The New Yorker Radio Hour - Russia’s Intentions in Ukraine—and America

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

“They push buttons,” says Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. “What button of ours are they pushing here? What are they trying to get us to do?” Vladimir Putin is posturing toward a costly invasion of Ukraine, on the false pretext of protecting Russian-language speakers in the country. Why? In a wide-ranging conversation, Snyder talks with David Remnick about how to understand Russia’s aggression, the idea advanced by Putin that Ukraine historically and rightfully belongs to Russia, and the dictator’s far-reaching goal of destabilizing NATO. Snyder is the author of the Second World War history “Bloodlands,” as well as “The Road to Unfreedom” and “On Tyranny”—which warn of the dangers that imperil American democracy. Running an oligarchy in which corruption is universal, Putin “is basically stuck with spectacle, distractions—the old bread and circuses idea,” Snyder says, “but also is working from a situation where you want to bring other countries down to your level. . . . With that, you can understand their intervention in our elections, or the way they talk about us: they want to bring out the elements of us, both rhetorically and in reality, that are most like the way they run the country.” Putin’s governance of Russia and his foreign policy, in other words, are intricately entangled. “I tend to think [the threat of invasion] is about the Biden Administration, in a pretty fundamental way,” Snyder believes. “If your goal is to undermine NATO—let’s accept that that is their sincere goal—who do you want to be President? Trump.” The crisis, he says, “puts Biden in a very bad position. It’s very hard for Biden to look strong. . . . Insofar as there is a strategy here, it’s about dividing NATO members and putting pressure on the Biden Administration.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Throughout the long, cold war, which had consequences all over the world, the Soviet Union and the United States and its European allies, somehow managed to avoid a full-on military confrontation. But 30 years later, that is the prospect we face. Russia insists that the West has taken advantage of its weakness and is now threatening to invade Ukraine yet again.

And it's a terrifying prospect. At this enormously tense moment, I wanted to talk with the historian Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a professor at Yale and the author of the bestseller Bloodlands. He's long studied the dynamics of this part of the world, particularly Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of Europe. Snyder's book, The Road to Unfreedom from 2018,

is a study of Vladimir Putin's effort to influence and undermine Western democracies. We spoke last week. Sometimes people seem to forget when they ask, will Russia invade Ukraine, that Russia has invaded Ukraine twice already. The first in 2014 to Crimea and has occupied Crimea ever since.

And Russian troops are in eastern Ukraine. They're all over eastern Ukraine, and many thousands of people have already died. So what are the stakes now? Yeah, I think it's, It's interesting the way that Russia has set this up for us, because they are presenting us with this, as it were, shocking new development that they might invade a country.

And then the discussion is framed about what we are supposed to do to prevent them from doing that. And in that very shock, we forget that they've already carried out in the legal occupation for eight years. And then interestingly, this leads us to a difference between how the Ukrainians and, let's say, the Americans react to all this, which can be instructive. I mean, the Ukrainians are the ones who are about to be invaded. You know, they're the ones who are facing the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of lives of millions more internal refugees. They're the ones who actually face that.

And yet their reaction is much more low-key than ours, which I find interesting. And, you know, your question gives a reason for it. They've already been invaded by Russia. I mean, every day they ask themselves what Russia is going to do next. And so that, I mean, I think what that helps us to do is to see the artificiality of the situation. Now, I just spoke to Masha Gessen, who's in Kiev. And she said exactly what you're saying, which is that people are quite calm in an almost strange and prey to natural way. She's with friends at dinner, and they're far.

less freaked out about this than many people in the United States. And obviously the lowest form of journalism, much less scholarship, is prediction, but let's indulge it anyway. As you look at what's happening now with over 100,000 troops amassed on the Ukrainian border, with troops in Belarus also poised at Ukraine, with all the cyber capacities that Russia has, what do you think that they will do? and what is the leverage of the West? David, I honestly, I don't know. I don't have a solid feeling for it. I mean, last time it was as though they jacked up the ideology,

the propaganda very effectively, and then they pretended they didn't invade. And this time they've jacked up the troop presence very ostentatiously, right? It's as though they're doing the opposite. They've made it very, very clear that they could invade, and now they want to talk. And I guess my thinking about that is that we have to be very aware of our own psychological reactions before we respond because they push buttons. And so you have to think, okay, what button of ours are they pushing here?

