Goal is now annihilation of Ukraine, says Putin expert Fiona Hill

Vladimir Putin has switched from trying to capture Ukraine to ‘annihilation’, a former White House adviser has warned.

Fiona Hill says ‘the Russian view of removing a threat is to crush it completely’. Picture: Getty Images

Vladimir Putin sees Ukrainians as “traitors” to Moscow and has switched from trying to capture the country to “annihilation”, a former White House adviser has warned.

The fierce resistance faced by the invaders came as a surprise but Mr Putin has simply adjusted his aims, based on his Cold War mindset of preparing for every contingency, said Fiona Hill, a British-born foreign affairs specialist who has studied the Russian president for almost 20 years.

“He wants to remove them [the Ukrainians] as a threat,” Ms Hill said. “He is moving from capture to basically carnage and annihilation, I think. The Russian view of removing a threat is to crush it completely.”

Ms Hill shot to prominence as a compelling witness before US congress during the first Donald Trump impeachment inquiry. Her insights into Mr Putin’s mind and potential are formed from years of close observation, including half a dozen encounters with him.

Ms Hill said she did not believe Mr Putin would be brought down by one of his inner circle and that the West’s best approach was to “hold our resolve” and intensify sanctions in the hope that Russians start rebelling.

“Putin has a very high tolerance for this kind of carnage, the loss of personnel,” she said. “And I think he has this belief, and we’ll just have to see if this is tested, that Russians are going to go along with it. He is not going to sue for peace, so whatever we do to formulate the way out of this has to make Putin look, from his point of view, like he’s won something.”

When asked how long the war could go on, Ms Hill pointed to the conflict in Syria as evidence that Mr Putin was prepared to play a long game. “One of the things that I’ve been reminding people is that Russia intervened in Syria in 2015 when it looked like Assad was going to be toppled,” she said. “He did that precisely to make sure that Assad was left in place.”

She said that Mr Putin had believed for more than a decade that the US establishment was out to topple him, which helps to explain why he intervened in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.

Ms Hill also said world leaders must talk urgently about how to police a new era of conflict, after the Kremlin’s blunt talk about its willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons. “One of the reasons for talking about this is getting ahead of it and we should engage the Chinese and the other nuclear powers on this,” she urged.

While nuclear powers say they would only use these weapons in the face of an existential threat, she said: “The Russians are redefining existential threat. It makes the whole world a more dangerous place … This will actually [if Russia uses nuclear weapons] completely and utterly change everyone’s ­calculations.”

Ms Hill told how she had pushed for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and former Republican governor of California, to be made US ambassador to Moscow when the position arose under President Barack Obama. She believes that Mr Putin and Schwarzenegger, who has spoken of his Austrian father’s torment over his Second World War actions, could have bonded over war stories in much the same way that he swapped stories with Gerhard Schroder, the former German chancellor, whose father was killed in action in 1944.

Schwarzenegger is “married into the Kennedy family, he’s roughly the same height as Putin, and they weren’t going to intimidate him in the same way that they tried with other ambassadors”.

“He’s popular in Russia and knows how to handle himself,” Ms Hill said.

Reports of atrocities that appear to have been committed by Russian forces were “following a pattern that goes back historically”, she told CBS on Sunday.

“A lot of this wasn’t talked about so much after World War II but when the Red Army moved into Berlin, there was mass rape of German women in the city. People didn’t really want to talk about that so much given all the atrocities that were committed by German forces and the Nazis.

“If this was genuinely a special military operation to liberate a fraternal country from what Putin was describing as Nazis, you would not expect this kind of conduct.

“Either this is a complete breakdown of command and control or it’s actually being sanctioned in some way to teach Ukrainians a lesson.”

The Times