indeed. >> ifill: fiona hill, director of center on the u.s.ngs institution and michael mcfaul, former u.s. ambassador to russia and now professor at stanford university. thank you. >> thank you. >> woodruff: an egyptian court ruled today that two al-jazeera journalists who had been jailed for more than 400 days will be released on bail. mohamed fahmy and baher mohamed- still face a retrial. their colleague, australian peter greste, was freed a few weeks ago. today's ruling is a small victory for press freedom advocates. but a new report released in washington warns that journalists are increasingly coming under threat. e indicators of reporters without border are uncontestable. there was a drastic decline in freedom of information in 2014. >> reporter: the world's largest press freedom group surveyed 180 countries and fully two-thirds in its estimation saw greater restrictions last year. the list placed finland first as most free, with much of europe near the top. the united states was 49th, with the report citing lack of a federal shield law

let me bring in fiona hill. she's a co-operative.>> thank you. >> the last cease fire didn't stick. who is to say this one will? >> i think that's the right perception over this deal wondering whether it will indeed stick. the last agreement was in september, and obviously many months of carnage and fighting on the ground have come since then. what we have to do is think about this as an interim step as yet another agreement to try to bring an end to fighting on the ground that we can then use as a basis for further negotiations. this agreement seems to have an awful lot of provisions for dialogue and for future agreements about the status of these territories within ukraine, about the future configuration of ukraine itself but i think we're very far away from any kind of final status final agreement about how ukraine will look. >> i wanted to talk to you. you've been studying russian politics for decades. one of the things that jumped out at me was it was vladimir putin that we heard from first in this post-agreement. it wasn't ange

that is what fiona hill my co-author and i have sought to do in a book we published in 2013 and havesued an expanded edition that just came out last week trying to give a picture of the way he thinks. and where those ideas come from. our thesis is that if we don't understand how he's thinking there is no way we can plan our own response and strategy to his actions. >> well clifford to that point, we have to understand what he understands and thinks about us and you write that putin does not understand the west which is bizarre to me. you write what we fail to appreciate, however, is how dangerously little putin understands about us our motive and our mentality and our values and of course being americans we have to make it all about us. but please explain how is it that putin after all of this time still doesn't understand us? >> well understand his background. his only professional background before he became deputy mayor of the city of st. petersburg as the soviet union collapsed in 1991-92, his only background was as a kgb agent operative of the intelligence services and his speci