Quotes from Fiona Hill

I am very confident based on all of the analysis that has been done - and, again, I don't want to start getting into intelligence matters - that the Ukrainian government did not interfere in our election in 2016.

President Trump understands that President Putin does not like to be insulted. Putin takes it very personally. He harbors a grudge. He doesn't forget. And he will find some way of getting some degree of revenge as a result of that.

There's no prospect that the Russians are going to send Snowden back. Snowden is in the land of spy swaps now. Putin is not going to give this guy up for nothing.

You could say that by standing up to Russia, the U.S. is finally getting some balls.

A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.

The Russians didn't invent partisan divides. The Russians haven't invented racism in the United States. But the Russians understand a lot of those divisions and they understand how to exploit them.

Outside of the Moscow elite and a very small urban elite, Russia is one great big blue-collar country.

Trump knows how to play the media all on his own. He creates his own Twitter feed and uses it. He knows how to get the media's attention without the benefit of a state-controlled media. He does it all on his own. Trump understands how a free media works.

Because the more you engage with someone who is spreading untruths, the more validity you give to those untruths.

Indeed, for Russia, inconsistency is an integral part of its foreign policy strategy, particularly under Putin.

Everybody used to talk about Chechnya as a place, in the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, that was essentially governed by extended family and regional networks that substituted for older clan structures. But those networks have been destroyed.

The Cold War was obviously driven by a very intense ideological struggle that was very clearly defined.

The Russian leadership doesn't operate in the same way as ours does. Informal networks have a much more important role to play than formal networks.