Is Putin playing Trump on Ukraine?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:43BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. It is, to borrow a line used each week by our friends on Ukrainecast, 1 ,157 days since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Call me a peddent, Nick, but I call it the re-invasion because I think that this war has been going on since 2014. But that's a little minor detail which we might come back to. It's definitely been 95 days since Donald Trump returned to the White House and there is still no deal to end the war, despite him once saying that it would take him just 24 hours to do that deal. In fact, he's now threatening to take a pass on the peace talks, take a pass being a very New York 1980s phrase for basically leave.

1:23And that perhaps shows how frustrated he is with the lack of progress. And if you wanted to censor that frustration, Nick, you need only look at his social media channel, Truth Social, which is home to a blistering attack on President Zelensky, in which he basically says that if he had a problem with giving up Crimea, he should have put up a fight in 2014, which I think it's fair to say, Nick, is not how Ukrainians see it. I don't think it is quite how they see it, but it is interesting that the courtiers to President Trump, and it feels relevant, and it feels right to call them the courtiers, as we'll hear from our guest, who is a Trump watcher coming up.

2:01the Secretary of State Marco Rubio the Vice President J.D. Vance have all talks about walking away from the talks if Zelensky doesn't take up the great deal that they claim is on offer and which Trump's golf buddy fellow New York billionaire Steve Witkoff seems all too keen to rush to the Kremlin fourth visit will be to put on the table in front of President Putin So that's what we're asking today is, should we take those threats to walk away seriously? Is there a path to peace without the Americans? Has Vladimir Putin perhaps worked out how to play Donald Trump? I've been speaking to Fiona Hill, who advised Trump on Russia during his first term, although is no friend of his now, about all of that and that relationship with Putin.

2:54Let's do it.

3:09Hello, it's Amol in Salford again, where I feel guilty about this because I'm dragging people all over the country. We've got Izzy and Georgia up here. Nick's at home. He's had about seven minutes sleep as ever. His work ethic is a source of some concern to us. But everyone's been fantastically flexible because I am indeed close to where Nick grew up-ish. No, actually, I'm not. That's a very southern thing to say. But I'm in Salford recording the new season. You are constantly the world's greatest football team, which is just temporary, having a blip at the moment. I'm seven minutes run from Old Trafford.

3:40Yes, exactly, the footballing stadium in Salford where I'm recording University Challenge, which is why I didn't have the privilege of talking to a guest that I would have loved to have spoken to because she is one of the leading experts anywhere in the world on modern Russia. And she, Nick, spent years advising President Trump on that very subject. That's right. Fiona Hill spectacularly fell out with Trump. She gave evidence against him in his impeachment trial. She is now helping to write the strategic defence review of Keir Starmer's government. What we wanted to get a sense of from her is are we any closer to peace in Ukraine?

4:19Because we've all been listening to Donald Trump. He's clearly not very happy. This is what he said on the campaign trail. Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly.

4:39I will get the problem solved and I will get it solved in rapid order. And it will take me no longer than one day. Compare that to this. This is President Trump speaking just on Friday last week after his Secretary of State, In effect, his Foreign Secretary, Marco Rubio, said the White House was prepared to move on from the talks. If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we're just going to say you're foolish, you're fools, you're horrible people, and we're going to just take a pass. But hopefully we won't have to do that. And Marco is right in saying we want to see it end.

5:19Think of it. Every day, a lot of people are being killed as we talk about, you know, as they play games. So we're not going to we're not going to take that. And we will. We'll see. I think we have a good chance of solving the problem. Listening to that again, isn't it extraordinary that the president of the United States says to Zelensky as he plays games, a lot of people are being killed? I think he probably spotted that, don't you? Yeah, yeah, I really think he did. And I think there's something, this gets us to the, and I know this is what you've been speaking to Fiona Hill about, it gets us to one of the central problems with Donald Trump, which is that he is someone who rose to power, he's the most powerful man in the world, partly because he has tremendous gifts of communication.

