Timothy Snyder on Why Ukraine Can Still Win the War
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You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. In January of 2022, I talked on the program with the historian Timothy Snyder, the author of Bloodlands and On Tyranny. We talked about Russia and Ukraine. The invasion was just around the corner. And also about the United States. Snyder explained how Russia's military invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine,

was related to its influence campaigns here in America. By encouraging the America-first isolationist idea, to the extent that it's been successful, Putin, he said, enables Russia to have its way in Europe. Since the invasion, Timothy Snyder has made many trips to Ukraine, speaking in Ukrainian with soldiers, farmers, journalists and politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

From a country fighting off an invasion, Snyder says he finds lessons for Americans living in much greater safety. His new book is called On Freedom, and he writes, Freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good. Tim Snyder, you are just back from Ukraine, and you've been many, many times. What were your impressions of the mood in Kiev and beyond? The mood would be something like,

We have to do this because Russian occupation is worse than fighting them. I think we tend to think that if their mood gets bad enough, then they give up or we can bully them into giving up. The mood question only kind of – it only gets you so far. The mood is, you know, the mood is dark. The mood is angry. The mood is realistic about Americans. I think more realistic than we are about ourselves. What does that mean? What?

We think we're more important. I mean, we're very important, not to get this wrong. We can supply weapons in a way that nobody else can do. But they're aware that for reasons that have nothing to do with Ukraine, our policy could shift very dramatically here.

They're quite calm about us. You know, Trump might win. He might cut off weapons. That would be terrible. But of course, that's your problem fundamentally. It's your country fundamentally. We can't tell you what your interests are. You know, we'd appreciate it if you'd help us more. But they're quite calm about it. Seems from a distance that this war has gone through any number of phases. In the early days, there was the euphoria of not only international support, but the fact that Kiev, which seemed to be incredibly vulnerable...

to not only assault but also seeing its government replaced by the Russians, emerged victorious. There was this kind of euphoria. And Zelensky was an international hero and, and, and. And this developed over time. Horrible and brutal incidents and battles took place. The losses start to mount.

And then the dialogue begins to change here in the United States. Well, quietly, sort of, this can't go on forever. The losses are unsustainable. A deal has to be made. And then something else happens. Ukrainians start attacking Russia in an attempt to change the calculus. So where are we? Where is Ukraine at this point in terms of the history of this war?

We did something really right at the beginning, which was we, that is the U.S. administration, correctly predicted that there would be an invasion at a time when almost everybody doubted it or in the Russian case denied it. But we never quite got to the point where we realized that Ukraine could win. And I think we're still not really at that point. And I think that's not only an intellectual mistake, it's also a

An historical one because the small country usually wins wars. Let's pause on this. Historically, as a historian, smaller countries tend to win. Yeah, since 1945, it's usually been the smaller country, which if you're an American, that shouldn't be a surprising finding because your country is big and it loses wars all the time.

You know, Russia loses wars too. Part of Russian psychological warfare is the notion that they're big, they're nuclear, therefore they can't lose wars. But they lost the first Chechen War. They lost in Afghanistan. You know, going back, they almost lost the second war. They would have without us. They lost the First World War. They lost the Russo-Japanese War. They lost the Crimean War. They have a long history of being very big and nevertheless losing wars. So it wouldn't be surprising if Ukraine won.

It's also a post-colonial point. It has to do with empires exaggerating their own strength and underestimating their opponent, which I think there's a lot of that kind of hubris in this particular war. I was just in Kharkiv. I saw the lines where the Ukrainians stopped the Russians. They won the Battle of Kharkiv, and then later they were able to push back in Kharkiv Oblast and take some of Kherson Oblast back.

If somebody is going to win, it's going to be because the Ukrainians are allowed to do things that we're not allowing them to do or because the Russians eventually wear us down psychologically. Because we're much more fragile than the Ukrainians are. How do you mean? Well, I mean, our journalists go to Ukraine for a day and come back writing about how exhausted the Ukrainians are. And I think that's a reflection. Is that fair? I think.

