Vladimir Putin reportedly kept getting frustrated with Donald Trump while he was US president, with a former aide claiming the Russian leader had to 'keep explaining things' to him during their meetings.
Fiona Hill, the former director for European and Russian affairs on the national security council under the Trump administration, told the Chicago Council of Global Affairs this week that despite the popular assumption that the two men were close, in reality Putin would frequently lose his temper with Trump during their personal meetings due to his attitude and poor knowledge of geopolitics.
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“He had to keep explaining things, and Putin doesn’t like to do that,” she said. “You could see that he got frustrated many times with President Trump.
"Even though he loves to be able to spin his own version of events, he wants to have predictability in the person that he’s engaging with.”
Regarding Putin's view of Trump, Hill told The Guardian in 2020: “Trump just wants to sit down with the guy, whoever it is, and create personal chemistry and then everyone else works out the details.
"He wanted to treat Putin the same way he treated Xi Jinping or Benjamin Netanyahu. He wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to them.
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“Putin doesn’t operate like that. Putin takes translators with him for every occasion.
"The Russians are incredibly organised. They take advantage of every opportunity, every vulnerability, every open door they can walk through.”
Hill, who currently works as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and published a well-received book on Putin last year, also told the Chicago Council that the Russian president intentionally chose to invade Ukraine during President Biden’s tenure in the White House as he believed the current POTUS would be more likely than his predecessor to 'sue for peace'.
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“He thought that somebody like Biden, who’s a trans-atlanticist, who knows all about NATO, who actually knows where Ukraine is, and actually knows something about the history, and is very steeped in international affairs, would be the right person to engage with as opposed to somebody that you have to explain everything to all the time, honestly,” the former national security official added.
In response, Trump launched a furious public attack against British-born Hill during a recent interview with the New York Times, calling her 'a deep state stiff – with a nice accent'.
“She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about,” Trump said. "If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing."
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Topics: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin
Tom Sanders