Like what are they trying to get us to do? And what would it mean if we react to that effort at button pushing? So, I mean, they're asking us to stop them from invading a country. And that's a difficult assignment, you know, and you have to ask yourself, you know, is it, is it Russia's responsibility to stop us from invading Mexico? You know, it would be a terrible thing if we invaded Mexico. It would be senseless. Is it Russia's job to stop us, right? And so is it our job to stop Russia from invading Ukraine? It would be terrible for Ukraine if they did. It would be also terrible for Russia if they did. We don't want that to happen, but we can't really accept the premise that

it's our responsibility, which is the button they're trying to push. They're trying to make us feel guilty in advance for the terrible war in Ukraine. They're trying to shift that responsibility onto us, which means that we then say, oh yeah, then we have to do A, B, C, D, and E. We have to do all these dramatic things. But what if we do all these dramatic things and then they invade Ukraine anyway? Or what if we do all these dramatic things? And then three years from now, they just, they push exactly the same button. So I think our response should be more unpredictable than it's been. I think, you know, we should be meeting their proposals with counter proposals that are about completely different subjects, like where's your political opposition and, hey, let's work

together on nuclear fusion and a whole bunch of other things. Because what they've done is they've defined the agenda. And we are scared and we're meant to be scared, whereas the Ukrainians are treating it like real life. You know, it's true that Russia might invade at any moment, but that's real life. And so what are you going to try to do to do to prevent it? And what are you going to try to do to make sure you're not being manipulated by, you know, by this terrifying, by this terrifying specter. I think it's important to account for the psychology here. We're constantly talking about how Russia feels about Ukraine, how Putin feels about Ukraine, how Gorbachev did, or Solzhenitsyn or whomever.

How do the Ukrainians feel about their neighbor, Russia, since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991? I think your question points to a very important issue of, you know, let's call it rhetorical hygiene in the U.S. I think we really shouldn't be having discussions about Ukraine where we invite Russians or American diplomats who spent their career on Russia to talk without having Ukrainians on the panel. And I think that, you know, we're very conscientious, some of us anyway, about who are. who's on the panel when we think about our own American problems. But, I mean, there's, you know, no one should have been talking about dividing up Czechoslovakia without the Czechoslovaks in 1938.

No one should be talking about Ukraine's future without Ukrainians in 2022. And interestingly, I mean, getting to your question, Russian imperialism vis-a-vis Ukraine is sharper all the time. I mean, it's not actually true, as Putin likes to say, and is that people like to repeat, that there's a long history of the two people, two countries always being together, blah, blah, blah.

That's not actually true. It's not only much more complicated than that. It's much more interesting than that. What we see is a sharpening of Russian attitudes under Putin, especially in the last 10 years about Ukraine. So they've reached this point where we now are, where it's clearly just imperialism, where one country is saying about another country,

you don't really have the right to exist. Your people don't really exist. What is true? In other words, you're absolutely right. We hear from Putin on one level, but also others in Russia, that Ukraine is the seat of all Russian and Ukrainian civilization, Kiev and Rus, and we were together in this period of history, we're together in this period of history, and this was a tragic loss, and this is our sphere of influence, so it's in military,

in geopolitical terms. What is actually true? What is the basis for the Ukrainian reality and psychology of Ukrainianness? Yeah, I mean, I'll give that a shot, but I want to first make a kind of disclaimer, which is that no one really gets to judge whether the Ukrainians are a nation except the Ukrainians, right? Like, those are kind of the rules. So, I mean, there's a distant story and there's a recent story. In the distant story, Ukraine is not really that different from other European nations. There is a moment of early modern proto-nation formation,

