At some point, Russia’s war in Ukraine will reach some sort of conclusion, however temporary and knocked-together. And then a new series of questions will arise, as to what Russian President Vladmir Putin is likely to do next, through military or other means. How likely is a Russian attack on any of the NATO countries on its borders? After active fighting stops in Ukraine, what can the West expect next from Putin and his enablers?

To help find the answers to those questions, I interviewed Russia expert, intelligence analyst,  and former National Security Council member Fiona Hill—who not only has written books about Putin, but met the man in person. (Hill is also known for testifying during a Congressional hearing about the nature of President Trump’s dealings with Russia during the first Trump Administration, and Administration responses—or lack thereof—to possible election interference by Russia.)

In this interview, she not only provides a psychological portrait of Putin but also one of Donald Trump—from the point of view of someone who worked under Trump for nearly three years during what is now referred to as the “Trump 1.0” administration. She discusses the similarities between the two men, and just as important, the differences. Hill starts by taking a look at what the American public knew of the character of the two men back in 2016, and what we know now, nine years later, of their hopes, fears, ambitions, rivalries, and visions of the world—and how they think the world works.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)

Dan Drollette Jr: To prepare for our interview, I re-read your old Bulletin article “Putin, the one-man show the West doesn’t understand.”[1] I remember editing it at the time, but it was fascinating to look at it again now and see what had changed—or not changed. Back then, you’d said: “the West is at an inflection point in its relations with Russia, and the stakes for having an accurate understanding of Putin have never been higher—and a misreading could have catastrophic consequences.” Is that a good way to sum up the situation today?

Fiona Hill: What year was that?

Drollette: That was April, 2016. So that would have been before you were on the National Security Council, before…

Hill: Ah yes—just as we were getting going with the fateful presidential campaign that gave us Trump 1.0.

That was the period where we started to learn the depths of Russian interference in US presidential elections, and the attitudes that Putin has toward the West—particularly the US.

To put all this into context, Vladimir Putin has been at the pinnacle of power in Russia for 25 years now, during which we in the West have seen tumultuous change: We’re in a post-9/11 world, not just a post-Cold War world, where there’s been a whole series of disruptive events like the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ve had multiple changes of government in the United States, and US society has been buffeted by geopolitical changes, demographic changes, and economic changes—including a financial crisis. We’ve also had dramatic technological change, along with the welling-up of grievances. And political change in the form of breakdown of the mainstream parties.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Putin has been pretty constant—although he has become a darker version of himself.

He started off as a wartime president, coming in against the backdrop of the re-ignition of the war in Chechnya, and now Putin’s whole presidency is shaped by war, in Ukraine.

If we go back to 2016, of course we didn’t have the full-on war, but we did see signs of where we were headed because of the Russian annexation of Crimea and the sparking of what was really a Russia-instigated civil war in the Donbas region.

But Putin and his way of thinking have been a kind of rock—while we’ve been all over the place in the US, in the meantime.

Yet, somehow, our leaders continue to fail to understand who Putin is and where he’s coming from—possibly because we’ve been so caught up in our own chain of events.

So I think that article does still hold true, despite the pretty significant changes in the way that we think, live, and operate here in the United States.

Drollette: One thing that struck me in re-reading the piece is that it seems like it’s easy for us in the West to underestimate Putin, to forget that he’s a skilled strategist. He’s the KGB operative who knows how to “handle” people—or “work with people” as he calls it—to make them do what he wants.

Hill: Yes, and some of those are dark methods.

Drollette: “Kompromat” is the word I’ve seen used sometimes.[2] Is that appropriate?

Hill: Yeah. Although other times, it’s just through flattery and persuasion, or playing to people’s vulnerabilities or fears.

Putin’s the master of goading people through fear into doing things—the fear of crossing him, the fear of being exposed in some way, or the fear of being humiliated.

These are all part of Putin’s toolbox.

He’s not a strategist in the sense of von Clausewitz or some other great strategic thinker. But he’s certainly tactically very adept. Putin’s somebody who learns from mistakes, and always has a way of coming back.

