Putin’s Endgame: A Conversation With Fiona Hill

[0] From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro.

[1] This is a daily.

[2] Ending the war in Ukraine very much depends on how and when Vladimir Putin allows it to end.

[3] In an interview for his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, my colleague, opinion columnist Ezra Klein, spoke with one of the world's leading experts on Putin, Fiona Hill, a foreign policy advisor for the last three American presidents.

[4] about exactly how Putin is approaching this moment and the right ways and wrong ways for the West to engage him.

[5] It's Friday, March 11th.

[6] Fiona Hill, welcome to the show.

[7] Oh, thanks so much, Ezra.

[8] So there are a lot of different frameworks being thrown around right now for how to think about Vladimir Putin.

[9] There's Putin as a strategic rational actor, there's Putin as a nostalgic imperialist, there's Putin, the unhinged maniac.

[10] What is the model you're using for understanding Putin right now?

[11] Well, I think some of those models that you've just laid out do hold true.

[12] Putin remains a strategic thinking.

[13] He's certainly got strategic goals that he's trying to fulfill irrespective of whether we might think that those are mad goals, you know, from our perspective.

[14] These are goals that he has put forward for quite a period of time, including about Ukraine, but also about the rollback of NATO, and what he sees as some kind of monumental struggle with the United States for Russia's right to exist in the world.

[15] He certainly framed it in this way as well.

[16] And then there's all these kinds of questions about the way that he reads history, that he reads the situation around him, and the way that he has now, over a long period of time, I mean, we have to remember he's been in power for 22 years.

[17] after a period of time it's you know you and the state and particularly in the case of Putin have become fused together and you can just sort of see it in the staging of everything I mean we can all observe it as outside witnesses to his actions the way that he sets up meetings the rooms that he meets in with statuary of famous zars and zariners of the past including Catherine the Great the way that people talk about him as being the only decision maker in the Russian state.

[18] And the way that he has taken everything personally and made everything personal in his pronouncements on the conflict in Ukraine.

[19] So for him, the state and Vladimir Putin have become fused together.

[20] And what I fear about when he gets the state of his mind then is that he sees himself as infallible.

[21] Because he's decided to do something, therefore it should be done.

[22] Do you believe that he is the only decision maker in the state?

[23] Well, he can't possibly be the only decision maker because the decisions have to be made in the heat of battle that we're seeing right now by the generals on the ground.

[24] But he's certainly at the apex of a very narrow decision -making vertical.

[25] I mean, the Russians call this the vertical of power.

[26] It's not even just a pyramid because it's just kind of a poll that Putin is at the top of.

[27] But clearly, this latest assault on Ukraine in the context of everything else that's been going on has been decided by Putin, along with a very small number of military officials, and perhaps a handful of security officials around him.

[28] Before we get into how Putin sees the Russian lands, because we're going to spend a bit of time there today, I want to ask about how he understands the West, because I'm not hearing that analyze so much.

[29] You're seeing a lot of Putin's imperial rhetoric discussed, but what does Putin think we want?

[30] When you read his speeches, when you listen to his comments, what is his model of us?

[31] Well, his model of us is quite negative, to save the least.

[32] And everything that we see today just underscores that Putin believes that we're literally out to get him.

[33] You know, the more that we talk about crushing the Russian economy, you know, there's loose talk by people now about, well, this alone the end of Putin disappears.

[34] This just feeds in to this mentality that Russia is always under siege, its leaders are always under siege.

[35] People always want regime change in Russia.

[36] Every time he looked at something that happened, for example, in the so -called coloured revolutions or uprisings, the Arab Spring, what happened?

[37] You saw Hosni Mubarak, the longstanding leader of Egypt, basically pushed out of power and ending up in a prison cell, you know, for example.

[38] Even worse, you saw Muhammad Gaddafi shot by rebel forces in what looked like a drainage pipe.

[39] And, you know, we hear stories that Putin played that image to himself over and over again, working himself into more of a state of paranoia.

[40] the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein and his hanging in Iraq, this is what Putin thinks about.

[41] He thinks that the United States is in the business of regime change, and there are always, throughout history, there's been some malevolent force, mostly coming from the West, he's discounting for now the Mongols from the East, mostly coming from the West, who is out to basically push change in Russia, subjugate Russia, and basically install its own version of Russian power.