Is that fair, Tim? They go for a day. Okay. I may just be citing a recent example, but no, there are a lot of journalists who spend... They do what's called a toe touch in Lviv and then leave? Well, no. I mean, okay, you're making a good point. There are a lot of really good American journalists who spend a lot of time in Ukraine and from whom I learn all the time. But I think...

we do tend to project our own short attention span onto them. And when we see any sign of weariness or despair, I think we legitimately can't imagine that we would do it, and therefore we have trouble imagining that they are doing it. And I think as an imperial people, we have trouble imagining

accepting that smaller countries do win wars or that people from a country that wasn't that familiar to us would be able to do things on the battlefield that we can't do, sometimes with our own weapons. I think all those things are a little bit difficult for us to swallow. How do you see Ukraine winning this war? You don't win wars because you take back every centimeter of territory or win every centimeter of territory. You win wars because the other side's political system can't bear it anymore.

For the Ukrainians, they lose if we don't support them so that psychologically they don't think they can make it anymore. They still have a lot of wherewithal left though. And my basic thesis here is they never get to that point unless we push them there. A lot of the talk which goes under the innocent heading of negotiations in this country is actually about using U.S. power to push Ukraine to a place where it wouldn't be otherwise.

The Russians lose when Putin thinks they're losing or when he loses power, one or the other. And what do you see as the stresses on the Russian political system? Why would they throw their hands up? Why would Putin, in some form or another, admit he's lost? They'll never admit it, but they change the subject. Today, there was a report that there are now a million casualties in this war, dead and wounded, a million Russians and Ukrainians. Ukraine is a smaller country than Russia.

And sooner or later, you don't have that many men between the ages of 18 and let's call it 30. The Ukrainians are fighting largely with guys who are older than 30, just by the way. But they have had this idea, you should sort of try to spare not just the university students, but spare younger people in general. And they have this idea which comes directly out of the specific trajectory of their post-Soviet history that each generation is better than the one before.

And therefore, we're going to try to spare the ones that are coming through. And that's something which is hard. Because they're freer of the old mindset and more acclimated to the new. Yeah, exactly. And that they're more Ukrainian in some sense because they've grown up in a free Ukraine. But no, your point in general is very well taken. There just aren't that many Ukrainians.

There aren't as many Russians as people think either, but there aren't that many Ukrainians. But there's more, in the most horrible terms, more meat for the meat grinder on the Russian side. And Putin doesn't hesitate.

The Ukrainians, I believe, are correct to think that they're not going to win this war by direct confrontation. I think they're right to think that they win it by having the Russians try pointless counteroffensives, by hitting Russian logistics, by doing things inside the Russian Federation that cause pressure. I think we're wrong to think that the only way they can win is by a kind of one-to-one.

The casualty rate is horrifying on both sides, but it is roughly 5 to 1 in the Ukrainians' favor right now. It has to be probably more like 8 or 9 to 1 for them to win. But at 5 to 1, they can hold their own. Although, of course, it's horrible on both sides. I mean, he killed them all, right? Because, I mean, we talk about...

In this discussion about Russia and Ukraine, people tend to think, okay, let's talk about them both as states, but they're very different entities. And so to be Putin and to be Zelensky are very different things, and they have different strengths and different weaknesses. I think if you're Putin, you feel strong right to the moment where you're not. Whereas if you're Zelensky, you take bruising hits every day, but at the same time, you can kind of tell how much support you have. I don't think Putin can really tell that. I think you're absolutely right that...

it's indifferent to Putin how many Russians he kills. And it's not indifferent to Zelensky. It's not indifferent to the Ukrainian political class in general. As for Russians, it's not just numbers, though, because...

There's a demography to who they kill. They first killed as many Ukrainian men as they could, Ukrainian citizens who they impressed into their army. Then they killed as many Asians as they could. Then it's as many people from the countryside as they could. I think you do start to get into a little bit of a different dynamic when they have to start sending men from the cities, which is just now beginning to happen. On the Russian side? On the Russian side.