And he does keep an eye on the bigger picture, which is putting himself and Russia at the heart of things. Putin sees himself as a kind of manifestation of Russia—not in the same way that Trump sees himself as “America” or suggests that “America is Trump,” but more as a new standard-bearer for the Russian state, or at least Putin’s interpretation of the Russian state. Putin thinks of himself as part of a long chain of “the greats,” including positioning himself as another manifestation of Vladimir the Great, the Grand Prince of Kiev in the 10^th century.

Although technically, of course, that older Vladimir was a leader of the lands of “Kievan Rus,” not Russia in the modern sense.[3] So, there’s some mythologizing in Vladimir Putin seeing himself as the continuation of millennia of history.

And he clearly sees himself being linked to it in name as well as in deed; Putin’s father was also named “Vladimir.” So Putin sees himself as the living manifestation of Russian history and the Russian state—something a bit hard to grasp for Western leaders.

Our leaders in the West tend to come and go. Even Trump, who sees himself as a king in many respects—creating memes of himself and putting his image on Bitcoins—doesn’t fully comprehend how Putin thinks of himself as the embodiment of the legacy of Russian history.

Drollette: What do you think Trump sees in Putin? I get the impression they both have a penchant for personal power, and that Trump admires the idea of someone with no oversight from above, no constraints. He likes the idea of the strong-man, the autocrat?

Hill: Absolutely, he does. Trump would like to have that—to basically be able to snap his fingers and just make everyone bend to his will. And that’s what he thinks Putin does.

I mean, basically Trump himself is just one big bundle of will.

While Putin, in many respects, essentially willed himself into this amazing role. And when I say “amazing,” I’m referring to the Russian word for this sort of miraculous happenstance that allows him to become president of Russia.

Meanwhile, Trump has had aspirations to be president for a long time, and Trump’s had every advantage in life to push him forward—family, money, connections—people were always helping him. Everything in his life was facilitated for him.

But it was highly unlikely Putin was going to be Russian president; he’s from a hardscrabble background. Through sheer force of will, luck, ruthlessness, and playing all kinds of different games, Putin maneuvered himself into position to be chosen as the successor to Boris Yeltsin back in 1999. Again, there’s a sort of miraculous quality to it.

At the same time, there are similarities: They’re both remarkably resilient; they’ve both got all kinds of cunning, and they both have a very similar worldview. They both see the world in terms of might makes right, where strength is the only coin. And they both believe in these strange kind of Orwellian spheres of influence, with the world divided up into Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia [“Eastasia” in Orwell’s 1984 novel].

But there’s a very distinct difference. Putin is absolutely and utterly ruthless. He really doesn’t care about the price he pays in terms of human life to get ahead.

While Trump, to give him his credit, isn’t interested in a bloodbath. Trump doesn’t like devastating war; he wouldn’t be contemplating the first use of a nuclear weapon—tactical, intermediate, strategic, or otherwise. And this shows in his public pronouncements: Trump is very measured in his rhetoric about nuclear weapons. He wants to end wars. He wants to make the world safe for business.

Drollette: Not “safe for democracy,” like the Woodrow Wilson expression?

Hill: Yes, exactly. It’s safe for business.

Trump’s got his own idea of a sort of mercantilist imperialism—hiding the United States behind a “Golden Dome” to keep it safe and secure. And maybe including Greenland and Canada in there, too, because he wants to acquire them.

But once again, Trump’s promising a good life, not mass slaughter.

Whereas Putin wants to restore some of the territories that he feels got away from the Russian state—and he’s willing to fight to the last Ukrainian and potentially the second-to-last Russian to get what he wants. He [Putin] doesn’t see the human tragedy in this. He doesn’t think about it at all. He doesn’t care.

So when Trump says, “Putin’s gone crazy,” of course, Putin hasn’t gone crazy—this is what Putin was always like. It’s just that Trump failed to see this. It’s crazy from Trump’s perspective, because it’s not how Trump thinks.

And that’s a fundamental difference between Trump and Putin.

