You can sit and drink a coffee in Paris, but the reason you can do that is because of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Can you imagine like Putin talking to Trump and explaining to him how Ukraine has always been a part of Russia?
What Putin thinks about the history of Ukraine is absolutely nonsensical. And the Americans he talks to have no idea. Ukraine certainly has a chance, but Trump doesn't. At that time, the United States have chosen oil above freedom or above another fight.
You put it much better than I did.
Today, I'm very happy to welcome a very famous historian, Timothy Snyder, who has come to Kyiv for a special reason. Timothy, it's a great honor, not just to have your book at home, but to see you in person for the first time. Thank you very much for coming.
You are here for a special occasion, and of course we'll mention this in our conversation. But today is a special day in world history and in American history because we are recording this interview on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. What memories do you have of that day, and was it a turning point, you think, in American history of nowadays?
Well, I have personal memories of that day because I wasn't very far away. The night of September 10th, I was in New York with friends, and I didn't get back to New Haven, where I was living, until early in the morning of the 11th, just a few hours before the two planes struck the towers. And so it's something that obviously was very close. I knew quite a few people who lived in those neighborhoods, and I was going back and forth to New York a lot at the time.
When I look back at it, though, I have to say that I see it as a missed opportunity for us. I think we, the American people — and this is a hard thing to say on an anniversary, but I'm going to say it — I think we did everything wrong. We did everything wrong. We should have recognized this is a chance for us to get to the root of the problem and to free ourselves from oil and gas, to disentangle ourselves from the Middle East. This is a chance to think seriously about what security means. Not just security from terrorism, but security in the sense of health care and security in the sense of better lives for people. And we didn't do that.
Instead, we fought a war that we shouldn't have fought on the basis of things that our leaders knew weren't true. And a lot of the things that have gone wrong in the world since then have to do with the fact that we chose to fight that war. So on this day, I remember the 3,000 or so Americans who were killed, and I remember the courageous people on Flight 93 who did what they had to do and saved other people's lives. But I don't want to say that in the last 25 years we reacted in the right way because I don't think we did. I think we got a lot of things wrong.
What exactly do you think the United States should have done differently, or should have done instead of what they did?
Well, number one, like I said before, it was a chance to define what your major foreign policy is. And the way that we went about it was to say someone has committed violence against us, and therefore we will commit violence against somebody else. So terrorists from Saudi Arabia attacked us, and therefore we're going to invade Iraq. That's our major response. And that response lacked logic and it lacked depth. What we should have done was to say the deep roots of all of this have to do with our connections with oil. And we have very good reasons to get out from under oil dependency. We should move in that direction. And we didn't do it.
And if we had done that — and this is directly relevant to Ukraine, by the way — if we had taken that moment to say we were going to free ourselves from hydrocarbons, from oil and gas, then no Putin, because the entire Russian regime as it exists now is a result of Western dependence on oil and natural gas. So that's the main thing. And by the way, I'm not just saying this retrospectively. This is what I said at the time to my friends who were in the White House or my friends who are making policy. It was clear that they weren't going to do it, but this is what I thought at the time, that we have a chance here to get to the roots of these problems, but we chose not to do that.
What you're basically saying is that at that time the United States have chosen oil above freedom or above another fight.
You put it much better than I did, because we talked about freedom. We talked about freedom, but what we did was lock ourselves down into the region fundamentally because of oil. And you know, when our president said these people attacked us because they hate freedom — well, that would have been a chance to think about what freedom means. And freedom doesn't mean that you only talk about yourself, or you think about security only in terms of keeping other people out. Freedom means things like making sure people have opportunities and making sure people have health care and making sure people feel secure. And instead, what we did was we made people feel less secure. We spent the next decade making it harder for people to live the American dream. And we created a Department of Homeland Security, which is now the agency in the American government, not surprisingly, which is the most repressive of all.
If you think about 9/11, do you think that February 24th, 2022, has been 9/11 for Europe — this wakeup call that the world or Europe will no longer be the same again? Do you see any parallels between the two dates?
That's so interesting because, following on my previous answers, I have to say that I don't really think the United States woke up. I think it was a wakeup call, as you say, but I don't think we treated it that way.
I think the bugle sounded or the alarm went off, and we went off and did something completely different and hurt ourselves. For Europe, it's of course different because the war in Ukraine is something that happens every day, every hour, every minute for the last four and a half years. It's not a one-off event like 9/11 was. And so it can't be freely interpreted the way that 9/11 was because it's just there every day.