[42] So unfortunately, right now, even all of the events of the present are feeding into that kind of mentality.

[43] Putting aside the question of malevolence, is you on some level right that the U .S. and the West are in the business of regime change, not just in Russia, but in Ukraine, in some of the other places you mentioned and didn't mention?

[44] I've been thinking a bit about this narrative by the political scientist Samuel Cherap, who's been arguing that you can't understand Russia's actions in the region without understanding this is a two -way content.

[45] for influence in Ukraine.

[46] We've done a lot over the past 15, 20 years to try to bring them closer to us, not just opening NATO, but supporting Western leaders, training a generation of military, officers actually arming them, integrating them into EU licensing and trade and regulatory regimes.

[47] And so he sees there as being a genuine, constant expansionary pressure from us that he's now trying to beat back.

[48] Is there validity to that view?

[49] Well, sure.

[50] I mean, you know, that's the way that Putin definitely sees things.

[51] But what that does is totally deny any agency on the part of Ukraine or any other country for that matter, right?

[52] If you think around the world as well, many countries have fought for their independence, you know, precisely because people themselves want to.

[53] What about the United States, for example?

[54] You know, we look back in US history.

[55] This is like 1812.

[56] And, you know, the US has had French, you know, we've had the Spanish, we've had the, you know, the British empire, obviously, we've had all kinds of manifestations and, you know, we have our own version of our own history, you know, might look very different, you know, from a different vantage point.

[57] You know, you think about all of the other countries of Europe that have got their independence from the dissolution of empires, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, Finland.

[58] You know, Sweden was once an empire and had, you know, kind of basically dominion over many of these lands as well.

[59] The United Kingdom, you know, Ireland is an independent country now as well.

[60] A lot of what's happening now is a kind of a post -colonial, post -imperial impulse.

[61] on the part of Russia, this kind of feeling that it can't possibly be that lands and peoples want to go their own way, but there must be some of a malevolent force there.

[62] And when a country makes an appeal to another country, you know, for association or to a, you know, different international franchise, let's put it that way, and wants to be part of that, that's seen as that other entity, be it NATO, the European Union, or, you know, bilateral relations with the US or anything else, that those countries are acting with malevolent force to pull them away.

[63] So what Putin can't make sense of, in fact, most people looking at it seem to be not be able to make sense of, that people of Ukraine actually kind of want to live like people of Ukraine in their own state and make their own decisions, if they want to associate with the European Union and NATO for their security, then a lot of that is their decision as well.

[64] So when we frame it that way, we completely and utterly negate the opinions and the beliefs and the aspirations of other people on the ground.

[65] That's what Putin is trying to do all the time.

[66] So he's really done a great job in propaganda internationally, and we feed into it all the time.

[67] And again, it's this framed as a conflict, a proxy conflict, between Russia and the United States and Russia and NATO for Ukraine.

[68] Well, why do we want Ukraine?

[69] People keep asking that.

[70] We don't want Ukraine.

[71] The United States does not want Ukraine, just to make it very clear.

[72] We're not going to annex Ukraine.

[73] It's not going to come like Puerto Rico and, you know, some additional state.

[74] We're not annexing part of Europe.

[75] This is not World War II or the Cold War we are not occupying Europe anymore.

[76] There's something he's been emphasizing that seems to me to be very much part of that idea, which is I think we're comfortable in a geopolitical moment like this talking about security interests.

[77] Ukraine and NATO, Ukraine and the EU, Ukraine and Russia, arms, training.

[78] Something that Putin has emphasized in a number of speeches is identity, language, ethnicity.

[79] And this seems to me to have been a profound miscalculation in exactly the way you just described, but he seems to understand Ukraine is full of Russians.

[80] I mean, of course, it does have many people who are part of Russia who speak Russian, who identify as more ethnically Russian.

[81] But he seems to have vastly overestimated the potency and ubiquity of that identity, such that he seemed to believe he'd get a lot less resistant.

[82] He has, but also his fear, as far as I can tell from some of his speeches, is not just that Ukraine is going to fall into a NATO security umbrella, but that there's going to be a westernization or even a Ukrainianization of the identity of the Ukrainian people.

[83] And once that is done, then Russia can't get them back, because then you are just occupying a land, not reintegrating with your brothers and sisters.

