Christoph Bendas

Nov 21, 2023

“One thing I’m confident about is that this will be seen as a colonial war. There are other ways to characterise it, but it is a colonial war in the sense that Russia meant to conquer, dominate displace, exploit. And it’s an imperial war in the sense that in choosing to fight this war, Russian elites were self-consciously defining themselves as an empire as opposed to a normal state,” American historian Timothy Snyder says about Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Snyder is a professor at Yale University and author of award-winning books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, On Tyranny, and others.

This interview was conducted by Christoph Bendas, a journalist at the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (OFR), for an international investigation by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) into the Russification of the Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine.

You’ve once said that the war in Ukraine can’t be understood without knowing history. What do we have to know to understand this war?

First of all, history is very important as a way to see through myths. Very often wars are fought on the basis of false ideas of the past.

For example, in this war, we have Putin’s idea that there never really was a Ukraine and since there never really was a Ukraine, Russia is doing no harm to Ukraine because it doesn’t really exist. And that’s a very radical claim. History can help there because with history, one can see that Ukraine actually […] has a social and national history, no less, no more than Russia or Austria, or other countries.

History can help us expose when people are telling lies. History can also help us see what a war might really be about.

In this case, it was interesting to see when Yevgeny Prigozhin in the one minute of his life when he spoke the truth said, “the reason we invaded Ukraine was to conquer it, to colonise it, to divide up its resources among our oligarchs, and to install our own person as president”. I have no doubt that that’s actually true.

That would be consistent with the current Russian political system. But it’s also more plausible when one knows something about the history of Ukraine, which is that Ukraine has been time and time again a subject of colonial wars.

Vladimir Putin / AP 

Speaking about those historical parallels, do you see the Russification of Ukraine taking place?

For me, it’s very important to define what Russian would mean before we can talk about Russification. Because Russification suggests that there’s a Russian identity, and I can make someone or something Russian.

Looking at the contemporary Russian political system, I’m struck by how much it has to do with absences and vacuums. It seems like the Russian political system runs on the absence of journalism, it runs on the absence of social mobility, the absence of truth. And so, it’s a little bit hard for me to understand Russification as a positive process because I’m not sure what the positive definition of Russian would be.

And this also goes in foreign policy, particularly with respect to the West where in today’s political climate, a Russian is someone who is afraid of the West or despises the West. But that doesn’t tell you what a Russian is. Or why do we have to invade Ukraine? “Because they say they’re not us”. They’re not you, but that doesn’t answer the question of who you are. It’s as though the Russians now are defining themselves as the people who claim that Ukraine doesn’t exist.

This seems to me to be a very important point because when Russian propagandists on television talk about what it means to control Ukraine, they talk about taking things away, about destroying Ukrainian elites, destroying people who believe that they are Ukrainian, destroying institutions. And they talk about installing their own propaganda apparatus. But their own propaganda apparatus doesn’t say anything about what Russia is or who Russians are.

So, russification, in a banal sense, means using the Russian language and taking away Ukrainian school books and replacing them with Russian school books.

Life in Russia (associative image) / AP 

What I mean by Russification is what you just mentioned that, for example, the school books are being taken away. I’ve been talking to a doctor in Kherson who said that during the occupation, the newborn children had to be registered as Russians. So that’s what we mean by Russification – trying to take the Ukrainian identity away. 

I’ll give you some examples. But before I do, I want to stress that the thing we’re talking about is actually genocide. Denying that another group of people has an identity or exists and then using political power to try to make them into members of another group is genocidal. I’m happy to continue the conversation under the heading of Russification. But I just want to be clear where I stand on this at a legal level, not even an ethical level, but just at a legal level – the aspiration to take Ukrainians and make them Russians is genocidal.

I think the most painful example of what we’re calling Russification is the kidnapping of children, which is undertaken with the open aim of taking these young human beings and turning them into different sorts of human beings. [Russians] make no secret that this is what they’re trying to do. […]

Another important example is that people aren’t allowed to go through the routine of daily life without accepting the Russian state. That may seem unimportant until you think about how often we need an identification card or some piece of paper. We need it all the time. So, when you make people accept papers, you’re basically blackmailing them.