Also, for Putin, land isn’t just real estate; it’s part of the inherent, almost mystical qualities of the Russian state. And Putin leans into the state; he’s a product of the deep state; he sees the state as an instrument that he can use.

Whereas Trump wants to get rid of the state; Trump wants to have unfettered power—and I don’t know how Trump thinks he’s going to have the capacity to exert that power, if he gets rid of the apparatus of the state. Putin has made the state work for him, while Trump is working against the state.

Drollette: This might be a metaphor that’s been overused, but when you describe Putin and his ideas about land, blood, destiny, and willpower, it sounds a lot like old Leni Riefenstahl propaganda about the Nazi Party—you know, that whole “Triumph of the Will” thing[4].

Hill: Well, the roots of the Nazi era go to the same period that we get Bolshevism. And in Russia, it may even go back further; there’s always been this long tradition of thinking about will. There are all kinds of Russian thinkers that indulged in it,[5] and even cultural, folklore-rooted ideas of will.

The Russian word “volya” is the translation for this—a kind of upburst of unfettered will from the people. It ties in to how the peasantry, the serfs, used to go off on a bender at the end of the agricultural season. The Russian sense of it is a bit hard to describe, but there’s an inherent, atavistic sense to this upsurge of will—having the freedom to do whatever you want. And it also contains the idea that it can be purpose-driven; there’s a sense that all it needs to come to fruit is someone to direct it—a leader, “vozhd” in Russian, or “fuhrer” in German.

Putin is always aware of these things; he’s steeped in this kind of word-play and mysticism, which has such powerful political connotations in Russia. And Putin knows how to use that.

Whereas with Trump, it’s all about him; it’s just building a cult of personality around him.

Putin’s cult of personality is tied up with Russia and the idea of a Russia that’s deeply rooted in all different aspects of Russian culture. Everybody believes in it, by the way, but it’s just that Putin’s acutely aware of how to manipulate it.

To give you an example, Trump’s just all about his birthday—like for military parades—rather than the country’s birthday. It’s Trump this and Trump that—you know, Trump Enterprises. He isn’t really availing himself of the mystique of the United States, even though the US has this idea of a “manifest destiny” rooted in its historical origins. Trump’s version of history is superficial at best, and very controlled, with a high degree of manipulation, in which basic facts are twisted.

Drollette: What does all this mean for nearby countries—especially if you’re a little country that was once part of the old Soviet bloc, and you happen to be located pretty close to modern Russia. Should you be worried?

Hill: Yes, you should. Belarus used to be known as “White Russia,” and Ukraine used to be “Malaia” or “Little Russia.” Consequently, there’s all these ideas that because they were once part of that Slavic Russian-dominated core, therefore they don’t really exist as independent countries—they’re just accidents of history. There’s been a lot of Russian and Slavic settlement there, they were part of the lands that were acquired from various acts of conquest and wars with neighboring empires.

And Putin is of the view that anything that Russia once conquered, or was handed to Russia by virtue of a treaty—no matter how long ago, or what happened in the meanwhile—still belongs to Russia. He often says that Ukraine isn’t a real state; part of it was given to Russia, and the rest remained in Europe.

These are all things that he reiterated in that infamous Tucker Carlson interview[6], talking about centuries of Russian history going back to the 9^th century, citing it as proof that all these lands belong together.

Along the same lines, Finland was once part of the Russian Empire; it was considered the Grand Duchy of Finland, with Helsinki as its capital. And Poland was partitioned multiple times by the Russian Empire and its neighbors.

It does give you pause for thought, because you can’t fight history. But what Putin is trying to do here is negate all the agreements that occurred after the horrible events of World War II, when the world agreed that we weren’t going to carve up territory again based on disputes of the distant past. He’s trying to take us back to a time where you had 100 years of war between England and France over who had the right to the French throne based on disputes that were the stuff of the medieval era. But that’s what Putin is saying.

Drollette: Where do you think Russia will go next? Somehow or other, things in Ukraine have to end in some way, shape or form, so Putin and Russia won’t be tied down by Ukraine any more. Will they move on to do the same things somewhere else? Or has Russia been bled dry?