I would say that, like 9/11, I'll put it this way: it's given Europeans a chance. They have a chance to think about where they are. Do they understand first that Russia is a serious threat to their political existence and to the way that they're used to living? Do they understand second of all that it is primarily their responsibility to help Ukraine, and that helping Ukraine is the best way to help themselves? And third of all, are they able to say, excuse me, someone else is helping us, right? Ukraine is helping us. Because the danger in a long war like this is that people take Ukrainian battlefield success...
The danger in a long war is that people confuse Ukrainian battlefield success for just the way things are, right? That you can sit and drink a coffee in Paris, or you can take a dog for a walk in Berlin, you know, or you can drive your fast car from Florence to Rome and not think about any of this and just live your life. But the reason you can do that is because of the Ukrainian armed forces. And it's very easy for people to lose sight of what enables them to have their normal life. That's the thing that I worry about the most.
Do you think Europeans actually understand what you just said? You understand it because you come often to Ukraine, because you're a historian and you know the background. But do you think a regular person in Paris drinking coffee understands that the Ukrainian armed forces actually guarantee that he has this coffee?
No, I don't. And I don't mean that as an accusation. I think it's normal, right? I think it takes a little bit of effort to rise above your daily life and to ask what is it that makes this daily life possible? Whether that's the Ukrainian armed forces, or whether it's the people who, you know, take care of your city, or whatever it might be.
Or who actually make coffee.
Yeah. Or the people who grow coffee, you know, in Africa or Latin America or wherever it is you get your coffee from. That's so — I think it's a general problem, and it means that we have to make an effort. So when I give public speeches, I try to remember to say things like, the reason we can all be here today and do this thing we're doing is because of the Ukrainian armed forces. And I don't say that in Ukraine, but I try to remember to say it outside Ukraine because I want people to have the thought, oh, he just said a very strange thing. Why did he say that strange thing? And then maybe realize, okay, there is a connection, because I think it's a fundamental connection.
Right, I was just in Kharkiv and I was having a public discussion, and the moderator was talking about how a friend said that she was literally insane, right, that she was insane for staying in Kharkiv. But for me the question is, which is more unreal, Paris or Kharkiv? Because you're in different states of mind. When you're in Kharkiv, you might be very nervous and anxious, but you're not out of touch with reality. Whereas when you're in Paris, you might not be anxious or worried, but you may be in some sense out of touch with reality.
And the question is, how do you get those two things together? Like, how do you get people in Paris to appreciate that it's not normal — that it's not normal to ignore people who are doing things for you? And how do you put those two perspectives together in a Europe where people can recognize, all right, there's a certain amount of courage in Ukraine? That's a different way of putting it in moral terms. Are you able to respect the courage of others, or do you feel defensive and do you have to resent it, or forget it, or just not have it present in your mind?
For what reason do you think people tend to ignore it? Because they cannot accept that they are not as courageous, or they feel that in comparison to Ukrainians their life can be plain?
Well, I think there is a kind of existential shock. Yes. Because even in countries that fight wars regularly in the West, like my country, those wars are fought at a great distance and with relatively small losses. The total battlefield losses of American soldiers in all of our wars in the last couple of decades is far less than, say, just Mariupol, right? So there is not an experience of this kind of war in the West.
Now I would like to go to the very beginning and just to find out what was the occasion, or when was it, when you decided that you are so much interested in the past, when you decided that you want to become a historian?
Well, the answers to big questions about people's lives are almost always complicated, right? And so I'm not like a celebrity who can give a simple answer to all these things. But with history, I think the basic thing was that I found out that I liked it. So I didn't intend to become a historian. I thought I was going to be a diplomat. Which is funny because I'm a very undiplomatic person.
You're a very straightforward diplomat.
I really should say I've always respected diplomats and I continue to respect diplomats, and partly it has to do with the ability to react to situations and shape conversations and control oneself. I respect that a lot. But it's not necessarily me. What I liked about history was that you were trying to find out the way things really were, and that you could understand things in the past that people in the past didn't know because you have more time and you have more sources and you can think about it.
If you're a diplomat, or if you're a soldier, or if you're a politician, if you're a journalist, everything is fast and you're meeting deadlines all the time and you have to make decisions and you can't take a week and just think, what's this world I'm living in? But if you're a historian, you can come up to a difficult moment and you can say, all right, I'm going to take a week or a month or a year and I'm going to figure out exactly what happened in September of 1939 or June of 1941 or December of 1991. So I like that. I like that it was about trying to figure out what actually happened.