A third big example would be library books. The libraries in Southern and Eastern Ukraine are purged of Ukrainian language books. And sometimes those books are actually burned. School libraries are also purged, which brings me to another example – the schools themselves are Russified. People are forced to teach in Russian or Russian teachers are brought in.

Then there are also things, which are done at a greater distance, but which are clearly meant to eliminate Ukrainian culture, like trying to kill writers or bombing archives and libraries. That doesn’t create any Russian culture, but it’s meant to destroy Ukrainian culture.

Why do you call this Russification genocidal?

There’s a certain strange political correctness around genocide. People don’t want to invoke the word because it seems like a very heavy word, but it has a very clear definition.

In my work as a scholar, as a historian, I try not to use the word genocide. For example, in my book Bloodlands, I don’t use it at all. The reason for that is that it’s a legal term that arose at a certain point, while the events I was writing about in that book took place before that point, and I thought it would be confusing.

Russia’s war in Ukraine / AP 

But if we’re talking about the law, the 1948 Genocide Convention, it has to do with destroying a national group in whole or in part. There has to be an intention to do so. Historically, it’s sometimes been difficult to document that intention. The problem with genocide or proving it has often been that yes, we know there were these atrocities, but how do we know what the intention was?

In the Russo-Ukrainian war, it’s been very different. Here, the Russian strategy has been to overwhelm us with their intentions. They talk all the time about how they’re trying to destroy the Ukrainian nation or how it doesn’t exist. […]

So, the intention part, which is the first part of the Genocide Convention, is actually extraordinarily easy to prove. And then the second part of the Genocide Convention lists specific actions which constitute genocide. For example, the fifth one on the list is precisely transferring children from one place to another place.

Is it already possible to classify the Russo-Ukrainian war historically? 

That’s a really interesting question because the answer has to be no. Any historian would say that in 50 years, we’ll have had time to think about it. We’ll see some of the contexts that we don’t see now, we’ll have a lot of sources that we don’t see now, and so on.

That said, this is also an interesting war for a historian because it’s generating so many primary sources all the time. If I want to research the Second World War or the First World War, there are a lot of written sources, but compared to this war, it’s not that much. In this war, humans are generating primary sources all the time. And the question is just how to follow them all and catalogue them all.

One thing I’m confident about is that this will be seen as a colonial war. There are other ways to characterise it, but it is a colonial war in the sense that Russia meant to conquer, dominate displace, exploit. And it’s an imperial war in the sense that in choosing to fight this war, Russian elites were self-consciously defining themselves as an empire as opposed to a normal state. So, I think these core definitions of colonial and imperial will likely be terms that historians will be using in the future.

Do you think peace negotiations are possible in this war?

I don’t think negotiations are very likely. I just can’t imagine the scenario in which it serves the Russian political elite to negotiate. Negotiating means admitting that they’ve lost because their war aims are to destroy, dominate, and so on. I think they’re stuck. I think they have to keep fighting hoping that [Donald] Trump will win [the US presidency] or somehow Ukraine will collapse.

Russia’s war in Ukraine / AP 

I think they’re wrong. I think time is working against them. I think continuing to fight is a mistake for them. But I think they have to keep doing it because they’re trapped in their own imperial logic. […]

I think contemporary Russia is in a really deep cultural crisis. It’s not to say there aren’t great Russian painters, writers, or dancers. But there’s a fundamental cultural crisis which consists of not having any idea who you are, of you having to fight a war with your nearest neighbour in order to say who you are. […]

The Russians might try to negotiate, and stupid people in the West might take them up on it, but they would only do it in order to continue the war. […] So, I think aiming for negotiations is a mistake. I think if you want the war to be over, you help the Ukrainians as much as you can and that’s it.

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