and also this area around the Sea of Azov, extending across the top of Crimea, and all the way down across the Black Sea coast to Odessa.

In 2014, this was the area that they termed Novorossiya, New Russia, which had been a term used during the Czarist period of their lands. It suggests of new Russia, the lands of settlement of Russian speakers, Slavs, Orthodox Christians, in territories that once been part of the Ottoman Empire. And in 2014, there had been this effort, indeed, to set off these proxy uprisings, try to set up new committees that would be in favor of closer association with Russia.

And that had fizzled out. It hadn’t worked. And it looked very much the case that they’ve gone back to this again, but many people honestly had been anticipating that it would be, in fact, the initial thrust of a Russian invasion — not to try to take the whole country, but to try to consolidate the Eastern part of Donbas under Russian proxy forces and independent states, and expand the area of territory around Crimea, the Sea of Azov, and going as far as Odessa.

That seems to be what we’re seeing now, particularly the intensification of fighting in the East and the South.

EZRA KLEIN: On that point of Russia consolidating into the East and the South, I think the impression in the West — certainly, impression if you follow this on social media— is that Ukraine has proven relatively stunning on the battlefield, that Russia has been much weaker than people anticipated, as you gesture towards. America has talked about — has released intelligence saying that Vladimir Putin is not getting good information from his war commanders. I don’t know how to assess the veracity of that, but it’s an interesting public statement on our part.

How do you understand how the war has gone militarily for both sides? Has Russia been as weak as they’re often now portrayed in the US? Has Ukraine been as strong? What do you see as the balance of military power and potentiality?

FIONA HILL: Well, it’s actually fairly complex. There’s a really good case to be made that the Russian battle plans have not gone as they would have intended, and similarly, that the levels of resistance from Ukraine has been far more than anybody anticipated — certainly on the Western side of things. Look, I mean, I was hearing from many very well-informed analysts of the Russian military that this would all be over — we were all hearing that, right, 48 hours, 72 hours, a week maximum.

And there were others, Russian military analysts, who have also pointed out that perhaps the model for this intervention was actually the models of the intervention that the Soviet army launched against Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. And again, what they were probably planning on doing in Poland in the 1980s, which they went in, in force, in a very large mass — pretty much shock and awe approach, with tanks and large number of military, tried to minimize the shooting, and then basically put down governments that were trying to go their own way in all of these three countries.

And so that was what they were anticipating that they would do in Ukraine. And those of us in the West, myself included, who have described this as a blitzkrieg — so these Russian military analysts were saying were kind of wrong, that they thought that this is much more like the Red Army interventions in the Soviet era against other members of the Soviet bloc. So this is a mistake, still, on the part of Moscow, thinking that Ukraine would capitulate and sort of fade away.

And there wouldn’t be the kind of resistance that they obviously encountered, and that it would be much more like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and this would be over fairly quickly. So there’s all kinds of different dimensions to this. But clearly, whatever planning they had there initially, however they thought about this operation from the Russian side, it hasn’t gone according to plan, because we see this in the terms of the high casualties.

They didn’t plan for this, the strung out logistical supplies that they’ve had a lot of problems with. And then it’s the Ukraine response, this guerrilla response, as well as the response of the Ukrainian military that’s proved to be much more disciplined. And of course, they’ve been much better equipped than the Russians would have anticipated because of the weaponry that’s been coming in, in their support, from the West, from European countries, and from the United States.

So I think as we watch this unfold, there’s going to be a lot more assessments. And as I said, there’s been quite a differences of opinion behind the scenes all the way along. But clearly, we’re also been seeing a breakdown in the command and control of the Russian military. The atrocities that we’re seeing here are very much indicative of this. My former colleague from Brookings, who I brought the book about Mr. Putin with, Clifford Gaddy, had written to me pointing out the same thing.

I mean, something he had observed during that period as well, worrying that the military cohesion for the Russians has kind of broken down in the face of battle, and that’s why we’re seeing these horrible acts of violence against the civilian population.