6:06He's a very effective political communicator, whether for good or for ill, whatever you think about his politics. But he's also surrounded by kind of translators, people in his court, to use Fiona Hill's idea of him as a sort of kingly figure, he's surrounded by people who have to sort of make sense of what he means. So when he says what we've just heard, when he says that, you know, actually, well, he's prepared to walk away, does he mean that? Is he actually just negotiating? Is he actually going to walk away? And it's quite hard with Trump to know whether or not we should take him literally.

6:35There's the old adage about, do you take him literally or seriously or some combination of the two? And the thing I know you got into with Fiona Hill, I'm interested to know what she said, Nick, is whether or not what he's saying about walking away from Ukraine, he means whether or not it's actually the case that America's had enough. Well, that is the perfect cue for the conversation I did have with the woman whose official job title was Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the US National Security Council. She wasn't a close advisor to Trump personally.

7:07She was a leading figure in the foreign policy establishment in the United States. She is, of course, a Brit, which is why you're about to hear a woman with an accent from the North East.

7:23So I'm delighted to be joined by Fiona Hill. That one, the one that worked for Donald Trump, the one that advised Donald Trump about Russia, who crossed him, as we may turn to in just a few minutes. And we'll talk about the other Fiona Hill as well. Welcome, first of all, to the same podcast. We've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. It's a real pleasure to have you. No, it's great to be here. Thanks so much, Nick. Thanks. Now, I'm going to stress we're talking on Wednesday early evening. Who knows what will have happened by the time people are listening to this because things are changing so fast.

7:58From what you're hearing, from the outlines of a deal that we are seeing proposed, at least a proposed deal coming from the White House, what do you make of it? Well, I think you're quite right to stress that it's a proposed deal, because when we start talking about a deal, there's an expectation that something is going to get concluded. And, you know, you can really see that this is going to be a very difficult set of propositions that are coming out from the US itself. Let's just say this is being driven by the United States, by Donald Trump and the people around him. It's not something that's been necessarily, you know, kind of worked out in close consultation.

8:38with anyone else. There's been a lot of talking between Trump's envoy and the Russians. But, you know, the Ukrainians are really kind of getting this pushed on them. And that's kind of going to be the major part of the problem, because there's all kinds of discussions about territory, about language, about the kind of future disposition of forces, where the front lines are in the battlefield. And, you know, how this all kind of interrelates to, you know, broader security issues about Ukraine's role in Europe. And none of those details, you know, so far been accepted by anyone other than the United States.

9:12What about the negotiating tactics, which you're very familiar with? You're one of the very few people we can talk to who's been in a room when Donald Trump is talking about how he negotiates, the leverage that he wants to have. Do you see this talk of walking away that we've had from him, that we've had from the vice president, that we've had from the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, are simply that, a kind of threat designed to get people to concentrate. Yes, it's that, but it's also entirely possible that he could walk away. He walked away from the deal in North Korea with Kim Jong-un when he realised that it wasn't a deal that was going to make him look particularly good and that could come with all kinds of complications that he hadn't necessarily thought about at the time.

9:56He just walked away from it. He's walked away from all kinds of deals that other people have made, of the presidents. I mean, he's ripped up the Paris Accords, climate accord. He ripped up the JCPOA, which was the Iran nuclear deal that, you know, many predecessors had spent, you know, hours and weeks and months and years of their lives. They never get back concluding. You know, he's quite willing to walk away from something if he doesn't like it. He thinks it won't reflect well on him. But yes, he's also going to use that as leverage. I mean, what we've seen and what I've seen of Trump, like everybody's seen a lot of him by now, is that he loves to make threats.

10:30He loves to cajole people. He likes to bully them, browbeat them. And if they don't, you know, kind of play ball, he, you know, basically doubles down. He's constantly ratcheting up the threats, especially where he thinks he has leverage. And in this case, he doesn't have a lot of leverage with the Russians, but he does think he has a lot of leverage with the Ukrainians. And you talked in your memoirs when you were recalling those conversations you had, for example, about NATO, in which in his first term, he constantly said he might not defend the countries who didn't pay their bills. When people like you picked him up on that, what happened?

