Hillary Clinton discusses relationship with Putin during talk in Powys

The former First Lady, Presidential Candidate and Secretary of State was interviewed by human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy as part of a Festival series on Women and Power.

The third in her family to speak at Hay Festival, after her husband Bill Clinton in 2001 and their daughter Chelsea spoke with Devi Sridhar in 2018, Clinton was welcomed by cheers, and even followed to Wales by American fans.

The 2016 Presidential candidate discussed current issues such as the move by the United States Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, which in 1973 had permitted access to abortion in every American state.

Discussing the war in Ukraine, Clinton said that during her time as US Secretary of State, she worked alongside Putin and his aides.

She spoke of Putin’s “paranoid” nature and his distaste of critics, saying: “Putin does not like critics, especially women critics. Putin became very adversarial towards me."

She said he had an “almost messianic belief in himself and what he was destined to be”.

Clinton had witnessed Putin’s goal of “restoring imperial Russia” while working alongside him and had hoped he would “shelve his aggressive ambitions” to become more cooperative, but this was not the case.

It led her to write memos about his behaviour, after fearing he would “become another threat to Europe and the rest of the world”.

She was not surprised when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 but was impressed by the effectiveness of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s government. The former US Secretary of State supported NATO offering weapons to Ukraine and argued that there is a need to “keep the institutions we have and try to make them more effective for the future”.

She said that had Donald Trump been re-elected, he would probably have removed the United States from NATO, just as he had withdrawn America from the Paris Agreement in 2020.