EZRA KLEIN: When we last spoke, I think it’s fair to say that the conventional wisdom, what was implicit in some of what you were saying, was that Russia would win this war. And the question was how many they killed in doing it, and what kind of settlement could end it. At least, they could win this war if they wanted to. And now, there seems to be more of a sense that Ukraine can actually win, that Russia doesn’t have the supplies, the logistics, the morale — long term, the money to sustain a battle like this, and then to ultimately try to subjugate a country like this.

Do you think that’s true that perception has changed, that there’s now a view that Ukraine can win? And do you think that it is actually true?

FIONA HILL: Look, I think it depends on how we define winning, right? I mean, you think about Finland, for example, that won the Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1940, when there was an effort very similar to what’s happening in Ukraine to reincorporate them back into the Soviet Union, having won their independence already with the collapse of the Russian Empire.

And the Finns won, in terms of their independence and their freedom, but at great cost, pretty heavy casualties — although they actually wreaked havoc on the Soviet military, on the Red Army, through guerrilla warfare, and the kind of resistance that we’re sort of seeing now. But they lost a huge swathe of their territory in Karelia, and I think there’s obviously a case to be made here, which is — as we’re looking very closely at what the Russians are attempting to do, if they’re going to basically carve off the East and the South.

You can make a case that the Ukrainians will win their independence and sovereignty, which honestly they had up until Feb. 24, with the obviously notable exception of the annexation of Crimea and what was already going on, a hot war in Donbas that had been going on since 2014 — but now, rewinning it again, as the Finns had to do in the 1940s, but at great cost.

EZRA KLEIN: And then one thing that also seems to have become more of a live debate is over whether a settlement agreement that gives Putin some level of victory, something he can take back to Russians, is a good idea. There’s one version where he simply occupies the East, and there’s another version where there is some kind of deal made around the negotiating table that gives him some of what he wanted. Do you think the politics of a cease-fire and settlement have become harder for Zelensky? And if so, is that a good or a bad thing?

FIONA HILL: I think it’s become harder for everyone, both sides in this, and also for us, right? I mean the United States and Europe, the West, because of all of the knock on ramifications of this. This is a massive dislocation. This is like a 9/11 episode in our geopolitical perspectives. I think you and I talked about that the last time as well. I mean, this is one of these huge ruptures in political and security affairs, with global implications. It’s not just regional implications.

And that makes the stakes of the outcome here so much higher. The longer this goes on, the more difficult it becomes to find some workable solution. I think what we’re going to have to do is think about this in phases, that whatever might be resolved now might be temporary. And then, of course, we’ll have to work on whatever we can do to make sure that the Russians can’t press whatever advantage they may think that they may have down the line.

That’s why there’s so much discussion about security guarantees to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. What kind of formulations can you have for referenda, for example? If there’s some decision to cede some territory, which there certainly isn’t at this particular point — because the Russians have said, Putin has said, they’ve not really changed the goal posts in many respects.

They’re still saying what they wanted right from the very beginning, which is the recognition of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the recognition of the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, but in their full territory. And that would probably be very much a prelude to, let’s just say, absorption into Russia as well. I mean, that seems to be part of the plan as well. They clearly want to have the dismemberment of Ukraine, and that would affect that.

And then they want to have the neutralization of Ukraine, effectively — not just neutrality and not becoming a member of NATO, but also diminishing Ukraine’s defensive capacity, which of course, is not acceptable. If it talked about demilitarization or capping the size of Ukraine’s military, that’s some of the ideas that have been thrown out there by the Russians. Now, the Ukrainians under Zelensky have been trying to come up there with different formulations.

And we’ve got to give them the space to be able to figure things out as well, because as you’re just suggesting in the question, the longer this goes on, the more people that die, the more that this visceral sense of hatred which is so obvious, is going to grow against Russia and the Russians — and not a willingness, in some circles, to compromise after everything that’s been lost, the more difficult it becomes for Zelensky to find a formula.

And what we really need is a very large and robust international framework around this as well. When we’re talking about the security guarantees, when the Ukrainians are talking about this, they’re feeling out what is possible. Some people have been surprised — they put the Russians out there, as well as the Chinese. But really what they’re grasping towards is they need a larger framework.

It can’t be just assurances that they’ve had in the past from a handful of countries, like the Budapest Memorandum, which is assurances by the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia that didn’t hold back in 1994 for Ukraine. And in many respects, they’re kind of talking about an Article V type guarantee, not from NATO, because they’re saying that they’re very willing not to be members of NATO. And frankly, NATO doesn’t want to have them as members.