There was a presidential debate recently, obviously, and it's most memorable for the business about eating cats and dogs. But there was at least one brief discussion on foreign policy. Former President Trump was asked, quite simply, does he want to see Ukraine win? He couldn't answer that question or wouldn't answer that question. Tim, if Trump wins, what would that answer mean for the future? I can't resist pointing out that the pet-eating stuff and the us-and-them thing

is a little bit reminiscent of the craziness of East European politics 30 years ago, like the chaotic, what the Russians and Ukrainians called black PR, and the chaos of it and the imaginativeness of it and the ridiculousness of it and the way that it leads to complete political dysfunctionality. That's kind of a dark set of associations for me. Trump is an extreme example of the view that might makes right and Russia is strong.

because Putin is strong, because Putin's the dictator, which is a certain view of strength, it leads you to the conclusion, which Trump seems to have drawn, that in some sense, Russia is stronger than America because it's governed by a tyrant and America is not.

And that means that a Trumpian foreign policy is, and he showed this the last time around, is always going to be submissive in a certain way because he's going to think that we're weaker and that he's number two compared to whoever the actual dictator is. That's what it portends generally. I mean, with respect to Ukraine, I think it's disastrous because Ukraine

you have to believe that you're going to win. And this is something the Biden administration has had trouble with. If you want to get out of a war with some kind of dignity, you have to try to win it. If you're not trying to win it, it's not going to go, it's going to be longer than you think. Like the Putin people, and they're very open about this, have been waiting for Trump. They just, they needed Biden to go slow enough that Trump could save them. How would you fault the Biden administration in relation to Ukraine? That's a good question.

That dimension of time, precisely, would be number one. They've done a lot of the right things. But belatedly, in your view. Yeah. I mean, you're not really in a war supposed to talk so much about the things you're going to do before you do them. And you end up taking—like, weapons deliveries are not supposed to be essentially a debate club activity. They're supposed to be something that you do quickly, in secret, a little bit less predictably.

We telegraph everything we're going to do, and we allow the Russians to practice their psychological warfare against it by telling us that whatever it is, X, Y, and Z, this is going to be the thing which sets off that dreaded thing, escalation, which is never actually defined. Yeah, but we live in a democracy, and all kinds of political pressures are brought to bear on a president, various vectors of priorities and issues, and you have no patience for that.

The main thing is pace, that you give the Russians too much time. At the moment that you were talking about earlier, where the Ukrainians had made some progress, that's when we needed to pour it on. Fall of 2022, I think, was the moment when the Ukrainians could have pushed through. If we'd supplied them the way we did a year later, I think they probably would have pushed through, and we'd be in a very different position right now. That's not just us, by the way. It's also Elon Musk, who chose that moment to cut them off from Starlink. Mm-hmm.

You've written a book just out called On Freedom. What does the outcome of the Ukraine-Russia war mean for freedom globally? I mean, I have to take a breath there and just say what I think freedom is because it's a word that we kick around and I think we've kind of beaten it into a pulp in various corners of our history. If you think that freedom is just negative, if you think that freedom is just an absence of things, I think you then argue yourself into a position where you're

Given the absence, stuff is going to work out. You argue yourself into a position like the American position that the market is going to deliver you freedom or the founding fathers, different position, are going to deliver you freedom. Something else is going to deliver you freedom. And that, of course, is wrong. It's essentially an authoritarian conviction because if anyone's going to deliver you freedom, it's going to be you in some way, you know, you and your friends or you and your allies. Right.

But once you are in that habit of thinking freedom is fundamentally generated by some abstraction, then when you're actually faced with somebody else's actual conflict for freedom, you have trouble recognizing it as such and you have trouble believing that other people would actually fight for freedom because...