which actually comes very early to Ukraine in 1648, with the uprising against Poland. And at that time, the word Ukraine is actually being used, and at that time, you can see Ukraine emerging as something different from the people who speak a similar language to their north and now the people who are Belarusians and also as distinct from Poland. Russia is not really in the picture at that point,

but at that point in the middle of 17th century, there's clearly a very early assertion of something like Ukrainianness. Then there's an imperial moment. In the imperial moment, the territories that are now Ukraine are divided up between the Russian Empire and a bit in the Habsburg monarchy. There's a very typical 19th century national revival, which begins actually in what's now eastern Ukraine.

And then over the course of the 19th century, largely because of increasingly oppressive Russian imperial policy, ends up in western Ukraine. After the First World War, there is, again, a very typical attempt to establish a nation state. Many more Ukrainians actually struggle for a nation state after the First World War than, let's say, Czechs or Slovak's. But they're defeated because of the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution. And then you have this grappling on the Soviet side with what to do with Ukrainian national question. Lenin doesn't doubt there's a Ukraine. Stalin doesn't doubt there's a Ukraine. The question is, what do you do with this Ukraine? And it's mainly because of

Ukraine that the Soviet Union is established as it is, not as some kind of unified thing, but as a nominal federation. But it's worth stressing that although in the Soviet Union, Ukrainians die, sometimes by the million because of the Ukrainian question, no one in the Soviet Union actually doubted that there was a Ukraine. This business that there's no Ukraine, and it's just brotherly nations, that is an extreme position, which can be identified with contemporary Russian rhetoric, but which was not, hasn't really been, you know, that kind of extreme imperial position is actually something new. And when Putin says, oh, I say this because it goes back a thousand years, you know, one should just really ignore that. One could interpret the last 1,000 years in various

ways. But the idea that this new Russian imperial position has somehow always been what even Russian's thought is just not true. Now, Russia in many ways is, it suffers from a sense of weakness. Putin, most of all, suffers from a sense of weakness. And the greatest defense that Barack Obama probably gave to Russia is when he called Russia a regional power. That was taken very hard in Putin's circles. What is it that Putin wants now?

Doesn't he have enough internal difficulties, whether it has to do with his own really sinking ratings or a kind of monoculture economy? Doesn't he have enough problems that foreign adventures, which are extremely expensive in blood and treasure, what does he need this for? Yeah, I mean, I tend to try to think of this in cultural rather than in personal terms, you know, because as you know, it's very easy to get swept away by the mystique of the dictator, and then you find yourself kind of thinking in a dictatorial or an imperial way yourself. Structurally speaking, Russia, although of course it's a huge, you know, it's a cultural superpower and it's a hugely important country in many, many ways. It has some self-imposed problems, and the self-imposed problem is, you know,

oligarchy or kleptocracy. The Putin regime is based upon the state and the oligarchs being the same thing. And that has a certain kind of functionality, but it means that you can't really have domestic policy. If you have all the wealth concentrated in the hands of the people actually run the country, you can't have meaningful reform. You can't have meaningful redistribution. And so without the rule of law, Putin is basically, or anyone at the helm of the system like that, is stuck with spectacle, is stuck with distractions, you know, the old bread and circus idea, but also is working from a situation where you want to bring other countries down to your level. So, you know, you don't, you want Russians to think that the kind of organized mendacity and, and perfidious and apparently irresistible inequality, you just want them to think that's normal, that America is the same way, Britain's the same way, the EU is the same way.

So your foreign policy is designed to bring everyone else down to your level, right? And with that, you can understand their intervention in our elections or the way they talk about us. They want to bring out the elements of us, both rhetorically and in reality. that are most like the way they run the country. But let me do it for Russia here as a matter of argument. If I'm in that position, the Russian position, I get to say, oh, you're lecturing us about interference in your elections.