What year was it the first time that you came to Ukraine?
The first time I came to Ukraine was 1995, I think.
Yeah. So that really helped not to have a job, because once you have a job you become more boring. So I had a good decade from when I was a doctoral student and then before I got a job, where I was living in various places in Eastern Europe and could kind of do what I wanted.
You know that in many universities and for many historians, this part of the world sometimes may sound like Russia and CIS countries or Eastern Europe. Ukraine for many decades has never been identified as a special place to be studied. But unlike other people, you somehow distinguished Ukraine. At what point did it happen that for you it was not an appendix to studying the Russian history?
Well, for me — so I mean, the premise of your question is right, that from the 1950s through, let's say, the 2010s, the history of Eastern Europe in the West was organized around Moscow. I should say that was never really true for me. I mean, I did get a bit of that education. I did take Russian history classes and I did learn Russian, at least to read, pretty early on. So I did get that framework, that imperial framework which was so dominant, but that was never my main framework. I came to Ukraine rather from the West. The first language I learned really well was Polish. And the problems that brought me to Ukraine at first were Polish-Ukrainian problems. And I learned Ukrainian not from Russian, but from Polish. So I wasn't really coming out of that.
But your question is very justified. For me, the basic issue is this: there is a big difference between what framework is popular and accepted in your own time and what framework is actually going to lead you closer to the truth. And I find it kind of ironic that historians often accept the framework in which they were educated rather than thinking, okay, this framework in which I was educated is itself a bit historically accidental, maybe I should try to think about other frameworks.
So, and then the second thing is, it's often true that the things that are essential, that are absolutely central, are not written about at all. It can be the case, and I think this applies to Ukraine, that some situations are so tragic, they're so terrible, that history avoids them. Right? So Holodomor is a good example. Right? So now there is a lot of good history about Holodomor and we have quite a good sense of what happened, but Holodomor in particular, but also just the 1930s and 1940s in Ukraine in general, were so terrible that it's hard almost for history to deal with them.
And that's answering your question, that's what got me to write Black Earth and Bloodlands. I was trying to focus on the territory because it seemed like the way that we wrote about Soviet terror or even about Nazi atrocities, it wasn't focused on the territory. It was focused on the decision makers or even the perpetrators, but not on the land itself. And so the first move that I made to really become a Ukrainian historian was to write Bloodlands and to focus on the territory of Ukraine along with Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Western Russia, and try to think about what it was about the territory which made all this more likely.
The second stage, though, was to recognize that this is true not just of the 20th century but in general. The fact that you don't know about something doesn't mean it wasn't important. In fact, sometimes ignorance or difficulty or awkwardness around a subject is a sign that it is important and that you just have to kind of keep pushing. And that's what I found with Ukraine. So at the present point where I am now in my career, I am discovering all of these things about the history of the lands and peoples north of the Black Sea that I probably should have known a long time ago.
And I'm enjoying it tremendously because it's so much more fruitful not to think about, well, is Ukraine next to this or is Ukraine next to that or is Ukraine connected to other things. If you just look at the territory millennium after millennium, century after century, you realize, well, this was actually an incredibly important place in the history of the world. We don't have to start from like what it's next to. We don't have to relate it to something else. We can just look at it, just keep our eyes focused on it and say, aha, well, this is the place where there was contact with Neanderthals.
And this is a place where people built self-standing, quite beautiful structures in the Ice Age. And this is the place which has, as far as we know, the world's oldest cities. And this is the place from which the Indo-European languages spread. And this is the place where the Greeks and the Scythians made contact, and so on and so on and so on, all the way through, like for the whole prehistory of humanity, this place is actually extraordinary. And I just honestly feel very fortunate. Like I don't feel like I'm doing Ukraine a favor by studying Ukraine. I feel like I'm very fortunate to have this subject which is just so deep and inexhaustible.
You mentioned trying to become a diplomat at one point of your career, but talking about politics, I think now so many people understand how for a politician knowledge of history is so important, or lack of knowledge can be a tremendous fail. Can you imagine like Putin talking to Trump and explaining to him how Ukraine has always been a part of Russia? And I don't know whether Trump or any other political leader knows the right history of Ukraine.
