Timothy Snyder: The reality of Ukraine

by Timothy Snyder, a distinguished American historian, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, a Professor of History at Yale University

Source: Snyder on Substack

The divide in politics today is between unreality and reality. Those who seek to rule the world blur human experience and smudge memory, making cooperation and friendship laughable and unthinkable. Rather than possessors of truths, we are to serve as lonely nodes in a power network.

Ukraine resists an unreality war. Putin’s premise for invasion is that Ukraine does not exist. There is no state, no nation. Ukraine is just a misunderstanding that can be corrected by the violence and propaganda. And so the country was to be occupied, the children were to be reeducated, and everyone with any sort of political involvement was to be murdered.

The Russian lies told for foreigners return to that basic premise of non-existence. Ukrainians want to be Russians – because they do not exist. The Ukrainian government is illegitimate – because there is no Ukrainian nation that could have elected it. We will call the Ukrainian government or Ukrainians “Nazis” – not because that has any basis in reality, but because that would justify eliminating them. We will claim that Ukraine is an element of a conspiracy – if it is real, Ukraine is not.

The claim that somehow Russia had to invade Ukraine because of NATO also comes down to the notion that Ukraine does not exist. The story starts from the premise that only NATO has agency, that only NATO can act. Russia is therefore blameless in whatever it does, and Ukraine is simply a pawn. In this telling, the problem is that NATO was going to endlessly “enlarge” or “expand.” But that is not what happened. NATO was not an issue in Ukrainian politics before 2014. Ukraine could not have joined NATO back them because of military agreements with Russia that made this impossible. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine anyway. Then Ukrainians, sensibly enough, decided that joining NATO might be a good idea.

Vladimir Putin gives us no reason to believe that he fears a NATO invasion. If Russian leaders feared such an eventuality, the last thing they would have done would have been to undertake a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as they did in 2022. That amounts to sacrificing most of their army inside a country that is not a NATO member. If Russians feared a NATO invasion, they would not have created a situation in which Finland and Sweden join NATO, which they have done. By invading Ukraine, Russia created a new, very long border with NATO, its border with Finland. But because Russia does not fear a NATO invasion, it does not need to seriously guard that border, and does not. It throws everything it has at Ukraine, because it is invading Ukraine for reasons of its own.

Did you remember, by the way, that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014? That invasion was a giant triumph for unreality. A very simple event, the invasion of one country by another, was covered by the application of social media techniques. In a pioneering act of unreality politics, the Russians targeted the vulnerabilities of westerners with messages that would resonate with prior beliefs and thus demobilize them, or even bring them along to Russia’s side. The far right was told that Ukraine was part of a Jewish plot. The far left was told that the Ukrainians were Nazis. All of these were different ways of saying that Ukraine was not real. And everyone was told that Ukraine had no history, no culture, no language, and so on.

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