Fiona Hill: Putin has the U.S. "exactly where he wants us"

What she's saying: "Putin, sadly, has got all of our political class, every single one of us, including the media, exactly where he wants us."

• She said that in 2016, "a lot" of the polarization in the U.S. came from Russia — "But they don't invent the divisions. 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."
• "I don't think that we're in a second Cold War. But one thing that people need to bear in mind is that the Russian military still has the capacity to wipe out the United States through a nuclear strike. But there is no ideological struggle. The Cold War were two systems against each other. In a sense, we're in the same system. We're competitors."

Flashback: Hill, a former White House official, testified in the impeachment inquiry into Trump that a "fictional narrative" about Ukraine, driven by partisan politics, distracted the president from the real threat that Russia poses to American democracy.

Go deeper: Russia has already won the fight to undermine U.S. elections