I mean, it's such a basic thing. I agree with you completely. We really do have to have history in schools. It's like when people are young, not everybody, but often they think everything's about the future, so why should I care about the past? But if you don't learn about the past when you're young, then you just fall into other people's traps because other people have lies for you about the past, including your own leaders. I mean, you always have to be concerned about your own leaders telling you lies about the past, but you have to be concerned that somebody is fighting an idiotic criminal war with reference to the past.
And you're so right. Putin — what Putin thinks about the history of Ukraine is absolutely nonsensical, but he thinks something. He has a story, and the Americans he talks to have no idea, right? They have no idea. And so if he says this is always Russia, okay, if you say so. So yes, it's...
And one thing, to make a more positive point again, I run into very bright politicians and diplomats who say, at a certain point in my career I realized I had to start reading history, and they do. And a lot of the bright people who are coming from the West and to Kyiv right now for various conferences and things are people who read history books. So yeah, there's no way — whether it's domestic politics or foreign policy — you can't defend yourself against people who are carrying out acts of aggression on the basis of myth unless you know the history yourself.
And I mean, it's a very simple point, but all those great thinkers of the 20th century, whether it was Orwell or whether it was Milan Kundera, the idea that in order to control the future you try to wipe out the past — it's true. It remains completely true.
You mentioned one very important thing, that we should learn history as kids. But you know, so many decision makers in Ukraine, who are decision makers in Ukraine right now, went to Soviet school, like myself, like the president of Ukraine. So I think you heard this story when the previous Polish president, Duda, talking about these historical problems between Poland and Ukraine, said that in one conversation Zelensky openly told him that he never heard about this — I mean, at his school he never heard about this part of the history. Maybe it was not a great diplomatic move, but I think he was very sincere, because if you're in your 40s or in your 50s in Ukraine, you either knew the Soviet history, or maybe you had some time to learn it for yourself, or you never learned it.
Yeah, completely true. I mean, and one thing that you didn't learn about in Soviet Ukraine was anything important about Poland. Because the whole scheme in Soviet history was Ukraine always with Russia, everything else either didn't happen or it was bad. Whereas in fact the history of Ukraine is deeply, deeply connected to Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Austria, Bulgaria. In certain ways it's Germany. It's deeply connected to the West.
And I don't just say that to compensate or to say like Ukraine, it's between East and West. It's not that. It's that in the actual details of your history, there are all these connections with the West and especially with Poland. Ukraine was connected with Poland for longer than it was connected with Russia. And sometimes those connections were fruitful and sometimes they were terrible, but they were always there. And one thing Soviet history did was to try to draw a kind of line and put the Poles on the other side of it and keep the Ukrainians together with the Russians the entire time.
And the Poles, they're not always right about the past either, but during their version of communism, there was a lot more unofficial education and a lot more freedom of expression. And so they get to post-communism with, I think they're not always right, but with a more balanced or more heterogeneous view of history than Ukrainians have. But in defense of Ukrainians, I've got to say they really are interested in history. I mean, including the president, like they're interested.
And so with Ukrainians, what you get is like they get fanatical about some element of history, you know, the Cossacks or Rus or Trypillia or whatever. Ukrainians are interested in history, and so there's this opportunity, which I hope we're able to take, which is to create a version of Ukrainian history where kids will go to school and think this is amazing.
Speaking about Poles, you as a historian who've been studying Poland and Ukraine for such a long time and know everything about these Polish and Ukrainian relationships — did you see this crisis that we're having now in our relationships coming? Because many Ukrainians just missed it. Especially those living in Ukraine, they don't understand why this happened so drastically, such a drastic change since 2022. But did you see it coming?
Well, it was a... it doesn't... Okay, I think the main thing to understand here is that there isn't like — Poland doesn't exist. Like when people start talking about Polish-Ukrainian relations, the thing that you have to remember is that Poland is very divided, like a lot of Western countries. It's very divided. And like a lot of Western countries, it's roughly 50/50. And so in Poland, people think very different things about Ukraine. And the president of Poland, the current president of Poland, happens to be someone who is not very fond of Ukraine.
And so if you're a Ukrainian politician, you have to be aware that there is no Poland in this sense. Like there are at least two Polands. I'm simplifying, but it's closer to the truth. There's a Poland which is anti-Ukrainian and there's a Poland which is pro-Ukrainian, and you have to make sure that you don't say things that help the anti-Ukrainian part of the country, or at least you think about it. I mean, maybe sometimes you have to, but you have to at least be aware.
And so I mean, in the last four years it has been getting harder and harder in Poland to talk about helping Ukraine. So I'm not going to say I saw this particular thing coming, but what the president of Poland said — I mean, he chose to say it. He chose to create a problem, but he was exploiting some tensions inside the country about Ukraine that already existed, quite consciously.
