From New York Times, I'm Michael Obaro. This is a Daily.

Ending the war in Ukraine very much depends on how and when Vladimir Putin allows it to end.

In an interview for his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, my colleague, opinion columnist Ezra Klein,

spoke with one of the world's leading experts on Putin, Fiona Hill, a foreign policy advisor for the last three American presidents,

about exactly how Putin is approaching this moment and the right ways and the wrong ways for the West to engage him.

It's Friday, March 11th.

Fiona Hill, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much, Ezra.

So there are a lot of different frameworks being thrown around right now for how to think about Vladimir Putin.

There's Putin as a strategic rational actor. There's Putin as an nostalgic imperialist.

There's Putin, the unhinged maniac.

What is the model you're using for understanding Putin right now?

Well, I think some of those models that you've just laid out do hold true.

Putin remains a strategic thinking. He's certainly got strategic goals that he's trying to fulfill.

A respect of whether we might think that those are mad goals, you know, from our perspective.

These are goals that he has put forward for quite a period of time, including about Ukraine,

but also about the rollback of NATO.

And what he sees is some kind of monumental struggle with the United States for Russia's right to exist in the world.

I mean, suddenly framed it in this way as well.

And then in those all these kinds of questions about the way that he reads history, that he reads the situation around him.

And the way that he has now over a long period of time, I mean, we have to remember he's been in power for 22 years.

After a period of time, it's, you know, you and the state, and particularly in the case of Putin, have become fused together.

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