Hill: I think you need to show Putin the limits of Russian power. You need to do what Norbert Röttgen[7], one of Germany’s CDU foreign-policy experts, has said in a number of speeches: You must show Putin that war doesn’t pay; you’ve got to stop him in his tracks.

For Ukraine, I think the best way is to put on a really robust defense—to stop Russia from being able to move forward.

From the point of view of the rest of Europe, it’s to make it very clear that any Russian moves would be at enormous cost. It’s basically about creating limits to Putin’s ability to move forward.

But the problem is that Putin isn’t going to stop trying, because he’s a war president—he came into office with war in Chechnya, and now he’s involved in the largest military action on the European continent since World War II. He’s too invested. He’s in too deep; there’s been a tremendous loss of life in Russia, approaching a million in terms of people killed and grievously wounded—or wounded enough to be taken off the battlefield.

We don’t know exactly what the casualties are in Ukraine—that’s closely held—but they’re pretty significant. And then there’s the civilian costs of the destruction of cities and villages in the eastern part of Ukraine, as well as all the internally displaced people. But now Putin’s sort of locked into that militarized economy he’s created; there’s a war political machine that’s been built up around Putin. If Putin were to dismantle that now, I don’t think he could move back to being a peacetime president.

So I think we’re going to see Russia continue on this path in other places—re-fortifying the border with Finland, for example, and so forth. Putin is always going to be looking out for his own preservation and his regime’s preservation. I think he’ll be emphasizing permanent confrontation with Europe and with NATO—even if the US shifts to being best friends with Russia, he’ll still be trying the same tack.

Europe has been put into a state of needing to be in perpetual readiness and deterrence, to make sure that Russia goes no further. Because, as I said, Putin really can’t afford to step back. His whole economy now is tied up with war, in ways that it wasn’t previously.

And I don’t think this state of continual warfare can be easily resolved anymore; I was more hopeful in the past that we could do so, partly through arms control negotiations.

This situation has really transformed Europe. They’ve come a long way from their initial reaction, which was one of being slightly incredulous—not taking very seriously the annexation of Crimea and Donbas—and then trying to talk it away with all kinds of excuses. They’ve completely changed, to realizing that they have to step up and become a collective power in their own right. There’s a really serious effort now to build up European security—including even countries that are formally neutral, such as Switzerland and Ireland. Even Iceland comes to mind as one that needs to be much more serious about its security.

Drollette: Is there a particular place you see as especially at risk?

Hill: Everywhere is at risk—from attacks on critical national infrastructure, assassinations, poisonings, sabotage, and efforts of political subversion. It’s no longer a matter of “will a Russian tank appear on your horizon,” but “how can Russia harm you.” You have to start worrying about cyber attacks, GPS blocking, anti-satellite actions, cutting undersea cables, rupturing gas pipelines, poisoning water supplies, poisoning people, blowing up warehouses. We’ve seen all of these things, you know.

So when people ask “will attacks like that happen,” I say “we’re already in the middle of them.” And it’s been happening for some time.

Drollette: Politico quoted you as saying something to the effect that World War Three is already in progress[8].

Hill: What I meant was that all these different conflicts and wars—including between Ukraine and Russia—were colliding together and getting intertwined.

Drollette: How?

Hill: For example, Asia is being entangled in the war in Ukraine by Chinese support for Russia. China got involved because they thought of it as a kind of proxy war against the United States, back when the US was supporting Ukraine.

The Middle East is involved, with Iran openly supporting Russia by building drone factories.

And, of course, North Korea sent in troops to aid Russia.

If that’s not a war with global ramifications, then I don’t know what is. I mean, there’s an Asian front and a European front, which is what you had in World War Two.

Trump is trying to separate this stuff out and disentangle it—trying to deal with Iran, North Korea, the Middle East, and everything else independently.

But that approach leaves Europe in a bit of a mess because it means that the United States kind of moves out. It leaves the Europeans basically where they were in World War I, when they faced a whole mishmash of adversaries who were drawn into a conflict for one set of purposes that rapidly became something else.

