Former intelligence analyst and Russian and European Affairs expert Fiona Hill now claims that Russia’s war in Ukraine was held at bay by Moscow’s impatience for Trump.
Hill, who briefly worked in the Trump administration before eventually testifying against the 45th president during his first House impeachment, now claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin held off invading Ukraine until President Donald Trump was out of office, because he would apparently rather negotiate with Joe Biden.
Putin “often became frustrated” with Trump, according to Hill, as reported by Insider. She claimed Trump’s “lack of knowledge on geopolitical issues” frustrated Putin, who assumed that Biden’s long history in politics would result in a better deal for Russia at the end of the war in Ukraine.
“He thought that somebody like Biden — who’s a transatlanticist, who knows all about NATO, who actually knows where Ukraine is, and actually knows something about the history, and is very steeped in international affairs — would be the right person to engage with,” Hill claimed.
She said the Russian president “got frustrated many times with” Trump, because “he had to keep explaining things, and Putin doesn’t like to do that.”
Hill seemed to insinuate that Trump required this due to lack of information, however, it seems prudent to note that the 45th President wrote the 1987 best selling book, “The Art of the Deal”.
Apparently, Trump’s tact with Putin led the the Russian to assume that he would be able to negotiate a better deal under Biden.
“Even though he loves to be able to spin his own version of events,” Hill said of Putin, “he wants to have predictability in the person that he’s engaging with.”
For his part, Trump has regularly suggested that Putin feared he would unleash the full weight of the United States military on Moscow if he invaded Ukraine.
He said so in interviews with the media, and with golfer John Daly.
“He was a friend of mine, I got along great with him,” the 45th President told Daly. “I said, ‘Vladimir, if you do it, we’re hitting Moscow.’”
“And he sort of believed me, like 5%, 10%,” Trump boasted. “That’s all you need.”
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Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year after a years long dispute about the contested Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. Moscow claims it launched a “special military operation” to protect ethnic Russians in the breakway republics Donetsk and Luhansk, while Kiev and its allies claim the invasion was unprovoked.