[84] And that seems very important in his thinking and also to have been very wrong in a way that now, if anything, he's he's made it even worse, right?

[85] I mean, nothing has done more for Ukrainian identity than this invasion.

[86] But I'm curious what you think of that, because he talks about it a lot, but I don't hear it discussed very often.

[87] Ezri, you're spot on.

[88] So it's very possible to be living in Ukraine and be somebody like Volodymyr Zelensky.

[89] Volodymyr being a name that would suggest, you know, Ukrainian nationalist version of Vladimir, by the way, after the great grandparents of Kiev that Putin's also fighting over.

[90] It's being bought over the versions of the name.

[91] Volodymy, Ukrainian version.

[92] Vladimir, the Russian version.

[93] And Putin is, you know, it's a battle of the Volodymere's and the Vladimir's.

[94] Volodymyr Zelensky also happens to be a Russian -speaking Jew.

[95] And I think he's blowing Putin's mind, because in that kind of capacity, he can't figure him out.

[96] He's trying to say that Ukrainians are being led by a bunch of, this is bizarre labeling, drug -addled neo -Nazi fascists.

[97] Well, it's a little hard to say that about somebody who's completely sober, very clearly, Volodymy Zelensky.

[98] and happens to be Jewish, and who has lost family in the Holocaust and is very proud of his Jewish identity as well as Ukrainian identity, and his identity as a Russian speaker.

[99] And this is the problem that everybody is falling into in the modern era right now.

[100] Putin has been trying to put himself forward in many respects as the kind of leader, not just of the Slavic part of the world, the Russian part of the world, this idea of Ruski -Mir, all of the Russian speakers who are scattered around, not just Ukraine, but also Belarus and northern parts of Kazakhstan and elsewhere in the former Soviet Republic or the Russian diaspora abroad, which he reaches out to.

[101] But he's got this idea of a kind of a white Christian -Russian -Orthodox, you know, Russia that is leading then, you know, the kind of peoples who are opposed to these other kinds of identity politics.

[102] So he's right there in the middle of it.

[103] And I think he's talked himself in to that idea that there can only be one particular form of identity.

[104] And just as you say, I think the main impetus for this is he saw that Ukraine was moving away.

[105] So what we're seeing here is almost in a way a kind of a battle for people to be able to espouse their own identities as complex as there may be, because Ukraine is full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

[106] There are many Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, but who will be Russian speaking.

[107] There are millions of Ukrainian citizens working in Russia, and there are lots of people in Ukraine who speak Russian, but now feel a very strong identity tied to place and to history and shared culture, especially for the last 30 years.

[108] They don't want to go back to whatever version of Ukraine, or multiple versions of Ukraine, because it seems that Vladimir Putin wants to carve the whole country up, that he is presenting to them.

[109] They want the right to decide for themselves.

[110] I want you to continue on spooling something you began talking about there.

[111] We've talked a fair amount so far about what Putin fears.

[112] But what does he want?

[113] What does he aspire to?

[114] Well, at this particular point, when it comes to Ukraine, I really fear that he aspires to punish them severely for not falling in line with his vision of what he's calling the Russian world, Ruski Mir, and laying down their arms surrendering and overturning their government so they can put in a puppet.

[115] That's exactly where we are right now.

[116] He's made it crystal clear.

[117] Any pretenses off now.

[118] And so what he wants to do is punish them severely and also punish us.

[119] I mean, I've feared many times before that if we got to this point, Putin would be willing to find to the last Ukrainian or the last Ukrainian that's willing to, you know, stand up and hold their head high.

[120] His aspirations, you know, were very clearly laid out.

[121] The two documents that were submitted to the United States and NATO back in December that said no, Ukraine and NATO, no NATO deployments in the lands of Eastern Europe that were made after 1997, which also suggests, you know, nothing about the expansion of NATO into countries like Poland and the Baltic states, you know, and then the US pulling out of those same kind of territories, and if not just there, even more of a pull -out out of Europe as well, putting the US on notice too.

[122] But since then, he's made other demands, not just the full surrender of Ukraine, but the recognition that Crimea belongs to Russia, recognition of the breakaway republics of Daniazgen -Lakhanz in their full administrative board is not just the rebel -held territories, the suggestion that that might be annexed to into Russia because they've been given passports, and making it also very clear, that he wants the neutralization, demilitarization, not just of Ukraine, but probably of the whole swath of former Soviet republics, unless they're in Russia's own alliance.

