World War III has begun?

It may have been pure coincidence that Vladimir Putin first introduced the Russian hypersonic missile to the world via a simulation in which the missile hits an unnamed peninsula that bears an uncanny resemblance to Florida.

That detail was not missed by Donald Trump, whose face turned pale while watching the video - probably the image of his favorite resort Mar-a-Lago disappearing in an atomic cloud passed through his mind. Standing with him that day in March 2018 was Fiona Hill, the White House's Russia adviser at the time.

"That got his attention," she said. "Trump said, 'Why did he do that? Real states don't do that.' He is terrified of Putin, I saw it firsthand," she added.

Hill, a longtime Kremlin analyst who once dined so close to Putin that she could smell the detergent on his clothes, says the episode revealed a lot about Trump's view of the Russian president. "It shows how susceptible he is to Putin because he is genuinely afraid of the possibility of a nuclear conflict," she said.

Unlike Trump, whom he describes as having a 1980s mentality — both in terms of foreign policy and musical taste — Hill argues that today's threats come from covert forms of warfare.

"It's no longer a matter of a Russian tank crossing the British coast or a nuclear bomb wiping out a city. Now the threats relate to sabotage of key infrastructure, poisoning, assassination," she said from her office in Washington.

He believes that the Third World War has already begun, writes The Telegraph. "World wars begin when a series of global conflicts begin to intertwine. This is exactly where we are now," she said.

After years of warning about the Russian threat, Hill came into the spotlight in 2019 when she testified at Trump's first impeachment trial. Her testimony exposed the White House's vulnerability to Russian influence, prompting an avalanche of reactions - from praise to death threats. She published a memoir entitled There is Nothing Here for You, became chancellor of Durham University and last year was appointed by Sir Keir Starmer to lead Britain's Strategic Defense Review.