In this interview with Mediapart, Yale University professor of history Timothy Snyder, a specialist on eastern European history and notably Ukraine, author of Bloodlands, his internationally acclaimed book about mass murders in central and eastern Europe beginning in the 1930s, argues why he believes Russia’s war against Ukraine amounts to genocide in the full legal sense of the term. He also sketches Ukraine’s long history of resistance to oppression, the singular character of its society, and why it is vital for the future Europe, and even Russia, that Ukraine wins the war.
The atrocities unfolding in the war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion of February 24th are the latest in a long history of devastation and oppression to befall the country, regularly preyed upon by foreign powers. “During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world,” writes historian Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, his acclaimed 2010 bestselling account of the mass murders of millions of people in central and eastern Europe from the 1930s up to the end of the Second World War.