[123] I mean, he's laid all of this out.

[124] It's the kind of maximalist position of everything that he's probably ever thought of and that circle around him.

[125] And many of those demands go back in nationalist Russian circles since the very beginning, or to the very beginning, rather, of the period in the early 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

[126] So Putin's been picking up lots of threats.

[127] So I have a picture that I was given of me and of a whole bunch of you are sitting at that big white table with Putin.

[128] So Putin has four statues in that room.

[129] One is Catherine the Great.

[130] And when he talks of Crimea, he looks at her because it's, you know, Catherine the Great who, you know, basically annexed Crimea.

[131] The other is Peter the Great, the first person who, you know, really created the Russian Empire and the bottle of Poltava in Ukraine.

[132] And then the other two, and Nicholas I, who fought the debacle of the Crimean.

[133] while, but was the hard czar who, you know, basically made the world safer autocracy during all the uprisings of 1848.

[134] And there is then Alexander, the great, Alexander I, who chased Napoleon out of Moscow all the way to Paris, you know, way across the Elbe.

[135] And he's got these four around him.

[136] And then there's he, Vladimir the Great.

[137] And he built this big statue of Vladimir the Great, you know, the Prince of Kiev, the Grand Prince, you know, outside of the Kremlin, when this is really Volodymy of the Great Grand Prince of Kiev, who is also there in Kiev as well and outside of the Ukrainian embassy in London and all the rest of it.

[138] And so it's like a kind of a battle and he's putting his statuary all over the place.

[139] So this is a guy who kind of, you know, you hear about Jerusalem syndrome of people, you know, going to Jerusalem and thinking they're Mary Magdalene or Jesus Christ or John the Baptist and he thinks he's one of these guys.

[140] He's Catherine the Great or he's Peter the Great and, you know, Vladimir the Great.

[141] And, you know, you look at and you think, okay, you get where his headspace is.

[142] But that is part of what makes his current position confusing to me. I can understand, particularly if you begin this fight with the view, that Ukraine is full of Russians and that they are going to welcome Russians back in.

[143] I understand wanting those borderlands.

[144] I understand wanting the old Russian Empire back.

[145] It is a little hard for me to understand the Putin, who in many ways trenchantly critiqued some of America's foreign adventures as graveyards for regimes, for Pajamans, wanting to, on the one hand, expend blood and treasure on an endless occupation of a country, a gigantic country, where many of the people don't want him there.

[146] And on the other, to the extent you fear NATO, to the extent you fear an aggressive West, to unite the West, to put NATO into entirely different posture with regard to defense spending.

[147] It's a little harder for me to understand the endgame that looks good to him now.

[148] Yeah, and I think that's the problem.

[149] It's the same for him.

[150] The carefully laid plans of Putin and his men have gone awry.

[151] And they clearly thought that this would be over and done with in a couple of days.

[152] They thought that this would be very quick.

[153] They'd be making some pronouncement about Ukraine, now being under Russia's thrall.

[154] I mean, again, it sounds pretty medieval, you know, in many respects as well, under, you know, the dominance, the dominion of Russia, and that, you know, we'd then be moving on in a different place they didn't expect the massive backlash that they got.

[155] And so now, I think he's having the same problem that you laid out, he also doesn't really know what the end game will be beyond the end game that he already had in mind.

[156] He's still sticking to the plan.

[157] So when Macron called him, President Macron, France, and said, hey, you've made a mistake.

[158] Putin had no other response, and no, I haven't.

[159] I'm still sticking to my plan.

[160] because he believes that the plan is right because he set it, and he's become so wrapped up in that, that he is going to now throw everything that he's got at it to make sure that he succeeds in subjugating Ukraine.

[161] I'm worried about that last part, particularly, because if he maybe began this by having goals for Ukraine, I presume at this point he has goals for himself and for Russia and for everything that you have said and laid out about his psychology and his narrative, being humiliated at the hands of a independent Ukrainian uprising and a united West punishing Russia with sanctions and economic devastation, that's not how he wants to go down in history.

[162] Like, he's not going to slink out of there.