Haven't you done that in elections and political processes around the world? You're lecturing us about possibly invading or having invaded a sovereign country. Haven't you done that repeatedly, repeatedly in modern history? So what is the American answer? And is there a, what is the moral retort to that as well as political? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is a good example of that kind of argument, that argument from hypocrisy is an example of how they try to bring everything down, right? So what they're not saying, you shouldn't do stuff like that. They're saying everybody does it. Right. Right. So it's part of their general attempt to extract value out of all conversations of international

and domestic policies. So I'm happy to concede that the U.S. should not have invaded the rock, and that was completely illegal. I'm happy to concede that we interfered in elections in Latin America, and that that was a desperately wrong thing to do. I grant you that. But when I grant you that, I'm granting it to you and affirming the standard, right? Their conclusion is, because the United States sometimes does bad things, therefore there are no rules, right? Therefore, anything goes. So I think it's very important not to fall. for that argument from hypocrisy. Because of course, sometimes people break rules. But when they break rules, what you do is you affirm the rule. You don't affirm anarchy, which is where their diplomats

want us to go. I'm talking with the historian Timothy Snyder, the author of The Road to Unfreedom, on tyranny, and other books. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking about the crisis in Ukraine and Russia and Europe with historian Timothy Snyder. Now, Snyder is one of the best writers I've ever read on that region. His history, Bloodlands, was about Ukraine and other countries that were caught between dictatorial regimes before and during the Second World War. And in a book called The Road to Unfreedom,

Snyder looks at autocracy in our time and at the strategic reasons for Putin's meddling in the United States and other democratic countries. Now, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, an occupied Crimea, it was supposedly on behalf of the country's Russian-speaking population. So let's pick up there. Tim, help us hear on what's got to be confusing for a lot of people. In Ukraine over the past 30 years, since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991,

you've had a back and forth between leaders who are pro-Russian, who want to be allied with Moscow, and with pro-Ukrainian or nationalist leaders who are seen as pro-Western or pro-NATO, There's also the factor in this whole question of ethnic division and linguistic division. When I'd go to Ukraine to write about nationalism in the late 80s and early 90s, certainly the western part of the country spoke Ukrainian almost exclusively, and you could see how culturally distinct it was from the regions east of Kiev, which are more Russian-speaking, or at least they were then.

What dynamic do these divisions of ethnicity, of culture, of language, play in the current argument? Yeah. So countries having different political orientations in different regions is not such an unknown phenomenon. If you look at Italy, for example, the south and the north are very different. I would say more different than east and west Ukraine, but it's still one country. It doesn't make Ukraine stand out. And it's not an excuse for us to say it's not really a country. On the second question about language, you're right. Of course, that, I mean, if you start at the far west of Ukraine, everybody, almost everybody's speaking Ukrainian, and people will speak Russian, but at this point they can't really spell, you know, they can't really write it anymore. They watch the TV, they watch the movies, they can speak it, but they can't really write it. It's not, whereas if you go all the way to the east, you'll find people who are, you know,

deliberately learning Ukrainian, but whose native language is clearly Russian. That's all true, but we, I mean, we and the Russians both have trouble, with the idea of a bilingual country. And the Russians, that's one of the buttons they push, right? They say, well, if they're, if they're Russian speakers, then they must somehow be Russians. But, you know, we're English speakers. That doesn't mean we're English, right? I mean, it's, you know, the Austrians are German speakers.

I mean they're Germans. So, and then with the presidents, here's what happens with Ukrainian presidents. You run for office on the idea that you're going to calm things down with Russia. and you win on what is in American terms a southern strategy. That is, you appeal literally to the south of the country and you talk about cultural issues, right? And you use on that platform, you win. And that's how Krakchuk won, that's how Kuchma won,

that's how Yanukovych won, and that's how Zelenskyy won. And then when you're in office, you move, so to speak, west and west and west. you try with Russia, it doesn't work out in a more or less dramatic way. And then your second diplomatic move is to go to the West. And then when you run for office for your second term, your electorate is now in the West part of the country rather than the East Bar. And that's happened over and over and over again.

