Fiona Hill: Ukraine’s Fate Now Linked to the Middle East’s

As Israel weighs a possible ground offensive in Gaza, there are valid reasons to worry about new fronts in the war—and a wider conflict—in the Middle East. And as the United States expends time, money, arms, and political capital on containing that crisis, it gives actors in other arenas an opportunity to further their own ends. Chief among those actors must be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who celebrated his birthday on Oct. 7, right as Hamas launched its brutal and shocking assault on Israel.

How will a new conflict in the Middle East impact Putin’s now 21-month-old war in Ukraine? The two conflicts are already linked in U.S. policy: In a rare national address from the Oval Office on Oct. 19, President Joe Biden appealed directly to the American people for their support as he pushed Congress to approve a $105 billion aid package—$61 billion of it for Ukraine, and $14 billion for Israel.

But for many countries in the global south, Biden’s description of Ukraine and Israel as democracies fighting for their survival smacked of a double standard—a massively complicating factor for Kyiv as it continues to lobby for global support.

To understand how all of this might impact the future of Russia’s war in Ukraine, I spoke with Fiona Hill, a former senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council. Hill was also a deputy assistant to then-President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019 and an impeachment witness in his trial in 2019. She is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Subscribers can watch the full FP Live discussion in the video box atop this page, or listen to an audio version on the FP Live podcast. What follows is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: I thought we’d just begin with the Middle East. How do you think Russian President Vladimir Putin is looking at what’s going on?

Fiona Hill: Putin thinks that this has presented him with an opportunity to really turn the tide of the war in the sense that, increasingly, the United States and also European supporters of Ukraine are going to be very much distracted by what’s happening in the Middle East. This is in large part because of the nature of their relationships with Israel, but also because of their own domestic constituencies.

There’s another dimension here: Russia and Putin have already been factors in the Middle East. Russia, during the Soviet period, was renowned for its stance on support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. We know that Hamas and many of the leaders have previously been in Russia. But Russia had been extolling its relationship with Israel because of the large Russian-speaking immigrant population in Israel. Several Russian oligarchs have dual Israeli and Russian citizenship, and a lot of investment from Israel is coming into the Russian high-tech sector. Putin was always very careful to stress how Russia was a major supporter of its Jewish population, but also of Israel itself.

But the big shift has been on Iran—and that is also a result of the war in Ukraine. Russia has increasingly drawn closer to Iran, not just because of its provision of drones, but also because of Iran’s role as a regional player. I’m starting to hear from Israeli contacts that they will see Russia, no matter how this kind of ends up, more in the enemy category than in the frenemy or friendly category moving forward. There is a great deal of suspicion in Israel that perhaps Russia had some kind of hand in this, and lots of conspiracy theories out there, but I don’t think we have any evidence for this.

RA: So, we’ll come back to the Middle East, but I want to turn to Russia’s war in Ukraine for a bit. When we last had you on FP live a year ago, we were anticipating a spring counteroffensive by Ukraine. That became a summer one, and now it’s a fall one. How do you think it’s going?

FH: There was an awful lot of hype about this counteroffensive. We have fallen victim to overhyped expectations for what was really conceivable for the Ukrainians to do. We needed a more sensible conversation about the limitations of the kind of ground war that the Ukrainians have been engaged in.

The Russians have really entrenched themselves. There’s hundreds of miles of anti-tank defenses and land mines, which have made it very hard for the Ukrainians to penetrate the Russians’ offensive lines. Both Ukraine and Russia have had a hard time going on the offensive, while they’ve both been very effective at defense.

But there’s one area where the Ukrainians actually have had some success—because they haven’t been confined by some of these constraints—and that’s been in the Black Sea. They’ve broken the Russian dominance of the Black Sea and the blockade. They’ve been very creative. We’ve seen them carry out drone attacks into Crimea and also into Russian territory. And we’ve now seen recently the removal by Russia of some of the naval fleet from the Black Sea bases in Sevastopol.

That’s significant, because it shows that Russia is worried about its military position in the Crimean Peninsula. The Russians are aware now that the Ukrainians can actually do some damage there. That’s a difference in the naval side of the conflict from the land, where things are bogged down.

