In her recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former White House aide Fiona Hill was unkind and unfair toward those questioning her.

“Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its spy services didn’t attack the U.S. in 2016,” she said.

“I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016.”

But no one on the committee has denied Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, many details of which were recounted in the Mueller report. Nor should they. But they should heed carefully what Bloomberg’s Eli Lake noticed – that Hill mildly rebuked Chairman Adam Schiff for his tacit partisan assumption that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to make Donald Trump president.

“The Russians’ interests are, frankly, to delegitimize our entire presidency,” she said. “The goal of the Russians was really to put whoever became the president – by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale – under a cloud. So, if Secretary [Clinton] had been elected as president, as indeed many expected in the run-up prior to the election in 2016, she too would have had major questions about her legitimacy.”

Hill was only saying what we have frequently pointed out in this space. Whatever modest effect the Russians’ activities had in Trump’s favor, their real aim was not so much to make him president, which seemed unlikely in any event, but to weaken and discredit the eventual winner, who they had to believe would be Hillary Clinton.

Moreover, as Hill and Schiff went on to discuss, the Russians pursued this strategy through the amplification of the most radical voices on both sides of the political spectrum, irrespective of the candidates. They took advantage of and helped create an illusion, often with help from the media, of the rise of neo-Nazism and black radicalism, for example. All the while, Russia’s “fake news” operations worked to foster cynicism and distrust toward American institutions – the media, the police, the political parties (witness the release of DNC emails), and the electoral process.

This is why it is damaging when Trump talks about millions of illegal votes being cast in California, and equally so when Democratic presidential candidates baselessly claim that Democrat Stacey Abrams was robbed of Georgia’s governorship or that Trump’s 2016 win was illegitimate.

So, yes, Russia interfered. So did Ukraine.

To be sure, the Ukrainian effort was not nearly as elaborate, nor was its agenda so overtly malign. But Ukraine’s interference still had serious effects, both on Trump’s campaign and on the United States’ relationship with Ukraine after he won.

Although many people seem intent on denying it now, it’s silly to do so. Ukraine’s role in the 2016 U.S. election was not overlooked at the time. The headline that Politico used to tell the story in early 2017 seemed downright alarming: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” it blared.

“Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office,” wrote reporters Ken Vogel and David Stern. “They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”

If that sounds like foreign interference, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.

The U.S. needs to be concerned primarily with Russia, which, as Mitt Romney correctly observed, is America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe.