Timothy Snyder talks nuclear threats, psychological warfare, and drones...
I sit down with one of the world's foremost historians and public intellectuals during his recent visit to Kyiv
Pictured: Timothy Snyder at the controls of one of United 24’s “Safe Terrain” de-mining robots
Timothy Snyder might be the most popular American in Ukraine. Part of that can be attributed to his clear headed analysis about the danger of Russian imperialism, his frequent, eloquent demolitions of Putin’s spurious claims about Ukrainian nationhood, and his clear appreciation of Ukrainian culture (he speaks Ukrainian fluently, and arrives at our interview wearing a black vyshyvanka - a traditional embroidered Ukrainian shirt).
The other part can be attributed to his refusal to sit on the sidelines like a traditional academic. Snyder, in partnership with Star Wars actor Mark Hamill and the Ukrainian government’s cultural outreach programme “United 24”, has already raised millions of dollars in donations for the Ukraine. Their most recent “Safe Skies” fundraising campaign raised over $2.3m to help build a network of acoustic sensors to detect incoming Russian aerial threats; an ingenious system that detects the location and the flight path of incoming Russian drones and cruise missiles enabling Ukrainian air defence teams to scramble to engage them. Their next fundraising campaign aims to raise close to half a million dollars to purchase 30 de-mining robots.
His efforts have given him a public status in Ukraine more akin to a movie star than a historian; and we meet in the lobby of a hotel in central Kyiv just before he is whisked off to meet Ukrainian President Zelensky for a one on one meeting.
His visit to Kyiv corresponded with the arrival of British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, making their first joint visit, as pressure mounted on London and Washington to ease or lift Western restrictions on Kyiv's ability to strike targets within Russia’s internationally recognised borders. Such restrictions, placed on Ukraine due to Western fears of “escalation”, have been the result of an extremely successful Russian campaign of psychological and information warfare, Snyder argues.
“I think the Americans have suffered a series of defeats in psychological warfare,” Snyder tells me. “And it's difficult to acknowledge that. You never like to think, oh, I was wrong, I was tricked, the other side was smarter than me. Exhibit A of this would be the whole rhetoric of ‘escalation’.” Snyder also labels attempts to persuade the West of the impossibility of Russian defeat or Ukrainian victory - despite the ahistorical nature of such claims - as key Russian wins on the information battlefield. “And there was not going to be a nuclear war”, Snyder adds, despite continuing Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.
This campaign of psychological warfare - or “war magic” as he euphemistically puts it - has been extremely effective at limiting and delaying Western military aid to Ukraine, and then attaching limits to that aid when it does finally arrive. “It’s the same psychological mistake where you're playing by the rules that the other side has set for you as opposed to the rules of international law which allow for an invaded country to defend itself”, Snyder argues, referring to Western restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western provided long-range munitions to strike targets inside Russian borders.
“It seems like a very clear and logical principle would be allowing the Ukrainians to be able to hit whatever is hitting them. If that's planes from an airfield, they should be allowed to strike that airfield. If a missile is launched at Ukraine they should be allowed to hit the site of that missile launch. That would be a very simple thing to articulate and it would liberate the Ukrainians from most of the restrictions we have placed on them.”
History will primarily judge the Biden administration on its response to war in Ukraine, Snyder has argued, as the key foreign policy issue of Biden’s term. If this is the case, I ask, will history not judge the administration for having squandered the chance to deal a significant defeat to a key geopolitical adversary, at very little real cost to America?
“The Biden administration actually did a very good job of getting America on the right side at the beginning”, Snyder says. “Imagine if the administration hadn't released the intelligence, hadn't warned that Russia was going to invade, and then Russia invades; I think it would have been close to impossible to get any kind of coherent policy going, including the sanctions policy,” he continues, arguing the narrative of Russian victory would have been insurmountable in this scenario. “My main critique of the administration is that they're on the wrong time scale. What's taken them two years should have taken six months. And that Ukrainians are paying for that. And we're also paying for it, as you say, in the ability to define the geopolitical future.”
