President Trump has “completely ceded narrative control” of the Russia-Ukraine war to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former top-adviser-turned-vocal-critic said in an interview published Monday.
Fiona Hill, who served as a senior adviser on Russia at the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, argued in a Politico interview that Trump is endorsing Moscow’s position that it’s enough if it decides to stop fighting.
“What Ukraine is just basically getting as a concession is for the Russians to stop fighting. And this is Putin’s way all the way through the 25 years of his presidency, which is: ‘I’m going to beat you up, and my concession is that I stopped beating you up,’” she said.
Hill said in another interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that Trump’s red-carpet treatment of Putin in Alaska on Friday also played into the Russian leader’s hands.
“Although it was presented as perhaps a show of power by being at a U.S. Air Force base with the … passing of the B-52s and other fighter jets, it did certainly look much more like a show of appreciation for Vladimir Putin,” she said.
“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.”
Hill’s remarks come as Trump on Monday meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders at the White House to discuss terms Putin laid out at the meeting in Alaska and efforts to move toward a leaders-level summit to end the war.
Trump left the meeting with Putin late last week without securing a ceasefire agreement from the Russian leader, who has repeatedly refused to halt fighting in Ukraine. Trump instead said both parties should move to negotiations for an end to the war.
Hill served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. She was a high-profile witness during the 2019 impeachment investigation against Trump over whether he was exerting pressure on Zelensky for dirt on his political rival former President Biden.
Hill warned in her testimony that Republican lawmakers were repeating a Kremlin-pushed, false narrative that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential election. A GOP-led Senate intelligence investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
A White House spokesperson pushed back on Hill’s comments Monday, telling Politico that Trump “has done more to deliver peace in seven months than Joe Biden did in four years” while calling the former Russia White House adviser the “go-to Trump Deranged ‘expert’ on Russia.”
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