But they want to have guarantees that they’re not going to be subject to this slaughter again. And they certainly want to have the ability to defend themselves. There’s going to be a lot of devils in a lot of details here. This is going to be very difficult to work out.

EZRA KLEIN: On that point of the longer it goes on, the harder it becomes for a settlement to be reached, the more hatred there is, the more bodies there are for everyone to account for — I want to come back to the images of these horrific killings of civilians. How do they change the war? How do they change it for Ukraine, for Russia, to some degree even for the West? Or do they? Is this just war?

FIONA HILL: Yes, there’s degrees of carnage in every conflict that we can think of, and horrors. And the bottom line is that, we’ve said over and over again since the end of World War II, as we look back at just the unspeakable effect of that war — the Holocaust, the millions of deaths — that we would never do this again. And we keep on doing it. And really, what we’re seeing here is yet another reminder of how badly we fared in trying to address these kinds of conflicts.

And so Volodymyr Zelensky is saying, what is the use of the United Nations, which was actually set up precisely to try to push back against these kinds of conflicts emerging again, the abuses that we saw in war. Remember that very famous line, never let a good crisis go to waste. And Zelensky is basically saying, look, here we have another of these crises, these horrors of the conflict here. And the United Nations is just not living up to the task. We really need to do something here.

So there’s a much larger, rather implication, out of what we’re seeing here, what we’ve seen in Bucha and in Irpin, and all of the suburbs of Kyiv, and what we’re seeing. But we haven’t got the full picture of what’s happening in Mariupol and Melitopol. All of these cities are going to go down in the annals of history like Aleppo, and all of the cities that we’re thinking about being destroyed during World War II, like Stalingrad and the Leningrad — even in the Soviet Union, the similar sieges and the massive casualties.

And it’s really, basically, a wake up call to all of us that we need to do better. We need to do something about this. Zelensky is saying this every single day. And that’s kind of the implications, is that when we get a grip on this, that we have to really make sure that we’re putting in place institutional arrangements and responses that will make it less likely this happens again. We should all be ashamed in and watching this unfold.

EZRA KLEIN: But you see even in this, the way, the desire for settlement and justice end up in tension with each other. I mean, I feel it in me when I look at these pictures. I was thinking, looking at them, about how when we last spoke, you had warned that the West needed to be very careful not to make this about regime change. And since then, as Putin’s sort of horrors have become more visible, President Biden ad-libbed that Putin had to go in his big speech.

He walked that back. Now, he says Putin should be put on trial for war crimes. And it feels at times that those ideas are inconsistent. How do you end up negotiating a settlement with somebody you’re also saying should be on trial in The Hague for war crimes? How do you think about that tension?

FIONA HILL: Yeah, I mean, I think about it all the time, as everybody does. And we have a problem in the United States as well, that we haven’t signed on to a lot of the international mechanisms, the International Criminal Court that people have devised to deal with these things. So we’ve got these tensions all the time in United States politics, that we always fear that they will be used against us in some way to score political points by the countries in disputes.

So we’ve made it very difficult for ourselves to resolve those tensions. And one of the challenges that Ukraine has got to do, which is sort of separate from the United States, is to make the case to the rest of the world that all of these comparisons that people make with the — well, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, or this country did that, and this to another, that doesn’t justify what’s happening in Ukraine, and that what’s happening in Ukraine is a throwback to a much darker time. And it’s opening up the door to this happening over and over again in every setting.

And yes, you know, the Arab world the complaining that we didn’t take enough steps about Syria and Iraq, and Yemen, and all the other conflicts, but that doesn’t then excuse anything that’s happening to Ukraine. So I mean, Ukraine itself, Zelensky and the other leadership, are going to have to reach out to the rest of world, including China as well, and to basically be pointing out to them this tension and this injustice, that they have to step up as well.

