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25/5/25
A great interview in The Telegraph:
US president’s former Russia tsar believes World War Three is upon us as White House struggles to secure peace with the Kremlin
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.”
It's a long interview, the rest is at
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/05/25/fiona-hill-interview-trump-terrified-putin-seen-firsthand/
US president’s former Russia tsar believes World War Three is upon us as White House struggles to secure peace with the Kremlin
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.”
It's a long interview, the rest is at
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/05/25/fiona-hill-interview-trump-terrified-putin-seen-firsthand/