Again, it’s the breakdown of deterrence, the breakdown of the international system, and a shift in the way that wars are fought.

We’re seeing massive changes on the battlefield, just like we saw in World War I, which started with cavalry and ended with tanks and airplanes. And those kinds of technological breakthroughs are what we’re seeing in Ukraine with drone warfare. Who would have expected Ukraine to sink a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet when Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy? We’re seeing a massive system change.

Drollette: Do you think Russia will feel more emboldened now that Trump is in power? I’m thinking of a March Washington Post article headlined “Washington now ‘largely aligns’ with Moscow’s vision, Kremlin says.”[9] Is that assessment accurate?

Hill: Putin definitely feels more emboldened because Trump is in power, even with Trump’s statements about Putin going crazy—those comments have just been discounted by Russia.

And I want to underscore that from the Kremlin’s point of view, they feel that Trump is out of his depth. The fact that Trump thinks of everything as if it’s a game of Risk, or as some kind of real estate deal, means that he doesn’t really pay attention to any details—so they figure he can be easily manipulated.

Let’s face it: Trump doesn’t prepare for meetings, and he sends out people who have no background knowledge—no sense of the root causes or the deep history.

So I think they’re fairly confident right now that he’s not going to impose massive sanctions. Trump’s certainly not going to use nuclear weapons against them; he’s also more like-minded with Putin than not.

Although I do think that at the same time, there’s some degree of trepidation in the Kremlin too, because ultimately Trump marches to the beat of his own drum—and they can only influence him so much. So they’re never really quite sure what he’s going to do. They never really know whether they can rely on any kind of agreement with him.

But at the same time, it’s deeply liberating for them: They can just say and do whatever they want.

So, yes, I think Putin has been emboldened, and he’s trying to seize his opportunity to try to finish Ukraine off this year, in 2025. He’s talked about finishing off Ukraine in a number of speeches.

Drollette: It seems that Trump thrives on chaos. I interviewed someone for this issue of the magazine about China—Orville Schell at the Asia Society—who compared Trump to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Apparently, one of Mao’s favorite sayings during that era was “The world is in great disarray, and the situation is excellent.”

Hill: Oh, yes.

Drollette: If that’s the case, then is the United States in danger of no longer being the linchpin for a broader, more stable global order? Are we becoming just another tin-pot dictatorship?

Hill: I think we’re already there, honestly.

The question is whether we can reverse it.

Because Trump’s trying to make sure that no one can reverse it. He wants to make the world secure for his personalized power.

Although I do think that Trump is being manipulated by a lot of people—not just by Putin, but by many others. There’s an entourage in the court of Donald, who, frankly, each have their own ideological goals.

I saw that in Trump 1.0—people who joined the Trump administration for their own personal benefit, either by enriching themselves or getting power, or seizing the chance to promote a particular ideological goal. Stephen Miller[10] pushed Trump towards expelling as many migrants—legal and illegal—as you possibly can from the country. And people like Russell Vought and all the others who worked on Project 2025 have a very particular, very specific vision of the United States that they want to see realized. This isn’t speculation, these guys are out there articulating this all the time, including to the press.

Elon Musk was also manipulating Trump—and, frankly, buying Trump. Musk bought the presidency for him because Musk had a vested interest in deregulation and in cutting through all of the restraints on his own companies. It’s people like this who want to, as they always say, “reduce the federal government down to the studs.”

And they’re doing this all for their own personal benefit; it isn’t for the benefit of the United States writ large, or even for the benefit of the people that voted for Trump. This is insiders using Trump as a vehicle for all kinds of ideas they have.

You can go and read this for yourself, in articles[11] and recent interviews with the New York Times. They’re crystal clear, they’re not hiding anything. We can read and hear what they’re saying, and we should take them at their word—Bannon, Vance, Musk—regarding how they think that the United States should be governed. All of these people are manipulating Trump toward their own ends.