It could be only when we get that larger framework and that larger acknowledgment from other countries as well that we’ll be able to resolve this in some fashion. But the power, of course, still lies with Putin. And Putin knows all of this. I mean, he’s seen this happen in other places. He’s definitely going to resist it. And he’s going to always be playing whataboutism — well, what about what the United States did — making it even more difficult to be able to prosecute this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: You said a moment ago that the power still lies with Putin. And I want to ask a bit about how his power is changing during all this. There have been polls suggesting he’s become more popular in Russia. The Levada center, which is at least usually known for doing independent polling, found that 83 percent of Russians said they approved of Putin, up from 69 percent in January. There’s been sort of more qualitative reporting suggesting that to be true.

Do you find that plausible, that Putin is gaining strength in there, in Russia, in the midst of the war?

FIONA HILL: Yes, entirely plausible. I mean, this is something we’ve seen many times over — rally around the flag in the time of crisis. And of course, let’s think about the propaganda in Russia. We’ve heard that the Russians at every level pushing back against the reports of atrocities in the suburbs of Kyiv, saying this is all staged, this is the Ukrainians doing it themselves. This is all done to discredit Russia, the Russians haven’t done this.

I mean, that’s the kind of lies that are being told to the outside world. But internally, people, that’s all they’re seeing. We’ve had these reports also of Russian speakers and others being taken out of the Donbas region — been accusations on the Ukrainian side, rather than the Russians — kidnap people and are basically shipping them off to Russia, because that’s part of the whole narrative inside of Russia, that the Ukrainians are the aggressors, and that these are refugees from the assault by the Ukrainian military.

And they have to be able to show refugees in large numbers coming into Russia. So if everyone is fleeing in the opposite direction, to Poland or to Romania, for example, it makes it harder for the Russians to portray the course of events according to their own narrative. So we’re seeing all kinds of suggestive actions here that really, again, underpin the propaganda that — basically, what Russians are hearing is a very different side of the war, Russia being subjected to aggression by the United States, and NATO.

Ukrainians are to blame for the cause of this war — it’s still a special military operation. The casualties are being inflicted by these aggressive Nazis — there’s still the depiction of the Ukrainian forces as Nazis. We’re seeing that propaganda being reinforced in China, and by the Chinese, and other countries that are supportive of Russia. And then there’s this feeling of crisis — the West being out to get you, the sanctions are all done to punish Russia, to bring Russia to its knees. Putin said that over and over again since 2014.

The pain that you’re feeling, the average Russian person, is because of what the West is doing to Russia. This is not because of anything that Russia and the Kremlin are doing. And so people are rallying around, they’re rallying around the flag, they’re rallying around Putin, because Putin is the symbol of the state.

And although this is probably not the same sort of spontaneous upswelling of support that Putin got after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was immensely popular, it’s still completely normal to see people in times of duress and stress to be running around the central figure. We see it here in the United States as well.

EZRA KLEIN: Do you think the sanctions are working — on the first dimension, to inflict economic pain and pressure on Russia, and then in the second, more important dimension, to push Putin to want an end to this?

FIONA HILL: Well, they’re certainly doing it in the first dimension. And look, we’ve seen with Iran, for example, when there was a lot of pressure of the sanctions on Iran over its nuclear weapons program that Iran wanted to do things to lift the sanctions. But it didn’t necessarily want to change its goals about the nuclear program, if we look back in time over that. So Putin won’t change his goals, but they may want to try to head off more of the sanctions.

But they’re hoping, I think, Putin thinks this — again, that he can do that by continued outreach to China, continued outreach to other countries and continuing to depict this conflict as, again, a special military operation not just for domestic audiences, but then also for the outside world, those that are skeptical about everything, as again a continuation of the Cold War, a proxy war. This is again like Vietnam and South Korea. This is all — the Korean War, rather.

This is all a fight between Russia and the United States and NATO, that this is the kind of war that people have seen over and over again. And basically, pushing back on this idea of what it actually is, which is a post-colonial land grab by the Russians. Again, that depiction — from Putin’s perspective, he hopes that will head off more support for the sanctions, because what will really bite is when others start to maybe not fully participate in the sanctions, but certainly not help the Russians to evade them.

When other countries decide that they’re not going to buy Russian gas and oil as well, like China or other countries — not just purely because of pressure from the United States, but because they’re also wanting to bring this war to an end. So really, what this has to do is to blunt the ability of Putin to prosecute the war. There are some sanctions that are very effective, just by the way, which is those that tackle military components.

