Fiona Hill: Trump is terrified of Putin, I've seen it first hand

Telegraph

25-05-2025

It could of course have been pure coincidence that when Vladimir Putin unveiled Russia's first hypersonic missile to the world, he did so with a simulation of the weapon plummeting into an unnamed peninsula bearing an uncanny resemblance to Florida.
The similarity was not lost on Donald Trump whose face whitened as he watched on, presumably with visions of his beloved Mar-a-Lago resort reduced to an atomic wasteland, flashing before his eyes.
Standing next to him on that day in March 2018 was Fiona Hill, the president's Russia tsar at the time.
'That got Trump's attention,' she said. 'Trump was like, 'Why did he do that? Real countries don't have to do that.''
For Hill, a long-term Kremlin watcher who once sat so close to Putin at dinner she could smell the detergent used to launder his clothes, the episode revealed much about how Mr Trump views the Russian leader. 'He is deferential towards Putin because he really is worried about the risk of a nuclear exchange,' she said.
The threat of impending nuclear fallout shaped Hill's early life. Born in County Durham in the 1960s, the daughter of a coalminer and a midwife, she was inspired to study Russian following the war scare of 1983, setting her on an extraordinary trajectory that propelled her all the way 'from the coal house to the White House'.
She settled on St Andrews University, after a failed interview at Oxford where posh students mocked her for her working-class northern accent. From there she moved to Russia then America, where she met her husband at Harvard, before going on to serve as an intelligence analyst for successive administrations – first for George Bush, then Barack Obama – and finally on the national security council of Mr Trump.
Yet unlike the US president, whom she said remains trapped in a 1980s mindset, both in his foreign policy approach and his musical tastes (see his penchant for YMCA), Hill is at pains to stress that the biggest global threat is no longer a nuclear strike, but more clandestine methods of warfare.
'It's not the likelihood of a Russian tank coming across the Suffolk Downs or a nuclear weapon taking out Sheffield,' she said, speaking over Zoom from her office in Washington DC. 'Now it's much more about critical national infrastructure and acts of sabotage, poisonings and assassinations.'
That is not to say she believes the world is a safer place today. Far from it. In fact, she believes World War Three is upon us. 'World wars are when you have global sets of conflicts that become intertwined,' she said. 'That's where we are.'
Having spent decades in the US capital quietly blowing the whistle on Russian aggression, Hill was thrust into a media firestorm when she testified at Mr Trump's first impeachment trial in 2019.
Her testimony, delivered in her lilting Durham cadence, exposed vulnerability to Russian meddling at the heart of the White House – and caused her inbox to fill up with plaudits and death threats in equal quantities.
She has since released a memoir, There is Nothing Here for You, recalling her father's advice that spurred her on a dizzying career path to the heights of US geopolitics, been installed as chancellor of Durham University, and was last year appointed by Sir Keir Starmer to lead the UK's forthcoming Strategic Defence Review.
Since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and even more so following Mr Trump's return to the White House, her expertise has been in greater demand than ever.
With large chunks of the front lines in stalemate, and Russia on track to reclaim its territory seized by Ukraine in last year's daring counter-offensive, all eyes have turned to Washington. Mr Trump pledged to end the war on 'day one' of his presidency. And as the conflict drags on, the giant question mark hovering over western Europe is how long it will take for the US to make good on its promise.
So, when the two presidents shared an 'excellent' phone call on Monday, Hill was uniquely placed to read the tea leaves of the paltry briefings from each side.
How did Mr Trump fare? 'Terrible. Let's give him a pass for effort,' she said, matter-of-factly, as if marking the president's report card. A former Harvard researcher who serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, an influential foreign policy think tank, Hill is a career academic with the manner of a firm but fair head teacher.
'What Trump is doing is answering the wrong exam question,' Hill added.
'Trump thinks it's just about real estate, about trade and who gets what, be it minerals, land or rare earths,' she explained. What the president doesn't understand is that 'Putin doesn't want a ceasefire'.
'[He] wants a neutered Ukraine, not one that is able to withstand military pressure. Everybody sees this, apart from Trump,' she said.
Hill has previously said that her straight-talking approach is what earned her a place in Mr Trump's inner circle. Whereas in Britain, she was advised to go to elocution lessons to round-out her vowels, this wasn't a problem in the US, where Mr Trump referred to her as a 'Deep State stiff with a nice accent'. Sexism, however, was a constant, with the president once mistaking her for a secretary.
'In the Trump White House being a woman was something of a liability because I wasn't going to do the Fox News anchor makeover,' she said. Despite her resistance, she did purchase 'a whole array of dresses' ('I got them in flash sales') to camouflage herself.