Because deep down, I don’t think Trump really believes all of these things they espouse; he just believes absolutely, very strongly, in himself. He’s not an ideological person in the same way that they are. It just so happens that these ideologies resonate with him in some way, so he gives them his consent—he kind of allows these people to put them in motion, especially as they aggrandize him, or boost his power and standing.

But ultimately, these actions might actually hurt him, because he’s not fully cognizant of what these people are doing—like in the case of DOGE and Elon Musk, who have not only done great damage to the fabric of the United States but also to Trump’s own capacity to implement change. With all these mass firings, who’s going to make all these changes for him?

If you have no government apparatus, then you won’t be able to put things in motion. Even the Bolsheviks, after their revolution, didn’t intend to completely destroy the czarist state. This is of course what happened when they tried to take it over, but they realized that they needed apparatchiks and all the services of the state to implement their policies.

They did their purges and had their civil war, but they also then had to restore the fabric of the state. The destruction had devastating effect and it took them a long time to get over that.

Drollette: Things look pretty grim here at the moment. What can be done to make the autocrats’ lives more difficult, and help Ukraine? Can ordinary citizens throw sand in the gears of autocracy?

Hill: We can, certainly, and that goes for the domestic front as well.

You can start by lobbying your members of Congress to get their act together. Because it seems that Congress has forgotten that it’s a co-equal branch of government—and even, in fact, actually has more power constitutionally than the presidency does.

We can push back against this idea of a so-called “unified presidency” in the United States—which is what Russia has. Russia has a kind of constitutional monarch as a president, according to the Russian constitution. But Russia’s is one with great power—not the kind of constitutional monarchy in the British sense, which has no power at all.

So we can start to push back against this unified presidency by getting Congress to step up, to see that they have an obligation to do more to resist this dramatic political change. To do that, people have to really engage with the members of Congress, on every side of the aisle.

On the international front, the United States needs to join forces with the Europeans to help them build up Ukraine into the “porcupine of Europe”—meaning that Ukraine’s defenses must become so strong that it’s virtually impossible for Russia to take a bite out of it. It requires closing up all those vulnerabilities I talked about earlier, working on protecting critical national infrastructure, and instilling the capacity to fight back. That’s how you restore deterrence—by bolstering your homeland defense, making sure your critical infrastructure is hardened, your population is inured over the longer term, and basically fighting back against political influence and psychological operations.

That means we have to take a leaf out of the book of the Finns and the Swedes and the Norwegians and the Balts, who are always looking into new ways to embark on civil preparedness—in other words, brushing up our thinking about homeland defense so that we’re less vulnerable and more resilient. That means having strategic reserves and built-in resiliency in the face of possible attack.

In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, 70 percent of UK gas currently comes through just one pipeline from Norway, and the only people who can fix it are from one Norwegian company. That’s a tremendous potential choke point.

So we need to have emergency action plans in place, along with the means of repairing technical equipment and responding to a whole range of emergencies.

That’s basically what we need. It’s more of a kind of civil defense preparedness.

Drollette: One other question: Putin is not going to live forever; all things must pass. Meanwhile, the whole Russian system revolves around this one man. So, what happens when that one man, Vladimir Putin, dies?

Hill: That’s always the risk in all of these systems, because they, the singular leaders, don’t want to think about their own mortality—Trump included.

They don’t want to name successors, because that implies they’ve become a lame duck. And in the Russian context, Putin worries about becoming a dead duck—that if somebody else is available as an alternative, then that somebody might get him out of the way. So avoiding naming a successor is absolutely the point.

Technically, there may be a succession plan but it always throws the system into disarray. You see that over and over and over again.

And it could even be a problem here in the United States, too. After Trump denied the 2020 election results, we’ve been in a very dangerous place. Because it’s not entirely clear what would happen if the president passed on and the Supreme Court or another such entity had to step in to shepherd the process along: Would the country abide by it, after Trump has destroyed so many people’s confidence in the robustness of our system? We had an incredibly resilient political and electoral system until Donald Trump stressed it. And we’ve failed to pass that stress test.

Though I guess the silver lining is that now we know there’s a problem, and that something needs to be done.

Drollette: What could be done?