The sanctions against the aviation fleet, where it’s very, very difficult for the Russians then to maintain their aircraft, for example. So some sanctions will have a big impact on the ability of the military to continue to develop over time.

EZRA KLEIN: Do you see any evidence of China moving that direction? We’ve talked about China from a few directions so far in this conversation. One is possibly a country that Ukraine should appeal to around the war crimes, a country that could potentially put pressure on Russia by buying less Russian oil and gas, and at the same time, a country that seems to be backing Russian propaganda, from what we can tell. And reporting is censoring their own internet, shaping their own information space to drive the Russian narrative.

How do you see where China has not just been, but has moved over the course of this?

FIONA HILL: Yeah, look, I’m certainly the first to say that I’m engaging in some wishful thinking about the position of China, because when you look at the United Nations resolutions about the war in Ukraine, there’s been actually pretty considerable support — 141 countries voting in favor of the resolution, far more than voted to condemn the annexation of Crimea back in 2014. But it’s also notable that some key countries have stood to one side, either abstained, or some that have voted against it, perhaps not so critical.

But countries like China that have sat this out are obviously instrumental in their support for Russia, or in their framing of what the war is for the rest of the international community. And if we don’t get them swayed, then this remains extraordinarily difficult to resolve. So I’m hopeful that might be possible. But at the same time, I’m being realistic. I’m pretty pessimistic about it.

And I think we have to keep at it in terms of the diplomacy and the diplomatic outreach — the Ukrainians in particular, and other countries that have better relations with China than the United States has. But I think from the perspective of many Chinese scholars, they’re quite skeptical that China will be moved in any direction, because China is not liking what it’s seeing in terms of the unity of the West, the bolstering, again, of solidarity in NATO, within the E.U.

We saw the recent European Union and China meeting that was described by Josep Borrell, the High Representative, as a dialogue of the deaf, or a meeting of the deaf, that China’s not at all happy by the turn of events, and does not want to see the West consolidated, and does not want to see Russia sidelined as a result of miscalculations in this war.

EZRA KLEIN: Specifically, on the diplomatic side, are there things or tactics or leverage we should be taking? I think people normally think of that as aimed at Russia, but if you think of it as potentially needing to be aimed at other countries, are there ways that the West can be diplomatically changing the cost benefit for some of the countries now on the sidelines?

FIONA HILL: Yeah, and I think part of it is not just the United States getting out there, because again, when the Russians pushed back with the whataboutism, or what about the United States and what they’ve done — I think we need other countries to help make the case. The Swiss, for example, have always been very good at this, and in other countries that have not got a record here — the Finns, I mean, they’re usually smaller countries, but a grouping of countries that could help support Ukraine and going out on a broader diplomatic effort.

Now, in the middle of a war, this is horrific and horrendous, having to focus on this. But look, it’s exactly what happened in World War II. We know all the history, about how Winston Churchill had people out there on the road trying to get the United States in. And it wasn’t so easy — or trying to get other countries to support the UK and what was happening in the Western Alliance against Nazi Germany. It wasn’t easy then, either.

And there was a whole constellation of forces, with Japan jumping in support of Germany to press their own agenda. We have to look back at that period of diplomacy, realizing it was very hard, and that we had to do an awful lot behind the scenes. And who could be your emissary or envoy for this? As I said, it might not necessarily be the United States or United States leadership, but other countries that have got credibility and relationships, both from Europe and elsewhere — the Australians, New Zealand, for example, Canada.

You know, how could we craft together a diplomatic group to help and support Ukraine in this effort of reaching out to the rest of the world?

EZRA KLEIN: What else should the West be doing to support Ukraine, that it isn’t, if anything?

FIONA HILL: Well, obviously, we’ve heard a lot from the Ukrainians themselves about more support for the military campaign and coming up with ways in which they can defend themselves better from the assault from the skies, with their defense. If we’re not going to be able to come in terms of an exclusion zone, a no fly zone, there’s the longer term questions of helping deal with all of the Ukrainian refugees.