'For women, it's very important to not look, in his view, 'doudy',' she said. 'It was just this obsession with how you looked which became very bothersome, because if you didn't look the part, you couldn't impart the information.'
After his call with Putin, Mr Trump floated the possibility of a 'large-scale trade' deal. Putin, in turn, offered syrupy platitudes about negotiations being 'on the right track' and the prospect of a 'memorandum of understanding'. But one cannot help but detect a growing sense of desperation in the US president's boosterism. After all, the phone call was only ever a last-minute stand-in for the headline act: direct talks between Zelensky and Putin.
The Ukrainian leader had called Putin's bluff, inviting him to a face-to-face meeting in Turkey that the Russian president dropped out of. Mercifully, the Trumpometer appears to have swung in recent months from open hostility towards Ukraine, culminating in the infamous Oval Office shake-down, towards more conventional mistrust of Moscow – thanks in no small part to a lucrative minerals deal signed with Kyiv and a tete-a-tete with Mr Zelensky beneath the vaulting dome of St Peter's Basilica.
Putin's no-show, despite proposing the talks himself, was the latest in a string of empty promises to work with the US towards a ceasefire.
The US president has so far resisted hitting Putin with further sanctions, instead offering a deal which Hill said provides a 'great incentive for the Russians to play along with Trump'. 'If you offer the Russians a carrot, they just eat it, or they take it and hit you over the head with it,' she said.
'The entourage, the circle around Putin, have enriched themselves so much by availing themselves of all the goodies that the state can provide, what is it that Trump can give them that they don't already have?'
Hill is well-versed in the hard ball tactics of Russian negotiators (and the difficulties of corralling Mr Trump). Indeed, she helped prepare the US team for 2018 talks with Russia in Helsinki – where she was forced to call on the Finnish prime minister for help, imploring him to advise Mr Trump about how to engage with Putin after the president ignored his own advisers.
Putin, who has maintained the same 'tight team' of top diplomats around him for the past 25 years, dispatched his Stanford-educated economic adviser Kirill Dmitriev, former ambassador to Washington Yuri Ushakov, and Sergei Lavrov, his comic villain foreign minister, to recent talks in Saudi Arabia.
'These guys are really skilled diplomats. They all speak absolutely excellent English,' said Hill. 'They can talk the hind leg off a donkey. They can turn you around in circles. They've got an answer for everything.'
Batting for the US are Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, Mike Waltz, Mr Trump's erstwhile national security adviser, and his special envoy Steve Witkoff, a former real estate dealer. Between them, they have less than a year's-worth of cabinet-level experience.
So, what does the dancing Russian bear make of these three cotillion debutantes? 'They're eating the neophytes on the US side for dinner,' said Hill.
Mr Witkoff, the president's long-term golf buddy, comes in for particular scorn from Hill.
Touted as a 'killer' by the president, real estate billionaire Mr Witkoff appeared to forget the names of the Ukrainian territories that he was negotiating with Russia over during a recent episode of Tucker Carlson's podcast.
Having driven around the streets of 1980s Harlem looking for houses to flip in a former life, he has traded in his real estate licence for criss-crossing the globe to negotiate hostage deals and ceasefires on behalf of the US government.
'Witkoff's probably thinking about condos in Moscow,' said Hill.
'They think it's really tough being in Queens,' she added. 'It's not as tough as trying to do business in Russia, where people have a propensity to fall out of poorly sealed and easily opened windows from high buildings.'
In her line of work, Hill is all too aware of the dangers of dealing with malign governments in the near east. She fell violently ill after being told she was asking too many questions at a meeting with Chechen separatists. She later discovered she had been poisoned.
As a member of Mr Trump's security council from 2017 to 2019 , she said the president made it 'very clear' that Ukraine 'must be part of Russia'. 'He really could not get his head around the idea that Ukraine was an independent state,' she told a New York Times journalist.
But what has changed since Mr Trump was last in office, she said, is that he has surrounded himself with 'sycophants and courtiers', with no one pushing back against his more outlandish ideas.
During his first term, she said, 'he was a little bit deferential here and there to various people. But now he's so convinced [in his own abilities] that he doesn't pay attention to anyone'.
Underpinning Mr Trump's soft approach to Moscow, she believes, is his personal idolisation of Putin, and their joint belief in 'spheres of influence' and 'might makes right'. 'Trump is enthralled by Putin, and as a result becomes in thrall to him,' she said.
However, she is equally scathing of European leaders for not coming to terms with this new reality sooner. 'The fact that the Europeans are so shocked by his deference to Putin actually shows that they haven't also done their homework,' she said.
Despite European outrage at Mr Trump's repeated threats to withdraw American support for Ukraine, Hill gives credit to the US president for sounding the alarm on the need for Europe to increase its defence spending as far as 2016.