Those are the military aspects. But then there is the battlefield in politics, and that’s where things are not going well for Ukraine at all. There was so much expectation for this counteroffensive. The fact that they haven’t achieved that still suggests that Ukraine isn’t moving forward in the ways that we wanted them to.

A lot of debate here in the United States and in places such as Germany and elsewhere, is “how long this will go on, and what’s the end game?” And that is very detrimental for Ukraine. We’re seeing a diminution in support for a long-term offensive. That starts to constrain Ukraine’s room to maneuver and boosts Putin’s idea that things are moving in his favor, even if they actually are not on the battleground. In the battle for information and for public opinion. Putin is feeling more confident now than he would have been several months ago.

RA: I’m struck by how your assessment of the battleground is different from your assessment of the battle for public perception. But just ignoring perceptions for a minute—and I realize the two are connected—what’s your sense of where the battle on the ground might be headed in the next year?

FH: Unfortunately for Ukraine, this is going to be a long grind. Part of it is a numbers game. The Russians have a lot more people that they’re literally throwing at this war. Second, they put their economy on a war footing. They’ve ramped up industrial production, which is significant for the Russian economy because the largest workforce outside of the public sector in Russia is in the military-industrial complex. In a way, it’s inflating the performance of the Russian economy.

Ukraine has a lot less manpower to take to the front, given its much smaller population base. The Ukrainians are also picking up on their military equipment production, but they’ve depleted their stocks. Over the longer term, it’s not just if the United States keeps up support but if European countries step up production—which they’re starting to do—and Ukraine steps up its own production. Then  Kyiv could be in a pretty good shape. But it’s not going to be immediate.

Kyiv is also having a hard time generating revenue. Ukraine’s critical infrastructure keeps getting pummeled and so it is very much dependent on financial flows from the West and the IMF to keep its economy going.

Russia is still occupying large swathes of Ukrainian territory—not just Crimea and Donetsk and Lugansk, but also in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson—and the difficulty is going to be in dislodging Russia from that territory over the longer term.

For Ukraine, it’s been extraordinarily difficult. But on the other hand, Ukraine has prevailed. Russia’s “special military operation” and Putin’s idea of completely taking over Ukraine has failed.

RA: Over the summer, the mercenary Wagner Group—and its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted putsch and subsequent death—dominated the news cycle. Now that the dust has settled, what impact do you think all of that has had on the state of play?

FH: Part of what precipitated the whole crisis with Prigozhin and Wagner was the attempt by the Kremlin to put the Wagner Group under the direct command of the Russian military. Wagner was a supposedly off-the-books operation that gave Russia a sort of implausible deniability. They were trying to pretend it was an autonomous entity working under its own direction, but it never was. Prigozhin’s putsch forced the Kremlin to take responsibility.

The big thing that Prigozhin did was show how low real support is for the system. He got pretty far on his march to Moscow. The images of him on his journey there, as a kind of a popular hero, really showed that people are not massively in support of the establishment and even of Putin himself, and that there’s a superficiality to a lot of support for the war. And of course, Prigozhin told the truth. He basically said that the war was started as a fool’s errand and that there was no threat from Ukraine. He was reflecting the sentiment of large swaths of the Russian population who thought the war was a mistake but now that they’re in it, that they wanted to win it.

This was a real problem for Putin. Putin now has to try to turn all of this around. I would say that he’s mopped up reasonably effectively in the aftermath of the Prigozhin affair, but we’ll see. There could still be undercurrents of support for Prigozhin. Putin has to be more attentive to domestic dissent.

RA: One undercurrent in our discussion so far is public perception. Much of the world is going to the polls in 2024. There’s the United States, of course, but also four other of the world’s six biggest democracies. With so many people going to vote next year, public perceptions about the war will likely become even more important in how it sways political calculations. Does that impact Ukraine or Russia’s thinking about how the war ends?

FH: Putin thinks that this ends when we in the United States and in the West just give up Ukraine.

There are impacts around the world. During the recent Polish elections, Ukraine was becoming a domestic political issue with the Polish government now stepping back from some of the critical support that it had given because of domestic backlash, not just on questions of spending, but also the perception that Poland was making itself weaker by some of its weapons transfers to Ukraine.