[163] No, he's not.

[164] What is somebody with Putin's psychology?

[165] How do they react to this kind of quagmire that he's now in?

[166] Well, first of all, you know, he's going to double and triple down on the military side of things.

[167] And he has very deliberately put his nuclear card on the table.

[168] You know, that's in a way of playing it, right?

[169] Because it suddenly gets everybody thinking, whoa, he's in a corner, what's he going to do?

[170] So he's going to nuke us to get out of it?

[171] He's saying, yeah, you know, that's why I'm thinking.

[172] I'm thinking about doing things like this.

[173] Do you take that seriously?

[174] Well, I think we have to take it seriously, but we have to deal with it with the car, collected manner in which we've done so far, which is like, okay, you're really going a bit too far here.

[175] You have scenes of old ladies and children preparing Molotov cocktails, and you've already gone nuclear.

[176] You know, there is a kind of a disproportionate asymmetric element to that, but which is classic Putin.

[177] You know, we've seen them now shifting some of the narrative for the internal purposes.

[178] And, you know, also to anybody else who listen, and there are, of course, many people who pay attention to what Putin says and, you know, by his propaganda, that the Ukrainians we're looking to try to get a nuclear weapon.

[179] I mean, basically he's making stuff up, and that's the whole point there, because he's trying to kind of shift the rhetoric, because if you make it nuclear, it's not, again, about Ukraine and Russia, and what Russia's doing to Ukraine, it suddenly becomes U .S., NATO, nuclear powers, permanent five at the UN Security Council of the nuclear powers, China, UK, France, Russia, the United States, you put it in a different box.

[180] So we have to keep this focused on what this is.

[181] which is Russia invading Ukraine.

[182] And that also goes to the other part of your question there about what to do with him and his psychology.

[183] If he starts to think that this goes into regime change, you know, he's looked at interventions in Iraq, he's looked at interventions in Libya.

[184] What about Syria?

[185] Why did Russia intervene in Syria in 2015?

[186] It was to stop Assad being toppled.

[187] Even though now in 2022, Assad is still there, but the country has gone completely.

[188] It's just being turned to rubble.

[189] That you see what Putin is prepared to do to stay in place.

[190] He did not want a sad to follow down the lines of everybody else where there'd been some kind of intervention.

[191] So I think, you know, in dealing with his psychology, the loose talk that's out there about this only ends if Vladimir Putin goes.

[192] There's plenty of people are out there saying that.

[193] We're going to have to be very careful about that rhetoric because that will make him maybe be fighting for his own self -preservation in his life.

[194] And we're going to have to keep framing this that this is the invasion of Russia, of Ukraine that we're trying to stop.

[195] And we need to try to get Vladimir Putin to pull out of Ukraine.

[196] And so it has to be framed in the United Nations.

[197] We're going to have to be, you know, extremely careful.

[198] This is like handling Chernobyl and trying to create a sarcophagus around it, because it really does have all kinds of dangerous spillover potential.

[199] We'll be right back.

[200] Let's talk about Zelensky for a minute.

[201] We've spoken so much about Putin, but I think it is fair to say when you look at where NATO was, where you look at where American sanctions were, on the day, of the Russian invasion.

[202] And then you look at how they changed come the following Monday, come a week from that Monday, that he himself has also, just like Putin, reshaped the world and reshaped the West.

[203] I think that he took our values and threw them back at us and asked, well, what are you really?

[204] And so before all this, I think there are many deals that America and Western Europe would have taken that would have treated Ukraine like a vassal state.

[205] I don't think any deal can be made so long, you know, hopefully as Zelensky survives, that is not a deal he would take.

[206] Because just as Putin as a power, I mean, I do think Zelensky has the moral power and the sort of global voice now.

[207] Do you have a sense of what he would take?

[208] Because it seems to me he has changed during this, of course, too.

[209] I mean, he's watched Russia try to destroy his country and kill many of his countrymen, things that he might have been okay with two weeks ago may not be things he's okay with two weeks from now.

[210] Yeah, not just him, right?

[211] There's an awful lot of other Ukrainians with government experience who are out there who won't accept anything different either.

[212] And Zelensky is really a president for the new interconnected social media savvy 21st century.

[213] He's 44 years old.

[214] When the Soviet Union fell apart, he was only a teenager.