I mean, at this point, the displacement inside of Ukraine, as well as the refugees across into Poland and Romania and elsewhere in Europe is just phenomenal scale. And we’ll have to keep on assisting and helping and helping to bail out the Ukrainian economy. And obviously, the Ukrainians would really like to see an energy embargo, but that’s going to really take a lot of public support, because that gets right into the heart of politics.

We’re seeing it in France, in the French elections, with Marine Le Pen and others saying, well, look, why should we be suffering, the average French worker, from high gasoline prices because of this war in Ukraine? And Hungary, where Viktor Orban has just been reelected against the backdrop of Orban, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, making a new gas deal for cheaper gas and longer term gas contracts.

And of course, Germany has done many things that we didn’t think was possible in terms of stopping Nord Stream 2 and making all kinds of commitments to wean itself off Russian gas and oil, and also Russian coal over a period of time. But we know this is going to be extraordinarily difficult. That is going to be one thing that will have a big impact on Russia, because most of the state revenues come from the sale of oil and gas and also other raw materials, natural resources.

And if we could find ways of moving forward with an energy embargo — again, not at all simple, that would really have a big impact. And then it’s the stepped up diplomatic effort to get more on board to get a workable international framework, that Ukraine can find a solution within all of this. And it’s a long-term commitment to Ukraine in terms of its security and its reconstruction. Now, we’re talking about all of this, but we have a lot of planning still to do.

We have to really step it up, because I do think there’s a very strong case to be made that if we don’t help Ukraine fend this off, the world is going to be a much darker place ahead. This is going to be opening up all of the kinds of things that we really hope that we’d moved away from after to two World Wars in the 20th century.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: Joe Biden has been very clear about not doing a no fly zone, but something that President Zelensky has asked for many times is planes. Do you think the E.U., the U.S. should give him planes?

FIONA HILL: Look, I think there’s a lot of things that we can think about doing. We need to do it more quietly, because part of the problem of having these big public debates is that then really gets the attention of the Russians. And one of the reasons that people are hesitating on some of this is because of the public nature of the debate about it, because that then raises that question about escalation in the sense of bringing in NATO directly into the conflict.

I mean, in many respects, we’re already part of this with all the refugees and the extension of the conflict in so many different ways with sanctions and economic pressure. And one of the reasons that the administration is so reluctant is because this plays exactly into Putin’s hands, because Putin again wants to make this war about the United States, NATO, and Russia. He wants this to be a proxy war, even though he wants to take Ukraine, again, in this sort of neo imperial, post-imperial land grab.

He wants it to look to the rest of the world like a war with NATO. And then that justifies him mobilizing his own forces in different political ways than he has already. It becomes something more than a special military operation. It’s also what he’s already starting to say to the Russian public. And you’re hearing Russian commentators say, and Russian officials, that this is now taking on existential dimensions for Russia. And so that puts things into a whole different category.

And we haven’t seen the full mobilization of political money yet, of Russia and the Russian military. This is what everyone is trying to grapple with. And it’s very important for us to have full discussions so that people can understand what’s happening. I myself have been out and about talking to people. But sometimes, there’s a real disadvantage in talking about everything quite so publicly in terms of this very sensitive military support for Ukraine, because it often exacerbates the situation.

EZRA KLEIN: Do you feel you have a sense of the phase of this conflict we’re in, that we are close or far from an endgame? That we are headed towards this being protracted, or that you can begin to see what will come? Is that something you think can be predicted?

FIONA HILL: I don’t right now. I mean, if I look back at past patterns, it makes me quite pessimistic. And I look at Chechnya, for example, which was, of course, a conflict within Russia itself. If you look at Syria, I mean, we’re still dealing in many respects with the ongoing conflicts in Syria. Look at Yemen — well, we’ve only just managed to get some kind of cease-fire in Libya. It’s not a lot of optimism that’s there, but again, there’s a real concerted effort here both to try to assist the Ukrainians and to have a focus on the diplomatic dimensions of it as well.

This didn’t go as the Russians intended, clearly, and it’s got a dynamic all of its own here. There are many different factors that could shift this. And so I think there’s also some sort of danger in predicting how long this is going to go on, too, because people start to then hedge on particular actions, or they make assessments and then take action according to those assessments that might actually make the conflict even more protracted.