And so that pattern, I mean, it's cranky and kind of weird, but it's much more interesting and truer than to say, well, okay, like there are the Russian-speaking ones, and Ukrainian-speaking ones, and there's just the East, and there's just the West. It's more like that. It's like a collage, right? So Zelensky started out much more an East Ukrainian figure,

and over his first term, he's had to move in both senses towards the West. You know, Zelensky went to Russia with peace proposals. As you know, I mean, Zelensky was elected to make peace with Russia by a war-weary nation. And he tried, and Putin's response was 150,000 troops on the border. Now, the president of Ukraine is an absolutely fascinating figure. to me, Volodymyr Zelensky. What are his options? I mean, Zelensky,

Zelensky is an interesting guy, right? I mean, just to stop on a couple points about him. A former sitcom actor turned president of a crucial European country. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's like some slightly better universe's version of Trump. And that he, like, he's an entertainer. He's a comedian.

I mean, he actually made it up from the bottom as a comedian. I would have said El Franken, maybe, more generously. Yeah, I mean, that's a better, yeah. I mean, I'm thinking also about the way they, like, the way they comport themselves. I mean, just in terms of their own, like, their comedic delivery, I meant. So, I mean, Zelensky is an authentically very talented personality, hugely talented, who had a show, which was called Servant of the People, and then he ran for president, bringing his own fiction into reality,

and won by a huge margin. And so one thing Zelensky is that he's an affirmation of democracy. I mean, democracy brings things you don't expect, right? But the second thing is that he's Jewish, you know, just worth keeping in mind because the Russians are going to pound the vulnerable sectors of German and American public opinion with this notion that Ukraine is a terrible right-wing,

country and make us feel bad about the Holocaust, if we talk about Ukraine, they're going to go for that. For them, the Holocaust is just a button to push, and they will push it, regardless of, you know, what the realities are. And then the third thing about Zelensky, which is interesting, is that he's a Russian speaker, right? So there's this whole thing that Putin gives us about how their brotherly nations, blah, blah, blah, and of course, if you don't know your brothers are, that means you're having an identity crisis. Or if you confuse her neighbors with your brothers, that means you're having an identity crisis. But Zelensky is a Russian, like he's as close as what basically everybody in Ukraine, as you know, bilingual to some degree or another. But Zelensky leansky leans pretty hard in the Russian-speaking

direction. The first few weeks and months when he was president of Ukraine, he was still dropping Russian phrases into his English and into his Ukrainian. He's gotten that under control a little bit better now. But he was doing a lot of that. And his comedy was mostly in Russian. So he's a Russian speaker, right? And so the whole, the Putin's idea that you have to invade Ukraine or do something about Ukraine because the Russian speakers aren't free, you know, a Russian speaker is president, right? A Russian speaker can run for president. Russian speakers in Ukraine are a lot, a lot freer than Russian speakers in Russia are in pretty much every respect, right? If a Russian speaker in Ukraine is much freer than a Russian speaker in Russia.

But as far as his options, I mean, he is playing this an interesting way. I mean, he's saying the things that we've been saying. They've already invaded once. You know, we're prepared as well as we can be prepared. We could really use some help, you know, what? folks should help us. And I think that's probably appropriate. What's your evaluation of the Biden administration so far in terms of this?

