• Fiona Hill, a former senior National Security Council official and expert on European and Russian affairs, has revealed new insights into President Donald Trump’s previous interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin—and how she believes Putin actually mocked Trump during their exchanges. In a lengthy interview with Foreign Affairs released Thursday, Hill described Trump as unprepared for meetings with his Russian counterpart and overly fixated on personal interactions rather than diplomatic strategy. Hill, who served Trump during his first term and testified during his first impeachment for attempting to extort Ukraine, pointed to one incident in particular as evidence.
• “The very first time I was in one of the phone calls with Putin, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don’t always capture everything, they don’t capture the nuances, particularly when it’s the Russian interpreter who’s translating into a language that’s also not their native language, all kinds of things are missing,” she remembered. Trump, who for years has expressed his admiration for Putin and has recently parroted Russian talking points in his bid to broker a peace deal to end Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, described the exchange as “great,” she said.
• But Hill recalled thinking that it really wasn’t. “There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said, he chooses his words very carefully,” she explained. “Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him,” she continued. “It’s just it’s completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this, or he’s goading him and urging him on to something, because he’s trying to see how he’ll react and the translation smooths over all that. That context is absolutely missing. And he doesn’t do a readout afterwards.”
• “All of this is amateur hour,” added Hill, who is now a senior foreign policy fellow on the U.S. and Europe at Washington-based think tank Brookings.

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Opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais via AP.