But it’s not satisfying for anyone here. Just — we are where we are in this phase of it. We don’t know how much longer this is going to go on, but we should keep the goal in mind of trying to get this resolved as soon as possible, both through military means and also through diplomatic means. And when I put this stress on the military means, it’s very clear that the more that the Russian military action can be blunted, the better that all of this is.

Because if they can’t prosecute the war the way that they want to do, that if it becomes much more difficult to get traction, then that might then bring it to a close much quicker. Most wars end up ending when all the combatants have run out of steam, they’ve kind of reached a dead end.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the things that seems not unlikely to me, and I don’t make it as a prediction, but as something I worry a bit about, is not so much an end as a stalemate — Russia holding some of the East and South, Ukraine having pushed them back from Kyiv, and views of — and ambitions of regime change. The West looking at that, and holding a sort of economic noose around Russia in a protracted way, Russia being in this war mobilization in a very protracted way, feeling that much more danger.

This didn’t go well. They have somewhat more territory, but are also now facing a united Europe. You’ve alluded to the darker world if this doesn’t go well — not that it’s ever going to go well, we’re already in a darker world. How do you think about the version of this that doesn’t really end?

FIONA HILL: Well, you’ve just scoped it out there, Ezra. That’s the darker world that I was thinking of. There’s also some pretty serious implications for the future. I was thinking the other day — there’s all these analogies that are being thrown out there. But when you think of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I was looking at a picture of Putin riding on horseback, bare chested.

And it made me think — four Putins, the four horsemen, starting off with conquest, his effort — pestilence, because we’re still in the middle of Covid, a famine, and then death. These are all related together, but famine becomes a really important angle in all of this as well. We’ve started to talk more — many of us were talking about this. There was a sense of urgency much earlier on, but we’re starting to talk more about the food security implications from all of this.

Ukraine’s the breadbasket of Europe. And in many respects, kind of Ukraine has become the global breadbasket now over time. And every time you have a war in a country in which it interferes with the planting and the agricultural development, you see famine coming into work — Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. And we’re heading in this direction now. These attacks on Odessa and on the fuel depots, for example, we have to start thinking about the implications of this.

Odessa remains the main port on the Black Sea for the export of grain and other foodstuffs. If Odessa is destroyed along with Mariupol, Melitopol and all these other parts, where is agricultural production going to be shipped from? And then even more fundamental, how is it going to be grown in the first place? How are the Ukrainians going to be planting their fields in the Black Earth Zone this spring?

This is the period. And this isn’t happening, because it doesn’t happen in a war time. There’s land mines all over the place. Think about all of the other countries in the world where we’ve seen this kind of devastation. And this is happening in one of the most fertile regions of the world, a place, along with Russia, that is one of the major producers of all kinds of grains. And some countries in the Middle East are completely dependent on Ukraine for their foodstuffs.

So this aspect of global famine, rising food prices, rising gas prices as a result of all of the disruptions in the energy sector and the potential embargo on Russia — this is really putting us into a kind of period of economic crisis ahead, too.

EZRA KLEIN: So to draw out that horrifying scenario, but I don’t think an unlikely one — of the things implicit there is that the invasion of Ukraine has — you can feel it in other places. I mean, certainly in Russia, but you can feel it through higher gas prices, somewhat higher commodity prices. But something I’m hearing you saying is that the longer this goes on, the more profound the disruptions everywhere else will become.

Three months is different than six, six months is very different than a year, a year is very different than two or three. Cutting off Russia, devastating Ukraine — the longer it is, the more the rest of the world is going to shake.

FIONA HILL: That’s right. Look, it’s shaken already. And the one thing is, if there is miraculously some breakthrough in the next several weeks, we mustn’t forget this — that gets back to what we were talking before, about the failure of our institutions. Time and again, we kind of write off conflicts as something regional, something that can be contained. And probably, that was initial thinking of this in Ukraine for many people — globally, thought, well, we won’t worry about this.

This is something in Europe. This is Ukraine. It’s not, like, a major global player, but Ukraine’s an enormous country, 40 odd million population, the largest country territorially in Europe, except Russia, and one of the most fertile, important countries for several centuries in terms of food production. Back in 1900, Odessa was one of the richest, fastest growing cities in Europe. And it was the center of the whole European grain trade. And it’s continued to be that, people have just forgotten about it.

