Transcript: Fiona Hill and John Sullivan on Facing the Nation, February 19, 2023

The following is a transcript of an interview with Fiona Hill and John Sullivan that aired Sunday, February 19, 2023 on Face the Nation.

MARGARET BRENNAN: We’ve now been joined by Dr. Fiona Hill, the Trump administration’s National Security Council adviser on Russia, and former US Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, who is now a correspondent for CBS News. Good morning. It’s good to have both of you here. Fiona Hill, I’d like to speak to you first. Secretary of State Blinken acknowledged that Russia is not isolated, it has the support of China, the support of Iran. Does this mean that the main tool of the West here – sanctions – does not work?

FIONA HILL: Well, I think sanctions were never the only tool we had, I mean diplomacy and also military support for Ukraine. And I think you know what we heard from Secretary Blinken and the fact that he was just at the Munich Security Conference highlights the fact that we will have to really step up our diplomatic game. Because, you know, as you’re suggesting here, many other countries simply don’t believe that there is such a big problem, as we see it, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I mean, they always compare, you know, with the great power rivalry between the US, Russia and China and see it as part of that.

And I think you know that Secretary Blinken and other members of the administration were really keen to get across that this is not part of the same thing – the United States is not fighting for Ukraine for any kind of competition with China and with Russia. They are trying to help Ukraine free itself. This is the message we need to get across. And frankly, if Russia succeeds in taking land in Ukraine, it will make the world unsafe for every conceivable country that has a territorial dispute, including, of course, all of China’s neighbors in the South China Seas and East Asia, as well as many other countries. For example, India and China have a major dispute in the Himalayas. And what we really need to do is work with these middle powers, the countries in the UN General Assembly, to show that we are trying to help Ukraine liberate its territory from unprovoked aggression.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Ambassador, you heard from the Prime Minister of Poland that he is not only worried about the range of this conflict, but that it will be pushed out of the borders, maybe not because of an invasion, but because of destabilization.

SULLIVAN: Of course.

MARGARET BRENNAN: When you were in the administration, you quit in September, and there was talk that neighboring countries were also being targeted by Russia. Do you think this is happening now?

SULLIVAN: Absolutely. I mean, we saw the story earlier this week about possible Russian attempts to undermine power in Moldova. We have seen overflights of Russian missiles that have carried out strikes on Ukraine, over the territory of other countries that are not parties to the conflict. But this is a long-standing concern of the Poles, the inhabitants of Eastern Europe, who have always felt threatened by this colossus on their eastern border from Russia. They always described it to me as if when I was deputy secretary they felt they were on the front lines against this Russian-imperialist Russian state.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Right, but when you were here with us, it felt different. The last time you spoke to Secretary Blinken on February 19 last year, you said he asked you, “How are you feeling?” You said it was like August 1939. You saw the Prime Minister of Poland mention Hitler.

SULLIVAN: Right. Yes. So what happened on February 24 last year, Putin put all his chips in the center of the table. He went for broke. You remember, before February 24, there were… there were suggestions that “yeah, maybe there will be a limited invasion of Ukraine.” Putin went for broke, he went for broke on the scale of World War II, World War I. This is a war and we are going for broke, we are going to overthrow the Ukrainian government, we are going to subjugate the Ukrainian people, and, by God, we will do whatever we want with Ukraine, because Ukraine is not a country, Ukraine is part of our “Russian world”. We will do whatever we want with it, whatever we want, and you, the United States, the EU, NATO, whoever else, you can’t stop us,

MARGARET BRENNAN: And he’s betting on a short attention span here in the West, here in the United States. Vladimir Putin is due to deliver an address on Tuesday, his first address to the nation since the start of the war, the same day President Biden will deliver a speech in Poland. What message do you expect and need to be delivered?

Hill: I think what Putin is going to do is a message based on what Ambassador Sullivan just said, he’s going to portray this as a great patriotic war, you know, they use the words “father’s war” and ” defense of the motherland.” In this case, Putin was actually trying to say that this was the third invasion of Russia after Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars in the 1800s and then Nazi Germany. So he actually portrays it as an existential threat to Russia. So we can imagine that he is really trying to mobilize the Russian population in support of what he portrays as a fight for their lives. Now President Biden will have to confront this. We must confront this narrative not only in Europe. And you know, as we have heard from the Prime Minister of Poland, we have heard from many other European leaders, they see things in the same sense as a repetition of World War I and World War II in the sense of unprovoked great power aggression in Europe. But basically they should, and President Biden should convince the world, the whole world for now, not just the Europeans, that we are fighting to help Ukraine free itself, and that everything Putin says is a distortion of history and fact.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Ambassador, when you talk about the war in Ukraine, politically here in the United States, President Biden is being attacked by Republicans, particularly for being too slow to approve certain types of weapons, fighter jets, for example, for there has been a debate for a year about whether to give them or not. Isn’t it too slow if we really live in this incredibly important moment?

SULLIVAN: That’s an incredibly important point, and I think some of the criticism was justified, I think the administration that I was part of until recently was a little slow, cautious. President Biden, the order we got at the start of this conflict was that he wanted to do everything he could to support Ukraine, but he didn’t want to work with Russia. And this careful balancing act that we’re doing with the administration…

MARGARET BRENNAN: But Vladimir Putin doesn’t want war with the United States either.

SULLIVAN: Vladimir Putin says he’s already at war with the United States. He says the reason he invaded Ukraine is because Ukraine, encouraged by the United States, was going to invade Russia, Ukraine was going to develop nuclear weapons, the United States and Ukraine were developing biological weapons. The times he will use the word “war” to discuss what is happening in Ukraine is when he says that the West, the United States and all of its vassals, the word they use, are actually at war with Russia. When he talks about a special military operation, this is Russia’s response to the war that the US is already waging, through its Ukrainian proxies, as they say, the US wants to fight against Russia to the last Ukrainian and this is all made up

MARGARET BRENNAN: And those are the words you’ll be listening to on Tuesday when he…

SULLIVAN: He’s going to…absolutely. Fiona is absolutely right. This… this will be the rallying of the Russian-Russian people to… support the fatherland in this, as he believes, “existential war” that he is waging in Ukraine.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Dr. Hill, I mean what the Ukrainian foreign minister said in Munich: “The real end of the war will come when the Russian president falls to his knees and begs for forgiveness.” This is not like Vladimir Putin.

Hill: No, but maybe in 90 years some Russian president could do it. And I say 90 years because actually Ambassador Sullivan and I have some Irish roots and it took Queen Elizabeth II 90 years to actually come and ask for forgiveness in Ireland, which is very symbolic for you. you know, a lot of conflicts. It is possible that at some point, not in the near future, some Russian leader will actually ask for forgiveness for what was done in Ukraine. We saw German leaders after World War II, you know, eventually ask for similar forgiveness from war memorials, including those in the Soviet Union and in Russia itself. But it is true that when Russia falls away as a country, these imperial goals, then it will finally end, but it will not be soon.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Thank you. It is hard to believe that we have been in this conflict for a year now. We’ll be back soon.

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