[215] he is a post -Soviet guy.

[216] And he's also a gifted actor.

[217] And he, you know, clearly it's not just performance.

[218] He's obviously the guy's also got balls.

[219] Let's just put it that way.

[220] That's incredible line that, you know, he basically said is, look, I need ammunition, not a drive when he was offered safe passageway out of Kiev.

[221] I mean, that was one of those transformative moments for everybody else watching this as well.

[222] And although he's become iconic out there in social media, as you have said, he's actually in a real material way shifted everything.

[223] His emotional appeal to the European Union, the way that, you know, that created redevelopment of a spine on the part of, you know, so many people watching that.

[224] It's really important to have that kind of charismatic, transformative leader in that moment when you absolutely need them to get everybody in motion.

[225] And that's exactly what he has done.

[226] And he has transformed that landscape, just as you say.

[227] And it will be very hard for other people to back down from that right now.

[228] He's gone full Winston Churchill.

[229] I want to say this truly honoring him and truly being amazed at what he's done.

[230] But in a way, it's made the conflict scarier because it is in many ways easier to imagine compromises over material, compromises over security, compromises over land.

[231] It is very hard to compromise over values.

[232] And the remarkable thing he's done for the West is to re -center this around values.

[233] I mean, he does not treat it, as you were saying earlier, like, oh, just great power politics.

[234] This is not a great power, I are realist.

[235] This is somebody who has reframed this successfully correctly, because, I mean, it's true around values.

[236] But that means that a lot of the dirtier or uglier compromises that you could have imagined the West and Russia coming to to end this, that doesn't satisfy not just Ukraine now, but I think many people in the West.

[237] I'm not sure you can speak the way Joe Biden spoke at the state of the Union.

[238] I'm not sure you can speak the way many of the European leaders are speaking right now and then turn around and carve up Ukraine to let Vladimir Putin save face.

[239] That pathway out has become harder for me to imagine.

[240] And I'm curious how you imagine it now.

[241] Well, look, in wartime, it is very important to have that inspirational, charismatic leader.

[242] And, you know, if you think about what Winston Churchill did at the end of the war, sitting down at Yelta and Potsdam and the other conferences and actually making deals with Stalin and the Soviet Union.

[243] It wasn't particularly in line with what he was actually saying when he was talking about fighting on the beaches and everything else he was doing to rally against Nazi Germany.

[244] So, you know, I think that there's different phases in all of this.

[245] And I would like to point out that Zelensky is also being very pragmatic and practical in many different respects.

[246] At the very beginning when he came into office, he did signal to Russia that he was willing to try to find some kind of solution, accepting that everything wouldn't go Ukraine's way.

[247] And even now, he is trying to push forward.

[248] The people around him are pushing forward, not just on humanitarian corridors, but to have a ceasefire, and basically talking about, talks without preconditions, and actually basically laying out there, look, we're willing to negotiate.

[249] Now, clearly, not willing to negotiate Ukraine away.

[250] I mean, the Russians have, you know, basically said they want to have recognition of Crimea.

[251] They'd already try to recognize Danyetsk Milkansk.

[252] Somewhere down the line, there may be some very difficult discussions that absolutely have to be had.

[253] But I think Zelensky is capable, and the people around him are capable of doing many things at once.

[254] It's important to have everybody mobilized to basically put that pressure.

[255] It can't just be the Ukrainian standing on their own, to get the United States, to get the European Union, to get the world paying attention, the United Nations, those big fora.

[256] And that's what's who Zelensky is appealing to.

[257] He's not just appealing to us.

[258] He's appealing to all of these other countries who have faced the same challenges and dangers or might in the future.

[259] Because if Russia doesn't pull back, if Putin doesn't pull back from what he's doing in Ukraine, it opens the door for everybody else to do the same.

[260] So he is able then to strengthen his hand in having that inevitable, you know, negotiation that's coming forward.

[261] He wants to be a seat at the table.

[262] He doesn't want to be like, you know, basically Europe that was in the rubble as you had, you know, three guys and a few others, you know, sitting down at some wartime conference and making decisions without them.

[263] What looked to you like the various scenarios that could be the end of this?

[264] I mean, all the way from full Russia -conquers Ukraine to various kinds of settlements, ranked from likeliest to least -likely.

