The following is the transcript of an interview with Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 17, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face the Nation. Fiona Hill served as the Senior Director for Russia and European Affairs on the National Security Council during President Trump's first term. She joins us now from Waterville, Maine. Good morning to you.
FIONA HILL: Good morning, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, Fiona, you were an advisor during that infamous Helsinki summit in 2018. You've spoken about that in the past. I wonder what you think about how this Alaska summit compared?
HILL: Well, obviously quite different in many respects. Part of it was the fact that they decided to skip the one-on-one meeting and the lunch. I mean, these are usually part of the sort of set of summits like this. And the press conference, obviously, was more of an announcement, or a set of announcements- presentations by both leaders. Much more by President Putin, and more of a commentary by President Trump. So there wasn't that free-for-all of press questions, which I'm sure was a bit disconcerting for you and others who were present there, at Alaska. But the optics weren't exactly great, as Congressman crow has laid out for the United States and for President Trump, again, I mean, again, different, but although it was presented as perhaps a show of power by being at a US Air Force base with the fight passing of the B-52s and other fighter jets, it did certainly look much more like a show of appreciation for Vladimir Putin. And so, the optics were really much more favorable to Putin than they were to the United States. It really looked like Putin had set the agenda there, the narrative and, in many respects, the tone for the whole summit meeting.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, saying that, you know, the President has a team of advisers around him, and in a traditional administration, those advisers would be setting the policy, they would be planning the optics, and they would be thinking through that. Do you think that the President's team set him up for success here?
HILL: Well, look, it may well have been that one of the demands, because we've heard from Secretary Rubio, which I have to say, I think was a very fair assessment of where things are. So it may well have been that one of the demands by the Russians to make any progress in moving further forward was to actually have that kind of show of pomp and pageantry, that basically marks Putin's re-entry into international affairs. Maybe the Russians said to them in Moscow, either to Steve Witkoff or to Secretary Rubio, or to anybody else, that basically they wanted to have a major US-Russia, bilateral summit appearance before they would move on to the nitty-gritty of anything else in Ukraine. That's to give them- them all the benefit of the doubt there. But, it all now depends on what comes out of this. And I think again, Secretary Rubio made it very clear that it's not going to be easy. He was certainly downplaying any expectations of a major breakthrough. But he did say that there was something that might be possible. I think that's what's going to be the proof of whether this was actually worth all the effort that they went to in Alaska or not. And as Congressman Crow said, there's a pretty high bar here, because what Putin is doing is pretty brutal, and he's not showing, right now, any signs whatsoever of giving anything up.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The United Kingdom's Defense Secretary has said that they would be willing to put boots on the ground in Ukraine to help oversee a ceasefire. When you hear these security guarantees being talked about, and the Secretary said he is going to negotiate that tomorrow, what should we think- what form is that going to take? What do you think that should look like?
HILL: Well, look, I think he actually laid this out, and you did too in your questions. And I think Congressman Crow made it very clear as well. It has to be a combination of all of the things that we've already heard discussed on the show today. You have to be able to have some boots on the ground. Congressman Crow that it doesn't have to be the United States. That's actually the case. But, it actually has to be some commitment from the United States to enable European forces to actually hold that territory and to provide some security guarantees for Ukraine. The United States is key in terms of its intelligence, in terms of enabling equipment, and the information and the data that we would need for all of this to make a security intervention mean something. And it's also essential in terms of all kinds of other forms of equipment and defensive weaponry. We've already heard, of course, about Ukraine needing all kinds of equipment, from javelins in the past, to patriots, now, in terms of an integrated missile defense system that Ukraine desperately needs. So there's a lot there that we all know needs to be done, and what we really need to see, I think, in these meetings that will take place on Monday and moving forward, is a real commitment to the United States, to work with Europeans, and to work with Ukraine to make this happen. Look, this is existential, also for European security. So, minimizing the real role of Europe here, be it the United Kingdom, be it Poland, be it Finland, be it France, be it Germany, is not the way to go. Europe has to have an equal say in all of this. This is about Europe's future and the future of European security, not just about Ukraine's.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to ask you about the dynamic between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. You know both men. You've written biographies of Vladimir Putin, and of course, you served under Donald Trump. In one of the FOX interviews that President Trump did, he said that he spoke about mail-in voting in the United States with Vladimir Putin, and during that press address, Putin also claimed that the war wouldn't have happened at all if Donald Trump had been President. I mean, that's a counterfactual, but that something Trump often says on the- on the trail, why would those things be discussed at all if this was about Ukraine?
HILL: Exactly. Well, look, this is Vladimir Putin, as usual, trying to manipulate U.S. domestic politics. I've seen him do this over and over again, including at Helsinki when he set the president off, not in the press conference, but before that, in a whole diatribe against his political enemies, because Putin deliberately asked him about this. So Putin knows that President Trump wants to have an acknowledgement of his self-assertion that the war wouldn't have happened had he not- had he been in the presidency. And so, Putin is giving him something that plays well for President Trump in his own domestic environment. It doesn't play well in the international environment, where people know things are much more complicated, but it's basically a gift and a concession to President Trump himself. And Putin wants to sow chaos in the American electoral system ahead of the midterms. So, of course, he's led into this whole issue of mail-in voting. And President Trump asserted in his Fox News interview that there are no countries in the world that allow mail-in voting. Well, Russia allows mail-in voting, and if everybody wants to go out and look, they can look for themselves. In 2020, President Vladimir Putin signed into law Russians being able to vote by mail and also on the internet. And more than 30 other countries also allow some forms of mail-in voting. So, it's just not true that other countries, including Russia, don't use this. It's a pure, blatant piece of manipulation, and that's the kind of thing that Putin likes to do.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And, of course, I don't think you would endorse the outcome of that voting system and that those elections are rigged in Russia. Correct?
HILL: Of course. And I mean, basically, Putin wants to see us tie ourselves up in knots between now and the midterms. He's trying to sow chaos, and he's just basically used his time with President Trump to push that along. It's, again, it's a diversion, it's a distraction, really, from the negotiations on Ukraine, because Putin doesn't really want to give anything up, so he gives up, basically, something that plays well in the political arena for President Trump and something that actually plays very badly for the United States in its own political arena, which is the mail-in voting point that he made.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Fiona Hill, always appreciate your analysis. Thank you for joining us today. We'll be right back.
Open: This is "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Aug. 17, 2025
Extended interview: Sen. Dan Sullivan on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan"
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