Much as you talk about freedom, you've gotten yourself persuaded that you're the beneficiary, you're the inheritor. It just kind of comes to you. And I think that was fundamentally our mistake in February 2022. I mean, there are various sources of it, but I think one of them was the belief that

was the lack of a belief that anybody actually would do that thing that we talk about, which is fight for their own freedom. I mean, I think we left that metaphysical commitment out of our calculations, and the Ukrainians have taught us something or have been teaching us something. And, you know, this is going back to your question about the mood. This is something that they will tell you over and over again very calmly. It's not about how they feel. It's that they know that under Russian occupation, elites are going to be murdered, children are going to be deported, people are going to be tortured.

And so therefore, they don't, you know, trying to preserve freedom means they don't have much choice about what they're trying to do. So globally, I think it's a positive chance for folks to recognize that we all, like freedom doesn't mean something which is given to you. Freedom means something that you have to care about. And there's always going to be a certain amount of discomfort and risk involved. It's never brought to you. And then, you know, going out now geopolitically, if the Ukrainians were

who have taken this huge risk for freedom, I mean, very straightforwardly, that's their language and they mean it. If they are allowed to fail, then it's hard to imagine anyone else trying to do what they're doing. And it's not just the absence of a success, it's also the presence of a defeat. So if Putin's worldview, that all these virtues are nonsense, there's no world truth, there's no empirical truth, there's no factual truth, if that's allowed to prevail, then...

Those sorts of ideas are going to spread, and those ideas are very inconsistent with democratic practice. Let's talk about freedom and the use of American power. What is your view of the extent of the obligation of American power to defend freedom around the world? One of the other topics that was brought up in the debate was Taiwan. Taiwan.

For me, freedom is not negative but positive. Freedom from is important.

but only because it's part of freedom too. The prison walls are bad because they prevent you from doing the things that you would do if you were free. And this is something actually that Ukrainian occupation and de-occupation brought home. The occupation was bad, but de-occupation, which is the word that Ukrainians tend to use rather than liberation, de-occupation is only the first step towards actually making people free. If their houses are still in rubble,

They're not free. This, by the way, was also a point that observers of concentration camps made. They would say, well, they're not actually liberated now.

The fact that the Germans are gone doesn't mean they're liberated. It means that they need health care and lots of support, and then maybe at some later point they'll be liberated. The way the Ukrainians talk about freedom is about being for things. It's about having a better future. But I'm not sure I've gotten to the point of your question. You have. You write that this book is your answer to the question of what a better America would look like. How to even begin answering that question of what a better America would look like in very clear terms?

I had to try to answer that because of other things that I've done. If things can go so wrong, Professor Snyder, how do they go right? Like these are the questions which... Potentially. I've been, yeah, I've been confronted with for the last 10 years, and I think they're fair questions.

I think it's easier to describe how Germany went wrong or how Stalin succeeded Lenin than it is to describe how things metaphysically would be better. And it's easier, as I did in On Tyranny, to say, here are some good tactics to try to keep things from going too far off the rails than it is to say, here's what's actually right. So I'm not refereeing various concepts. I'm making an argument that this is the correct idea of freedom. If you have this idea of freedom as being positive,

as involving value commitments and choices and the ability to realize them, then you have to move from there to a kind of politics which makes that possible. Then you have to also believe very banally in things like masterminds

maternity and paternity leave and generous vacation policies and health care. Social democratic elements. Yeah. The things that you would call social democratic or even socialist are elements of freedom because they allow young people to grow up with the capacities to do the kinds of thinking and feeling and acting which you would need to be free. And so I'm starting with our verbal commitment to freedom. I'm working forward to what I think is the right concept of freedom. And then I'm saying that actually suggests certain kinds of

So that's that the whole book is my answer to your question. The book is on freedom. Timothy Snyder. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Very glad to be here. Thanks for listening. And you can hear more of the New Yorker Radio Hour by subscribing to the show wherever you listen to podcasts or on public radio stations across the country. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for the New Yorker. I love

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