Former National Security Council official Fiona Hill on Sunday said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is focusing on the invasion of Ukraine because he’s "worried about his own position" in Moscow.
In an interview on NBC News’ "Meet The Press," Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the NSC, warned against "loose talk" about a forced regime change in Moscow.
"One of the reasons that Vladimir Putin is engaging in this appalling behavior in Ukraine is because he's worried about his own position," Hill said.
"He has to be reelected, in theory, and also in practice in 2024. We're running up to his own presidential time clock here."
According to Hill, if Putin fails at his invasion of Ukraine and "looks weak, it's disastrous at home, not just abroad."
"Any kind of loose talk about taking out regime change, he looks at what the United States has done and he says it openly all the time in Libya, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and many other places where we've intervened. …He looks at us and he thinks, I'm not going to let that happen here in Russia."
"He's extremely paranoid about this, and one of the reasons he wants to destroy Ukraine is because he thinks that we would use it, because he would think about using it as a launching pad for something like this," she said.
"We have to be extraordinarily cautious about how we talk about this conflict," she added. "We need to stop the war in Ukraine, but we have to be very careful about talking about war with Russia, regime change and other things, because then he will absolutely double down further."
Hill said there should be more effort directed at swaying public opinion around the world in favor of Ukraine.
"We have to work on the broader world of public opinion," she said. "We have got to get the Chinese, the Indians and others who have basically been sitting on the fence try to push this, too, because this is an atrocity that the whole world can't stand by and watch. That's what we need to focus for right now to see if we can get this to stop."
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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