Episode 2: Europe's Security: Squeezed Between Russia and the US?

Dr Hill, who served the first Trump administration as a Russia expert, brings deep insights into Russian, American and British defence policy making.

Having identified Russia’s obsession with recovering the old Tsarist Empire’s borderlands, and anticipated Putin’s strategic use of economic power to create dependencies in the 1990s, she sheds light on the thinking of Presidents Putin and Trump, and what is now needed by societies used to a peace dividend.

She also explains the challenges faced by the drafters of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, with limited means available to respond to a transformed international environment, with Russia an enemy, and the USA now an economic rival and a less reliable ally.

Dr Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and Chancellor of Durham University in the UK. She is on Harvard University’s Board of Overseers, from where she gained her doctorate in history and was a Frank Knox Fellow. She co-authored Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (2003), both with Clifford Gaddy. She has been appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George by the UK and Knight First Class of Finland’s Order of the Lion.

Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, 2013.

Fiona Hill, In search of great Russia: Elites, ideas, power, the state, and the pre-revolutionary past in the new Russia, 1991-1996. (Harvard University, 1998).

Fiona Hill, "How Vladimir Putin’s world view shapes Russian foreign policy", in David Cadier & Margot Light (eds.): Russia’s foreign policy: Ideas, domestic politics and external relations. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), pp. 42-61.

Maura Reynolds, "‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes." Politico Magazine 28 (2022).

Fiona Hill, "Russia: The 21st Century's energy superpower?" Brookings Review 20.2 (2002): 28-32