And now, the larger implications of this conflict are becoming evident. And they will have knock on effects. I mean, again, this is planting seasons, and Ukrainian farmers are not out there in their fields, planting the grain that feeds Africa and keeps famine at bay.

EZRA KLEIN: You’ve alluded a few times in our conversation to the need for a new international security framework, a new European security framework specifically. But I get the sense you think of it as broader than that. Do you want to say a bit about what you’re thinking there, the ways you maybe have seen the international order we have now show its weaknesses, and what, if anything, we can say firmly or predictably about what could replace it, and be more capable and enforceable?

FIONA HILL: In many respects, maybe just the revitalization and an adaptation of some of the existing institutions, because — in many respects, there’s this before. We faced this at the end of World War II. Again, this is another of those defining moments. And the world has become much more complex. I mean, one of the big reasons that this is such a profound conflict is everyone is watching it, we’re seeing everything in real time, including the atrocities.

And I was just astounded myself seeing some of the footage from satellites that’s been shown in tandem with the evidence from journalists, visiting the suburbs of Kyiv and being able to see the bodies on the streets and the satellite imagery in exactly the same places as the journalists are seeing them as they’re driving through the streets. I mean, this is unprecedented. Obviously, I mean, we’ve got a much more wired world; we’re much more interconnected. People are seeing things happening in real time.

This is having a larger public impact. This isn’t just elites as it was — you know, the Winston Churchills of the world in World War II. You can’t imagine something like the Potsdam and Yalta conferences of World War II, with just a couple of guys sitting in chairs with their entourages, making decisions about what’s going to happen next, and how there’s going to be the disposition of territory and political influence at the end of all of this.

We have to find a way of building out our institutions to reflect more of this complex, interconnected world that we have. And the Ukrainians are kind of showing us the way of this. They’re kind of showing us here that we need to have something more here, where more people have agency. This is just kind of elite institutions that are dominated by the major powers. And you know, I’m grappling with that, because I don’t really have a full answer.

We’ve started to do that in the adaptation of some of our international institutions. Often, when we have the U.N. — in fact, mostly now when we have the big U.N. meetings in September, we have think tanks and N.G.O.s and all kinds of other groups that meet around the margins of this. And we’re getting closer. Sometimes we do this at the G7 and the G20, and some of the other institutions. But we need to think about how to make this much more robust.

It’s pretty complicated. But you know — and again, we need to have some rethinking for our new, wired, networked world, and complex world, about how to give more people a voice in how these institutions operate. And again, I said that’s what the Ukrainians are calling for. That’s what Zelensky’s been saying. What are you guys here for if you can’t help us in this situation?

EZRA KLEIN: Let me end, as we always do, on books. Last time you were on the show, you gave some great recommendations around Russia. Something I’ve heard from you as we’ve been talking tonight is a certain sense of history of how other wars have gone, a sense of what can and cannot be predicted, the way things in a battle change the shape of everything around them.

Are there works of military history, works on other wars that you find yourself returning to or thinking through during this era?

FIONA HILL: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I haven’t been having much time to pick things up. I may have thought a lot about some of the books that I read about World War I and World War II, particularly about how we first blundered into them. Sun Tzu, “The Art of War,” I actually have been picking that up again, because I think we talked earlier about the need to find a way that Putin can have his golden bridge, some sense of victory.

But of course, that was before we started to see the evidence of what’s going on in the ground in this battle. But yes, I think that I probably should be devising myself a reading list of military history, going back over a period of time, the whole period after the end of World War II and what we thought we were doing in terms of institutional development.

EZRA KLEIN: Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

FIONA HILL: Thanks, Ezra.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: Thank you for listening. If you want to support the show, you can leave a review in whatever podcast app you’re listening on, or send the show to a friend, family member, a frenemy. It really does help us. “The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of “New York Times” Opinion, and it is made by an amazing team of people. It is produced by Roge Karma, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld.

This episode is fact checked by Michelle Harris and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing and engineering by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristina Samulewski and Kristin Lin.

[MUSIC PLAYING]