11:07Oh, he just disregarded us. Oh, just, you know, told us to back off because he knew better than anyone else. I mean, when people say you're an advisor to Trump, that's a very loose definition of term. I mean, I technically had that kind of title, but it wasn't like he was ever listening to me. I mean, he only ever asked two, you know, direct questions, which I could tell he wasn't particularly interested in hearing my answer about. Which were? Well, one of them was, is Mr. Putin a nice man? Will I like him? And I, before I could even respond, because I was running through my head, how the hell do you respond to that question?

11:36Somebody interrupted. So, phew, I didn't have to, you know, basically, you know, respond to that question. And another question was about, you know, kind of basically some of the nuclear issues. And again, that kind of moved on before I was able to, you know, properly, you know, get out a response. But, you know, Trump's style is all about himself. It's all about him being the special source, the charismatic individual who carries these negotiations. Anybody else who is in the space is essentially an envoy, an emissary, in an almost 18th century sense of thinking of the monarchs sending out the bearer of their notes.

12:12That's essentially what everybody else is, and he gets deeply frustrated with anybody who might think, for example, by virtue of their position, say, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, a, you know, director of intelligence, you know, for example, that they actually might have any freestanding role. And as you can see, you know, as time has gone on in this hundred days of his presidency, he's pretty much whittled away or discarded and sacked, you know, kind of or reduced, you know, kind of the role or the independent, you know, position of any of the people around him. So should we pay more attention to the words of a man who appears to be his special envoy for the entire planet.

12:50A man who's not just trying to do a peace deal with Ukraine. He's also trying to do a peace deal in the Middle East as well. Stephen Wyckoff, who is a billionaire property developer who makes him on the golf course. Well, that's it. He's an extension of self. He's, you know, somebody who Trump says, well, hey, Steve, you can just go and explain my position. And maybe Wyckoff understands Trump's position better than anything else. He's not there to understand what the Russians' position is or the Ukrainian position. and he's there to basically brok a deal for Trump personally. This is all personal for Trump, all of this deal-making.

13:25And whenever he would reference things, you know, the first administration, oh, look, every time we hear him speaking up, he's always talking about himself. My this, me this, I this. You know, basically in the Oval Office with Zelensky during that, you know, dreadful encounter that the whole world watched with, you know, some degrees of consternation to horror. Basically, Trump was all about nobody respected anybody else in terms of US presence, they only respect me. It's all about, you know, basically me and about you, Zelensky as well, making a deal with me and everybody else making a deal. And that's what Steve Wittkopf obviously is.

13:56He is the broker of a deal, the envoy, the emissary, the guy carrying the letters, you know, kind of these days. You don't have to do that quite so much, but still there's exchanges of letters. But it's just basically bringing back the portrait, you know, that very, again, 18th century, you know, kind of bringing back the best wishes and the prayers, you know, from the presidential, you know, person of Vladimir Putin to the sovereign back in the United States. I mean, we're in a kind of a world that anybody who's a buff for, you know, British, you know, films about, you know, the 18th century would be find very familiar.

14:29Does that mean, are you implying that Putin understands him much better than a democratically elected leader, much better than Zelensky? Wyckoff is, what, on his fourth meetings coming up with Putin. And as you say, that portrait of Donald Trump was produced as a gift to send to him. When Putin said that he wanted to see something change, he was getting impatient. What does Putin know? He suddenly says, ah, yes, we'll have an Easter truce. In other words, he's constantly looking to give him gifts to big up Trump to make him important. Yeah, I think he understands him perfectly well. And it's also because Putin himself has a big grasp of history.