I mean, I tend to think that it's, I tend to think that this is about the Biden administration in a pretty fundamental way. So if we take a step back from NATO, you know, and we think, what would be, if your goal is to undermine NATO, let's accept that that's their sincere goal. Who do you want to be president of the United States? Trump would be president of the United States. I mean, Trump made it pretty clear,

especially in the second half of 2020, that if he was president again, he would try to withdraw the U.S. from NATO. So, you know, what is the effect of this crisis in the U.S.? It puts Biden in a very bad position? you know it's very hard for Biden to look strong at least the way that they've approached the crisis so far they've been on the back foot and and then you know ukraine itself is an awkward issue in american domestic politics you know so so i i tend to think that insofar as there's a strategy here

it's about dividing nato members and about putting pressure on the Biden administration right how much is just like maybe you disagree with me but it seems to me that some part of this is an attempt to exploit, not only to attack Ukraine, but to exploit a crisis of democracy in the United States. Not that Putin is necessarily looking at the situation in Georgia and the Secretary of State and the granular details of that, but he knows, witnessed January 6th and witness many other things, that we are undergoing a crisis of democracy so much so that the dialogue lately, and I believe legitimately so, is in terms of civil war. And now, a civil war of a kind, at least.

Is Putin not trying to take advantage of that moment in the utmost way? Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. You know, when on the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union, the piece that I wrote was about how the United States could come to an end and how we should be looking at the end of the Soviet Union as an unexpected systemic collapse, rather than as a moment of triumph, and that the lessons of the end of the Soviet Union for us might be a little bit different than what we think.

And I mean, you look at this one way, and I look at it one way, and I'm sure Putin looks at it a different way, but I agree with you completely that he is thinking about putting pressure on our system, however he would define it. For example, January 6th, they push very hard because they love January 6th. They're big fans of January 6th.

it gives them so much grist for their mill about how democracy is just, you know, fraudulent. And they have a lot of fun talking about how these are just, you know, legitimate protesters and so on and so forth. And why we're hypocrites? Because we don't let these legitimate protesters protest. But I think, you know, I think this is exactly why we have to use this as a moment to go big

and continue this idea of a foreign policy, which is about democracies and about four democracies and for democracy. Whether the Russians go for or not. Forgive me for interrupting, Tim, but I think what you're getting at is the possibility that in Putin's mind, insofar as we can divine it,

that he would like to see our December 25th, 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, he wants to see that happen in the United States in somewhere between November and January in 2024. Yeah, of course he does. Of course he does. I mean, of course he does. There are two things, he would put it differently, but there are two things that he understands, I think, basically correctly.

One is that our system is vulnerable, and the other is that democracies rise and fall together. And so trying to divide NATO is also a way to weaken democracy in general, right? And pushing the Biden administration up against the wall and doing, you know, doing your best to make sure that it's Trump who comes back and it's in some kind of installation. There are an election scenario. Of course that's what they want. And they're right to think that that's a risk, right? Their perspective can be very helpful, you know, like that of an evil physician. I mean, he wishes you ill, but his diagnosis may nevertheless be correct, right? So I, no, I think you're, and this all goes back to the point that I was trying to make earlier.

about relative success and failure. Russia can only deliver so much to his population. And so the existence of a democratic alternative, you know, from Harkiv and eastern Ukraine to Vancouver and Canada, that whole thing, you know, what they call the Collective West, that whole thing is a problem in Russian domestic politics. You know, that whole thing, the existence of that rival, of that other way of living, you know,

more sensitive, the closer it is, more successful maybe further away. The existence of that is a problem for a regime like the Putin regime. And so it's not just that they're, you know, it's not just they have ideological differences or they have resentments. It's also that the existence of this democratic alternative or this rule of law alternative is a problem. You know, it's not that we threaten them by what we do. We threaten them by our existence. Tim Snyder, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University, and his books include Bloodlands, The Road to Unfreedom, and On Tyranny. And I do want to remind you that if you missed any of our conversation, you can always find the podcast of The New Yorker Radio Hour on any podcast platform. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carillo, Breda Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino,

with help from Alison McAdam, Harrison Keithline, and Meng Faye Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. and.