Fiona Hill: It's a mistake for Trump to meet Putin alone

Telegraph

a day ago

Donald Trump made a mistake in agreeing to meet with Vladimir Putin alone, his former top Russia adviser has warned.
Fiona Hill, who served on the national security council during Mr Trump's first term, said without his own advisers and translator, Putin will be better placed to lure the US president into a trap.
'Putin will lure you in in a moment,' she said. 'He likes to do the two guys chatting routine, but what he's really doing is making you complicit in all kinds of things he wants.'
The US president is meeting with his Russian counterpart for a high-stakes summit at an Alaskan military base on Friday.
He intends to speak to Putin 'one-on-one' as part of a 'listening exercise', Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced on Tuesday.
But Ms Hill – who is one of few people both to have worked for Mr Trump and dined with Putin – said the set-up leaves the US president vulnerable to manipulation.
Having counselled Trump ahead of a joint press conference with Putin at the Helsinki Summit in 2018, few are more acutely aware of the pitfalls of preparing the president for a diplomatic summit.
'He kept saying, get away, I can do this myself,' recalled Ms Hill, who said the president's dismissive attitude and flapping hand gestures reminded her of her own daughter – a young child at the time.
'He was convinced that if he sat down with Putin, he'd sort things out, man to man, without the encumbrance of any pesky analysts or aides.'
In the end, the meeting went so badly that Ms Hill said she contemplated faking a seizure to shut it down.
Going into Friday's meeting, she advised Mr Trump to keep his guard up and take a translator with him, lest he fall for the former KGB operative's linguistic tricks.
'Trump doesn't speak a lick of Russian,' she said. 'The issue there is that Putin is always going to be one step ahead, because Putin's English is certainly good enough to follow.
'You really need to be paying attention to this guy, how he holds himself when he says things, because he plays all these body language tricks as well.'
When world leaders speak behind closed doors, they conventionally bring their own interpreters.
Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump's special envoy broke with convention in May when he relied on Russian translators during three high-level meetings with Putin, running the risk that some of the nuance in the Russian leader's comments was lost in translation.
Ms Hill warned that without a fluent Russian speaker in the room, the president risks being secretly mocked by his counterpart.
'He does make fun of Trump. He uses the Russian language in a way that can be quite sarcastic and ironic. It's totally lost in translation. I would have someone there telling (Trump) what this guy is saying and how he's saying it.'
Ms Hill, a British Kremlin watcher and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said solo negotiations will 'limit' what progress can be made on a ceasefire deal as 'Trump isn't going to have total recall'.
'Who knows what will have been discussed. Only Putin will probably have a good idea,' she said. 'His team of people, they'll be sure to have someone taking notes. That's what the Russian interpreters do, they take notes at the same time.'
Mr Trump returned to the White House with a promise to end the war in Ukraine 'on day one' of his presidency.
But eight months later, repeated attempts to drag Russia to the negotiating table by Mr Witkoff have yielded little progress.
After consecutive talks with Mr Witkoff failed to bear fruit, Ms Hill believes Mr Trump has now decided 'he needs to see this through himself'.
'From Trump's perspective, he's the special sauce, the missing factor… I think he thinks if he sits down with Putin one-on-one, he can sort something out,' she said.
'He just thinks he can game it when he gets there, because he thinks he's very clever, and that he always has the upper hand, and things always work out well.'
Ms Hill fears Mr Trump may have overestimated his ability to get through to the Russian strongman.
'He doesn't get Putin. He thinks he does, but he says it all the time, he doesn't get why Putin wants to slaughter so many people. Putin's prepared to do that, so that's your problem,' she said.
' He has this brutality, which for Trump is unfathomable.'
'Putin wants to reset relations with Trump'
While Mr Trump has said he is 'not happy' with Putin in the lead up to the summit, she predicted the Russian leader will seek to flatter his counterpart in a bid to stave off further US intervention.
'If Putin wants the upper hand to just keep hammering the Ukrainians into submission, he'll probably get it,' she said.
'He'll want to reset the relationship with Trump so that Trump's not going off supporting Ukraine, and he'll want to put all the blame back on Ukraine and everyone else for a lack of success.'
She added that Putin is playing for time until 'Ukraine crumbles and capitulates along the front lines and the territories he's already declared are Russia's'.
Part of the issue, Ms Hill said, is that Mr Trump has relinquished his bargaining power by repeatedly forestalling robust sanctions and weakening Europe's posture of solidarity with Ukraine.
Despite introducing 25 per cent tariffs on India, a major importer of Russian oil, the figure marks a climbdown from Mr Trump's initial proposal of 100 per cent secondary sanctions – and a drop in the ocean compared to the 500 per cent tariffs against Russia and its allies mooted by Republican Russia hawks within his party.
Russia could be forced to negotiate if 'Trump were really willing to sanction Russia and Putin and to take action to really fully support Ukraine, but he's not', said Ms Hill.
Wary of making predictions about the outcome of the Alaska talks, Ms Hill said there is a chance Mr Trump could 'nudge [talks] along' in a positive direction.
Whatever the outcome, she is clear that the fate of Ukrainians will not be at the forefront of the president's mind.
'Trump is not the Ukrainians' plenipotentiary. Trump is Trump, and he's negotiating some sort of deal for a piece of property, which is Ukraine,' she said.
'People are talking about peace in Ukraine, but he's really talking about doing something with pieces of Ukraine.'