15:07And, you know, back in the days of the Tsars, Ivan the Terrible, for example, had a letter exchanged with Elizabeth I. I bet Putin's actually probably had that requested from the Kremlin archives and had a look at it. They exchanged portraits as well. At one point, Ivan the Terrible suggested to Elizabeth I, seeing as she hadn't married, perhaps she might like to marry him and have a dynastic marriage. I mean, I don't think Putin is actually, you know, expressing his desire to marry Trump. But the portrait exchange, I mean, that's not different at all, is it? I mean, Hans Holbein, you know, famously had all of those portraits painted, you know, so that Henry VIII and others could look at, you know, the recipients of their letters or perhaps one of the intended many wives, you know, for example.

15:48We're in that realm. And Putin understands that perfectly because he has a sense of history. And also it kind of fits in, you know, to the way that he looks at the world as well. Now, your specialist subject has become Donald Trump. But of course, first and foremost, it's Russia. That's why you ever had a job in the White House. You are a Russia expert. So let's start this conversation about how we might get a path to peace with what Putin actually wants and thinks is practical to deliver in these talks, if anything. Well, what he wants and what he's going to get are actually very important. And if we're actually thinking about where there might be a pathway to peace, because if Putin has a maximalist view of wanting control of all of Ukraine one way or another, either by direct control of territory, because he does want to have recognized the territories he's annexed and now placed in the Russian constitution, there's parts of the Russian Federation.

16:41and that's the Donbass region, the two provinces that make that up. It's Crimea, which, of course, was annexed in 2014. And then it's two other provinces, Zaporizhia and Kherson, where the Russians don't control all of the territory there. The battle lines, the front lines go through part of that territory and some of the portions of Donbass as well. And he wants to, at the very least, control all of that because it's now constitutionally mandated, illegally, of course, for Russia. Now he's kind of suggested that he might allow the kind of front lines to lie where they are, but you can be pretty sure that, again, if you look at the sweep of Russian history, which again Putin has looked at, one way or another, Russia usually gets the territory that it's after.

17:24If it doesn't get it at one time, it might basically get it again. Now, the question is, what is he going to get? And this is where, you know, in all honesty, a peace deal should be focusing, because if you were really serious about thinking about a long term peace deal solution that would hold, you would want to actually deny Putin the ability to go further. You'd want, you know, basically him to have to accept the lines, you know, as they are, and then, you know, to give some possibility for later on for Ukraine, you know, at some point in the future, to be able to have some kind of chance through negotiations or, you know, other means to get back some of its territory.

18:03If you look at most of the peace deals in that regard, there has always been some limit to how far things can go. Of course, there are territorial stops. And if there's a case of an out-and-out victor or an out-and-out loser, then you would expect to see something different. But Ukraine hasn't lost. That's the whole point. It's Trump who's telling everybody that Ukraine has lost. None of us want this war to continue. The Ukrainians do not want this war to continue. But it is an absolute lie that the Ukrainians have lost this war because Putin's aims were to take control of Ukraine and he has not taken control of Ukraine.

18:42So if the offer from Trump is effectively land for peace, but it's Ukraine gives up land in return for Russia agreeing for what a temporary peace. The question is, what could the Europeans insist on, the Ukrainians insist on to try to deliver what you just discussed? In other words, to try to say thus far and no further. This isn't just a temporary freeze to a front line, followed by Putin launching another invasion or another campaign of influence in a few years time. What would Trump need to insist on? Well, if Trump were getting really serious about this, he would be doing this in proper conjunction with the Europeans, not just looking like he's just going to hand it off at some kind of point where either he's fed up with the lack of progress or whether he's got a ceasefire and then he kind of wants to move on.

19:43I mean, really what Trump wants more than anything is a ceasefire in the same way that we saw that he broke one in Gaza and Israel and then kind of moved on. He hasn't gone back, you know, into the kind of the fray in the Middle East. In fact, he seems like he's moving on to another front in the Middle East with negotiations with Iran. And I think we can expect that he's probably going to go on to negotiations with North Korea, you know, picking up some of the themes and ideas and issues that he left off in Trump 1.0, for example. But if he's really serious, he'd go along the lines that you've just laid out, Nick, which is basically saying to Putin, look, you're not going to be able to go any further.