Hill: It does require some individual responsibility, but also collective action.

We all need to tell our members of Congress that they must decide if they want to go down in history as villains or heroes. They’ve been elected to do a job, not to be in thrall to a president who is basically a potentate.

They’ve got to stand up for democratic systems that, in the past, gave people a choice and gave people at least an opportunity to live better lives—even though that promise was not always fulfilled.

I think that’s all worth fighting for. And I, for one, am not going to shy away from it. I’m going to continue to speak out and talk, and try to get people into taking action. I don’t think it does any good to run away from what’s happening.

Drollette: That’s a good note to end on. Any last comments?

Hill: There are always times when you’ve got to think about what’s worth standing up for. And I think that’s where we are now. Stand up and be counted—and be confident you can do something.

Endnotes

[1] To read the original Bulletin article “Putin, the one-man show the West doesn’t understand” in full, see it free at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1170361

[2] According to Wikipedia: “ ‘Kompromat’ (Russian: компромат, IPA: [kəmprɐˈmat], short for ‘compromising material’) is damaging information about a politician, a businessperson, or other public figure, which may be used to create negative publicity, as well as for blackmail, often to exert influence rather than monetary gain, and extortion. Kompromat may be acquired from various security services, or outright forged, and then publicized by use of a public relations official. The word ‘kompromat ‘comes from ‘компромат,’ short for ‘компрометирующий материал ‘(komprometiruyushchy material) ‘compromising material.’ Widespread use of kompromat has been one of the characteristic features of the politics of Russia…”

[3] Kievan Rus was a loose affiliation of Slavic lands that sprawled over a land mass that does not correspond to the borders of the states familiar to us today. It was a common ancestor of at least three different modern states, and pre-dates modern Ukraine and Russia. For more, see “The Rise and Fall of Kievan Rus”

[4] Leni Riefenstahl has been hailed as a cinematic genius—and ostracized as a propagandist for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, which provided the financing and logistical support for her films. American Experience says: “The monumental vision of beauty in her film Olympia dovetailed perfectly with Nazi race ideology, and her Triumph of the Will was designed to glorify the power of the Third Reich… The film uses a number of innovative techniques: moving cameras; telephoto lenses used to create foreshortening effects; frequent close-ups of the wide-eyed party faithful; heroic poses of Hitler shot from below eye-level; and the use of real sound, a rarity at the time.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-riefenstahl/

[5] For more on the role of these Russian philosophers, see the Bulletin article of March 3, 2022 titled “Inside Putin’s head,” written by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst team of Charles B. Strozier and David M. Terman.

[6] Tucker Carlson is a conservative political commentator who hosted the nightly political talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News from 2016 to 2023. After his contract was terminated by Fox, he has hosted a weekly podcast of his eponymous show. A transcript of his interview with Vladmir Putin in Moscow on February 6, 2024 can be found at https://www.rev.com/transcripts/tucker-carlson-interviews-vladimir-putin-transcript

[7] Norbert Röttgen is a German politician and a member of the Christian Democrats Union (CDU) party, who served as Angela Merkel’s minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety from 2009 to 2012.

[8] See “ ‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes,” in Politico interview with Maura Reynolds on Febrary 28, 2022. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340

[9] For more, see the March 2, 2025 article by Francesca Ebel in The Washington Post titled “Washington now ‘largely aligns’ with Moscow’s vision, Kremlin says.” The author goes on to write that “Tension between the United States and Ukraine, laid bare in the Oval Office meeting of Trump and Zelensky, is seen in Moscow as a ‘gift.’ ” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/02/russia-ukraine-trump-zelensky-clash/

[10] Stephen Miller is Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the second Trump administration, and also Homeland Security Advisor.

[11] For one example, see the New York Times article of March 28, 2025 titled “Trump’s Budget Chief Eyes Deep Cuts to ‘Woke and Weaponized’ Spending.” The author, Tony Romm, goes on to write “Russell T. Vought, leader of the Office of Management and Budget, aims to marry extreme austerity with his Christian values.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/us/politics/trump-budget-cuts-russell-vought.html