'He's been accurate right from the very beginning', she said, of the need to reach the two per cent of GDP spending on defence target and of ending Europe's energy dependency on Russia's Nordstream pipeline, which, prior to the war in Ukraine, provided more than half of Germany's gas supply.
Even on the subject of tariffs, Hill said, there is method in the madness. 'Europe wanted defence and security provisions from the US, but wanted to be an economic competitor,' she said. 'There is an absolute and utter solid basis for why Trump is really pissed off about all of this.'
Hill now believes that America turning its back on Ukraine is 'the most likely scenario', yet despite the gloomy picture, she is optimistic that European sanctions can still bear fruit if the bloc can pull together.
Although sanctions currently rely heavily on the power of the US treasury to act unilaterally, Hill said collective action between the UK and Europe could be 'pretty powerful', but requires 'a lot more coordination'.
One possible avenue, she suggested, would be for Europe to leverage relationships with its major trading partners to encourage them to cut ties with Russia.
The Europeans handing an ultimatum to the Chinese, Indians and Iranians if the US withdrew sanctions could provide 'some really significant leverage', she said.
'All these countries that have a vested interest in investing in Europe and doing work with Europe,' she added. 'Maybe you don't do the kind of sanctions that the US does, but Europeans can have very serious conversations.'
Talking to Hill is like opening one of the sets of the encyclopaedia Britannica she used to read on the stairs of her small family home as a child. Seamlessly interweaving politics, philosophy and history, she cross-stitches conversation with references to Thomas Hobbes, Jean Monnet and, in a nod to her adoptive homeland, American football.
Growing up, her family did not have a telephone, a car or a television and often switched off the electricity to save money. A star pupil, Hill won a scholarship to a private school but did not attend because her family could not afford the uniform or the books.
In her memoir, Hill writes at length about how mass job losses in working class communities fuel populism. Yet despite the hardships of her upbringing, she was able to rise to the dizzy heights of American politics – a feat she credits to her parents, her teachers and her local MP.
Working in the highest echelons of foreign politics, she was often the only woman in the room. In Russia, this led to her being dismissed, in turns, as a waitress, an aide, and even an upmarket prostitute. But it was also a secret weapon.
'People just forgot you were there and talked as if you were part of the scenery,' she said. 'I'd hear and learn all kinds of things that I never would have done under different circumstances.'
When she testified against Mr Trump at his impeachment trial, she was careful about her choice of outfit, opting to dress in deliberately muted tones, so as not to draw attention away from what she was saying. The next day, she earned gushing front page headlines across the US national newspapers, with many marvelling at her accent. She also won a shout out in the Washington Post style section for her 'reassuringly dull' black ensemble.
Besides the bouquets of flowers arriving at the door, her daughter, then 12, heard some of the death threats left on the family's voicemail. Hill told her the callers were 'cowards' and said not to worry, but taped up the letterbox in case of letter bombs.
'I'm from the north east of England, I'm not that easily intimidated,' she once said.
Hill became a US citizen in 2002 and lives in Washington DC with her husband Kenneth Keen, a business consultant, and their daughter. But she splits her time between the US and the UK. Her mother lives in a care home in Bishop Auckland, near where she grew up, and she has taken on an advisory role to the British government as a leader and co-author of the Strategic Defence Review.
So how does life in the White House compare to the Ministry of Defence? 'I always find it quite refreshing in the UK context now, that people just look normal,' she said. 'It didn't feel like I had to be out there choosing my fanciest frock.'
The review was meant to report in the first half of 2025, but is expected to be delayed until autumn, much to Hill's frustration ('everyone knows what's in it. It's just the whole politics of finding a time.') Its release has been shrouded in secrecy amid reports that it will recommend protecting critical infrastructure through the creation of a home guard, uncharitably compared to dad's army – Hill dismisses this as 'rubbish'.
Hill said she hopes the review will act as a wake up call for Britain and Europeans to understand that a land invasion is not the only threat we face from Moscow.
Pointing to recent blackouts in Spain and at Heathrow Airport, she said: 'What we're arguing is the physical front lines in terms of the likelihood of an invasion by Russia may be further away, but the other front lines are here all the time. They're your IT systems, they're your electrical grids, the power stations.
'Every country is massively vulnerable,' she added. 'Ninety per cent of our way of life, everything from you being able to do your orders online for your food, to your ability to function at work would be taken out by a massive strike on all of the power grid.'
Working in the weeds of European defence and fighting a losing battle to convince the US to stay engaged is enough to turn anyone into a cynic. Yet despite everything, she remains optimistic that Britain and Europe will step up. 'The UK has absolute potential to play a leadership role at the moment,' she said.
Her message for Sir Keir's government? 'Come on then, get a move on. What I worry about is that people are going to be dithering about for too long, because the time for action was yesterday.'