So it's okay to say we in Ukraine didn't know this history, and it's true, but in terms of effective diplomacy you have to kind of know how to deal with the fact that there's different views in Poland. Because what happened now is that Ukrainian domestic policy or Ukrainian military policy — so it's by Ukrainian domestic policy or military policy, by choosing to name a division after the UPA — that is going to also be foreign policy. Whether you think of it that way yourself, for someone else it's going to be foreign policy. And that's just something that Ukraine has to know about Poland.
What you're basically saying, you think it was a mistake.
Yeah. I mean, it was... Well, I think it was a mistake for different reasons. I think it's a mistake because...
I think that Ukraine's reference points when it comes to courage are all over the place in this war. There are plenty of good reference points in this war. So going back to Soviet history, one of the problems with Soviet history is that there's a tendency to say that if the Soviets said something was bad, then it must be good, right? And so Ukrainians, I think, fall into a certain trap with Bandera and OUN and UPA, which is to think, well, the Soviets were against all of these institutions and people, therefore they must be good.
And there's a problem there, which is that if the version of Ukraine that OUN and Bandera wanted to exist, there would be no president with Jewish origin. There would be no freedom of speech. We would not be having this conversation. There would be no civil society. There would not be nice people driving supplies to the front lines. There would not be elections. It would be a very different Ukraine. And so the reason I'm against it is actually not Poland. If we're going to keep talking about this, I'm going to explain how this is mostly Poland's fault. I think it was a Ukrainian mistake, but I think it's mostly Poland's fault. But the reason I'm against it doesn't have to do with that. It has to do with the future of Ukraine. It's during the war, you're setting up the reference points for the future after the war. And I think one wants to be really careful about what those reference points are.
And it goes back to the earlier conversation about having coffee in Paris, because Poland is now more like France, right? It's a very peaceful, prosperous country. They've become incredibly Western. Like 30 years ago, they were much more like you than they are now, right? And so for them, they have what I've been thinking about as the luxury of memory. Like they can say, we really want to think about 1943 right now, and terrible things did happen to them in 1943. Ukrainians did do terrible things to Poles in 1943, that did happen, but they have the luxury that they can think about 1943 like they can think about things that happened 83 years ago. Whereas you are living through history, like you have to deal with the terrible history that you have to confront. And so you're in a different place mentally, psychologically.
They can say, 'Well, we're victims because of 1943,' but you're victims because of 2026 and 2025 and 24 and 23 and 22. And so what they're doing, which is wrong, is to say, 'Let's ignore the history that's being made today and let's focus on how we feel about things that happened a long time ago.' And they have the luxury that they can do that. And it's a way of withdrawing, I think, from reality. Like it's withdrawing from what's actually happening. It's withdrawing from the real threat that Russia poses to them today, into a comfortable place where they can feel like, okay, we're the victims and we never did anything wrong.
Now that you said that we're living through history, what you call what is going on in Ukraine, this full-scale invasion, and we're actually living through historical times. That's true. But as a historian, we have a debate: at what time what happened a year ago, 2 years ago, even 5 years ago can be put into a historical textbook? How much time do we need to proceed the events for it to be valid history?
Yeah, good point. So when I said you're living through history now, what I meant was something slightly different. What I meant was you don't have any choice but to confront certain structural realities that are similar to what a historian in 50 years will write about. Right? And in other countries that's less true. It's just less true. But right now we can say with confidence a historian writing in 2076 is going to write about the Russo-Ukrainian war. They won't necessarily have to write about Polish domestic politics in 2026, but they will have to write about this. And that's what I mean.
As far as doing proper history, it takes access to all the sources and it takes a generation, I would say. So I think it's fine for historians to talk about the present. I think it's fine for them to talk about the future. We may do a bad job, but we do a less bad job than other people in general. So, and somebody has to talk about the future, you know, so it might as well be us. And in general, if you look at the way historians talk about Ukraine, for example, I think they've done a better job than say political scientists. But to do proper history, yeah, it takes a generation and you have to have access to the sources.
You said that we should make history so attractive that school kids would want to learn it. What do you think is the most effective approach to studying history? Because now we have debates in our education that we learn too many dates. We're being tested on how we remember what day what happened, how we can distinguish different pictures when students take exams to enter universities and so on. What do you think is the most effective approach into learning history and teaching history?
