Fiona Hill explores the motivations of Russia's president.
 | By Yara Bayoumy World and National Security Editor, Opinion |
Late last year, President Vladimir Putin began ratcheting up pressure on Ukraine — amassing some 100,000 troops on its border. Meanwhile, the United States was reeling from the Omicron variant and Congress was in familiar deadlock. So Putin's bellicose rhetoric was met with the usual diplomatic speak from Washington — urging Moscow to de-escalate tensions, expressing statements of support to Ukraine and reiterating its unwavering commitment to NATO. |
But Putin has been in this game long enough — President Biden is the fifth American president he has gone toe to toe with — and he knows how to keep the United States on the defensive. His alarming moves and how the Biden administration should counter him has been the subject of much breathless commentary. |
To get a sober view of Putin's motivations, we turned to Fiona Hill. She is perhaps more well known in America as the official who gave a searing indictment of the Trump administration's behavior with Ukraine during the 2019 impeachment hearings. But Hill's expertise on Russia and Putin goes back decades. |
She was the national intelligence officer on Russia and Eurasian affairs for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and served on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump. No one is better placed to give Times Opinion readers a cleareyed and insightful analysis of Putin than Hill. |
The actions of Russia's president, she argues in a guest essay today, "are purposeful and his choice of this moment to throw down the gauntlet in Ukraine and Europe is very intentional." |
She argues that the time in which Putin began amassing troops on the border with Ukraine is no coincidence. |
"December 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Russia lost its dominant position in Europe. Mr. Putin wants to give the United States a taste of the same bitter medicine Russia had to swallow in the 1990s," she writes. That's when America and NATO forced Russia to withdraw the remainder of the Soviet military from bases in Eastern Europe, Germany and the Baltic States. |
In other words, Putin is choosing this moment to threaten to invade Ukraine again because he sees it as his chance to completely alter the post-Cold War European security architecture — into one that the United States would no longer be a part of. |
Putin believes "that the United States is currently in the same predicament as Russia was after the Soviet collapse: grievously weakened at home and in retreat abroad," Hill writes. |
Ultimately, how the West responds to Putin's latest maneuver will dictate whether he'll be stopped in his tracks or if he'll succeed in beginning to push the United States out of Europe, she argues. |
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