In Slovakia, we’ve seen the election of Robert Fico, who’s been notorious for being pro-Russian. You’ve got a million-plus Ukrainian refugees in Germany that there’s a big debate about.

The war in Ukraine is becoming a domestic issue for many countries. And so for Putin, he thinks that that will be the key for undermining that support, and for increasingly negative public perceptions of the war pushing Ukraine into negotiations that would be on Russia’s terms.

For the Ukrainians, for any kind of endgame, they want it to be on their terms—and rightly so. But Russia’s hold over certain territories makes it very difficult for the Ukrainians to even start to think about how they would find a negotiated solution with Russia. They really need to have a bigger diplomatic effort on their behalf. I think Putin feels at this point that everything is trending in his favor.

RA: So, I said we’d come back to the Middle East. Let’s do that, but in a big picture way, connecting the war in Ukraine with what’s happened in Gaza. Many countries in the so-called global south look at Washington’s stance across these two conflicts and smell hypocrisy.

FH: If you think about Biden’s speech linking Ukraine and Israel together, it might be good congressional politics—but it’s not good global politics. It has actually now tied Ukraine very directly to the fate of what happens next in the Middle East, particularly in the eyes of some of the actors in the Middle East, but also in Africa and Latin America and elsewhere in Asia, where there was a great deal of skepticism about the Ukrainian case.

I think we had a mistake at the very beginning in the way that the Russian invasion was being portrayed as a battle between democracy and autocracy. A lot of the world didn’t buy that. Instead of really emphasizing, at that point, a violation of national sovereignty, the Ukrainians then tried to move into a different arena, which is now where this becomes very problematic by what’s taking place right now in the Middle East.

Ukrainians tried to make common cause with many of the countries in the global south by presenting this as a post-colonial conflict—a former colony trying to re-liberate itself. The problem is that in other parts of the world, there is no conception that European countries can be colonized. Putin has utterly capitalized on this, calling Ukrainians Nazis and rabid nationalists. And in a sense, U.S. and European support has been something of a liability for Kyiv because Ukraine is seen as just another territorial dispute—another European spat. The Ukrainians have failed to enter into that national liberation, post-colonial discourse, primarily because they’re Europeans.

Now, with Ukraine’s issue being lumped together with the conflict in the Middle East on U.S. spending bills, and also with its own statements on Israel, Kyiv doesn’t know how to navigate this right now. I think that the Ukrainians don’t really understand, fully, the perspectives of countries in Africa and Asia. And it’s very uncomfortable. They were not a colonial power, and they find it very hard to understand the rage and resentment of the global south because they feel that they’re the underdog as well.

RA: It’s been hard enough for Kyiv to try to court the global south for its support over the past 21 months. This latest addition of conflict in the Middle East makes it harder. But will Biden’s explicit linking of these wars on two continents end up backfiring?

FH: I think Ukrainians are going to really have a hard time navigating this because there’s also this feeling, at the U.N. General Assembly level, that there has been a huge diversion of resources away to Ukraine in the war, into armaments, that could have been otherwise put toward sustainable development goals or debt relief, climate change commitments, investment in the global south. I think the challenge for Ukraine is to present itself as an asset for the rest of the world rather than a liability.

RA: Zooming out yet more, we have these two wars, and then we have U.S. competition with China—sort of the foreign-policy north star in Washington. Is the United States equipped to deal with so many conflicts and crises in the world all at once?

FH: We might be in terms of our military and strategic capacity, and even our economic capacity, notwithstanding the rising debt. But we’re not in terms of our domestic politics. We might have another government shutdown coming up. We’ve gone through how many iterations of trying to find a speaker. I think our domestic divisions, friction and infighting suggest that we’re not capable of doing this.

Part of it, going back to perceptions, is because the rest of the world is looking at the United States—and no matter how much many of the governments may feel that they see a lot of competence in the current administration, they don’t believe that the United States has the staying power in its domestic politics. Everybody asks the question about 2024, and if the United States will degenerate into complete and utter discord and disarray. It’s very important for our abilities to be able to handle three-plus crises all at once, because domestic resilience is a very important part of that.