[265] How do you rate the end games?

[266] Well, look, a lot of it depends on how, you know, I had a deep sigh there.

[267] because of how we all respond, and we have to be extraordinarily careful, given the dangers that we've already outlined.

[268] We're dealing with somebody in the form of Vladimir Putin who sees himself as all tied up with the Russian state.

[269] He cannot lose.

[270] So we have to kind of figure out about how to formulate something that deals with that and the fact that he's likely to react extraordinarily badly at any perceived intervention on the part of NATO of NATO forces, painting the Russians into a corner, discussions of economic warfare.

[271] We're going to have to tamp all of this down and to really focus on getting Russia out of Ukraine, focusing on ceasefires, focusing on withdrawals of Russian men and equipment, heavy artillery, these barbaric high -end weapon systems that they're bringing in there, trying to head off the use of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, etc., we've got to focus on these kinds of things and be very careful about the rhetoric.

[272] I think we've said all the things that can actually go wrong.

[273] So a lot of it is on us as well right now about how we react.

[274] And then how can we, to the best of our ability, formulate a further discussion about structures within European security or globally, you know, with the United Nations and others involved, to find a pathway out.

[275] So this is why I'm very reluctant to get drawn into how this ends, because I think in a way you can kind of then start leading the path for what seems to be the most likely scenario.

[276] I mean, the only scenario that is really going to work is one which Russia pulls out of Ukraine, but we find some kinds of mechanism to make Putin feel like he's got something out of this.

[277] And unfortunately, we're going to have to factor China into this.

[278] We haven't really talked about China so far.

[279] But China leapt into this whole debate and now into the conflict in a rather spectacular way around the margins of the Beijing Winter Olympics on February 4th when they issued a joint statement between President Xi and President Putin, basically with China calling out NATO and later enlargement and suddenly making itself, you know, a factor in European security.

[280] Now, there are NATO countries that operate in the Asia Pacific, not least us, the United States and the Canadians and the French and the Brits.

[281] But, you know, you could hardly say that NATO has been a menacing China in its neighbourhood.

[282] But, of course, NATO has been worrying about China and the China factor, and China has been a factor economically and politically in Europe as well.

[283] It was the biggest investor in Ukraine up until this particular point.

[284] So China's now thrown its hat into our ring, and we're going to have to figure out now a much more globalized solution to this.

[285] It's going to be very difficult.

[286] Very difficult indeed.

[287] I mean, this is something that we're going to be thinking about, talking about, and grappling with four years to come.

[288] I really appreciate the time you spend here with us.

[289] This has been very, very, very, very enlightening, if a little scary.

[290] Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

[291] Thanks so much, Ezra.

[292] On Thursday, the top diplomats from Russia and Ukraine failed to make any progress in their first face -to -face talks since the war began, and the possibility of a ceasefire remained remote.

[293] The Russian strategy of encircling and bombing major cities continued.

[294] In Mariupil, according to the Associated Press, 70 bodies have been buried since Tuesday, all of them without coffins in a mass grave, and local officials there updated the original casualty count from the Russian attack on a maternity hospital.

[295] At least three people have died from the attack, including a child.

[296] Meanwhile, American officials now estimate that as many as 6 ,000 Russian troops have been killed in the war, and say that the actual number could be much higher.

[297] To hear Ezra Klein's full conversation with Fiona Hill, listen to the latest episode of his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

[298] We'll be right back.

[299] Here's what else you need to know today.

[300] Inflation is getting even worse.

[301] The U .S. government said that consumer prices rose by 7 .9 % through the end of February.

[302] the fastest pace in 40 years, led by higher costs for food and rent.

[303] Prices are expected to go up even more in March because of the surging cost of gasoline, which has hit record levels.

[304] On Thursday, the average cost of a gallon of gas was $4 .32.

[305] Today's episode was produced by Roger Karma, Annie Galvin, and Yvonne.

[306] Jeff Geld, and fact -checked by Michelle Harris and Andrea Lopez Rosado, was mixed by Jeff Geld and engineered by Chris Wood.

[307] The executive producer of the Ezra Klein Show is Irene Noguchi.

[308] Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

[309] Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristen Lynn.

[310] That's it for the daily.

[311] I'm Michael Mubaro.

[312] See you.

[313] on Monday.