20:17We're going to reinforce the lines of where Ukraine is now for them keeping on their territory. Ukraine is going to be integrated in European security arrangements. It doesn't have to be NATO, frankly. It can be through other mechanisms. There's all these bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine. And Ukraine's military is going to be maintained. and, you know, we're going to continue to provide weapons for Ukraine for it to defend itself, you know, to stop Ukraine from moving in again. And then, you know, you would be engaging in really serious political diplomacy. And frankly, Europe has a lot of leverage because ultimately Russia, you know, to be able to put itself on a different footing has to be able to trade with Europe, you know, kind of basically have political relationships with Europe.

20:58And both Trump and Putin have been operating under the assumption that Europe is just a bunch of, you know, feckless vassal states that can also be just kind of bullied into going along with whatever this says. It's kind of, you know, back to, again, 18th century style diplomacy. Isn't that because the assumption in Washington DC, or at least in the White House in the Trump circle, the assumption in the Kremlin is that Ukraine's got its back to the wall. If it hasn't lost militarily, as you put it, they think it's on the brink of losing because the United States can simply turn the money off, turn off the supply of weapons, turn off the satellites that Elon Musk helps to provide, turn off the air cover potential coming for the United States.

21:43And they think that Europe simply neither has the money or the will to fill that gap. Are they wrong? Well, that's absolutely right. That's exactly how they think. And of course, if Europe doesn't stand up and also engage in pretty intensive diplomacy of the United States to at least maintain some modicum of that support for a bridging period, then, you know, they'll be right. And who will have lost the war for Ukraine? It'll be the United States. Because we saw exactly what happened when Trump, from Mar-a-Lago, when he wasn't in office, basically affected the suspension of aid to Ukraine for six odd months for the supplemental during the Biden administration.

22:20And that's when Ukraine really started to lose ground. So yes, there is a kind of a cause and effect. And do you fear that we're about to see a repeat that if they really mean not just to threaten to walk away but to walk away if the outlines of this deal are not accepted by Ukraine do you fear that that's what we now see of course and I think that's what everybody fears in Ukraine as well and that's what Putin is anticipating because like Putin hasn't been able to prevail in a war of attrition the way that he thought he was he wasn't able to topple you know Zelensky and you know basically take control of Ukraine the first three days to a week to two weeks that he thought he was going to back in February of 2022.

22:57So lots of things haven't turned out in his direction. So it was always going to be the case that there was going to be a major shift in the international environment that was either going to put things one way or another. It could have been a doubling down of support for Ukraine. That hasn't happened. And it could be the kind of switch in circumstances. Putin was, first of all, betting that would happen in Europe. But elections didn't quite turn out the way that he wanted. If AFD had got in in Germany, for example, the alternative for Deutschland and not the CDU-led, the Christian Democratic Union coalition with Friedrich Metz.

23:29I mean, that might have been a different case if Nigel Farage was in with reform in London, although, frankly, reform tend to be more nationalistic. But the expectation would be that right-wing populist parties in big European nations would switch the script there and make it much more difficult to get a kind of consensus sense in Europe. Basically, what he got was the US flipping instead. What is interesting is to see the way in which Nigel Farage has tried to distance himself from Trump on Ukraine, having previously echoed what many people thought was the Kremlin line as well as the Trump line.

24:07He's now saying, oh, no, there's too much pressure being put on Ukraine at the moment. Well, that's what I was saying is that, you know, reform tends to be more kind of nationalistic, patriotic and, you know, much more in favour of kind of a more robust support for Ukraine. In In fact, I mean, most of the British public tends to be more supportive of Ukraine's position and not at all of Russia's. And given the fact that there is so much of Russian interference, sabotage attacks, you know, assassinations, poisonings, you know, you name it going on in the UK and in Europe, you know, kind of writ large.