Western predictability has also played into Putin’s hands, Snyder believes. “Putin believes that we live in a world where people do clever, surprising things, and that it's very comfortable for him when we make ourselves more predictable than we have to be… I think we've made his life very easy by not doing clever, surprising things, and indeed by saying we're the rule-bound ones, and we're not only going to obey all the rules, we're going to make up some new rules, and indeed that we're going to follow the rules that our enemies make up”.
Western passivity - partly caused by Russian psychological warfare - meant that the Russian enjoyed impunity for its annexation of Crimea and the instigation of war in Ukraine’s Donbas, Snyder argues; leading to the West betraying some of its core values to appease Moscow. “We are supposed to believe in national self-determination and the inviolability of borders. We're not supposed to believe in stories about how centuries ago this part of the world used to belong to this particular baron, and therefore today’s maps need to be withdrawn. We have this imperfect order, but it's an order, and with Crimea we tore a hole in that fabric by allowing ourselves to be entertained and even moved to inaction by a story about the past, a story which is not only historically wrong but also sort of vicious because it removes the ethnic cleansing of the Tatars from the picture completely.”
Part of the reason Russian narratives - this weaponisation of history - has been so successful is the lack of historical literacy in the West, Snyder believes. “You’re inviting me to make a historian’s point, but I think we massively underestimate how important history is”, he says. “So Putin can say the stupidest things, and many of us will say, oh yes, look at that man, he knows something about the 11th century. Because we don't know a thing. He can go on TV with Tucker Carlson and say a series of idiotic things, or write this completely inane essay but we don't have the ability to dismiss it or to analyze it. We just don't have those tools anymore. I think the average geopolitician in the 1970s or 1980s did have a deeper basket of historical references than we have now. But I think we conceded that ground and then that ground gets filled up with the worst kind of myths”. Putin’s weaponisation of history is based on a worldview that divides smaller countries into spheres of influence and in which empire is normal, Snyder argues. “Putin genuinely doesn’t believe that Russia has borders, and also doesn’t really believe that any post-war construct really matters, because all that really matters is power and the leader’s charisma.”
Snyder also believes Western policymakers have forgotten fundamental realities of geography and history, and are too focused on trying to read Putin’s emotions rather than understanding the basic importance of the territory currently being fought over in Ukraine. Here, Western historical illiteracy again raises its ugly head.
“The northern Black Sea coast has been essential for state making for 2500 years. It was essential to the making of classical Athens. The places that are now the major ports have mattered for 2500 years; they've been important for war making and everyone knew they were important for war making until very recently; but now nobody knows what the Crimean War was or why it was fought. Nobody understands that this is the most fertile territory in the world or the unique combination of having the most fertile territory in the world abutting a sea which communicates with the rest of the world; that's a thing the Scythians understood 2,500 years ago and which we somehow have forgotten. We've shifted from a geographical model which asks tangible questions such as where are the rivers, where is the sea, where is the ocean, what are the goods, how do you fight a war on this terrain, to a ‘psychological model’ where we're more interested in how Putin feels today.”
With the West’s most recent conflicts being largely counterinsurgency wars where the holding of territory has never been the primary goal, the abandonment of history, and particularly military history, is to partly to blame, he argues. “Military history is inherently connected to territory, and we’re fighting a war on land and sea where the territory matters but when you talk to western officials, they don't necessarily immediately grasp this.”
And Ukraine has gained some important territorial victories, that they haven’t been given enough credit for Snyder believes. “They really don’t get credit for their victories. They don’t get credit for successfully defending Kharkiv, or Kyiv, and people have already forgotten Kherson”, Snyder says. “And clearing the Black Sea of an enemy fleet so that you can restore trade in agricultural commodities is a very essential victory. And we don’t give them credit for it, and because of that we don’t think enough about how much more they could do if we helped them in proportion to their successes rather than in proportion to our fears”.
Part of the problem with not giving appropriate credit to Ukrainians for their victories against Russia is that Western governments are squandering the ability to learn appropriate lessons from the conflict, Snyder argues. “War reveals your weaknesses, and lack of humility can be one of your weaknesses, right? You can’t win a war unless you learn from your mistakes. And the Anglo-Americans need to realize we have made mistakes in both our approach to Russia and also to our approach to Ukraine and the battlefield. I think that alone would be a big step in the right direction.”