Former U.S. Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said in a Thursday interview that Vladimir Putin cannot handle critics and the Russian president thinks of himself as a type of messiah.
“Putin does not like critics, especially women critics,” Clinton said at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in England on Thursday, per The Guardian. “Putin then became very adversarial toward me with few exceptions. As we know, despite efforts to say to the contrary, he worked very hard to get Trump elected through all kinds of means.”
When Putin served as Russia’s prime minister and Clinton was Secretary of State, Clinton told the crowd at the festival she witnessed “his almost messianic belief in himself and what he was destined to be.”
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Clinton said she was “sadly not surprised” with the war in Ukraine, noting Putin’s “goal of restoring imperial Russia.”
Clinton recalled writing memos during her tenure working with former president Barack Obama, issuing warnings that Putin could become a “threat to Europe and the rest of the world” while expressing optimism at the time that he may “shelve his aggressive ambitions.”
Clinton said her dynamic with Putin turned awry following his third presidential term in 2012 when Putin blamed Clinton for pro-Democracy protests.
“The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted,” Clinton said at the time, suggesting the election was fraudulent and didn’t “meet international standards.”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said in a video Friday that Ukrainians have been defending their country for 100 days against Russian aggression and added that “victory shall be ours.”
