He seems so politicised.

Nobody described as yet what is genocide in Ukraine like Dr Timothy Snyder did. Stand with Ukraine!

I have listened to a dozen a lecture by Timothy Snyder and I get the impression that he is increasingly whitewashing the Ukrainians of their history and the acts they committed. You can see his infatuation with Ukraine, and through it he is objective in his statements. If he already has to say something negative about Ukraine, it is a half-sentence with a jump to Justify Ukraine. Not telling the whole truth, keeping silent, is also covering up history, just as Putin is doing. Example: As Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainians staying abroad, quit their jobs and returned to defend the country. True, but it's also true that hundreds of thousands didn't return and, being in their prime, continue to work, and about 800,000 left in the early days. - He forgets to mention how Ukrainians were the main supervisors after the Germans in the concentration camps, how in 1939, living in Polish territories, they shot at Polish soldiers and greeted the Nazis with flowers and hanging Polish soldiers on trees or barn doors, how they carried out murders throughout Eastern Europe, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles. Supposedly revenge for Bolshevism and the famine caused in Ukraine by Stalin, only where in this newborn babies cut out of their bellies and nailed to a tree, or women with their bellies ripped open, children of several years old raped en masse, competitions in cutting throats or evisceration. And whole gangs roaming the countryside stealing, raping, murdering and burning entire villages and towns. Where's the revenge here for Stalin and the Soviets when they did all this behind the German front, hundreds of kilometers from the fighting.

If you want to listen to someone truely physchotic then you've come to the right place. He isn't good with the truth. Why do you think they have to talk him up so much at the start.

This guy invents stuff - Russia has multiple resources and not only Hydrocarbons. Please become a historian and not a Political commissioner. You never saw Robert Mogosci standing on a desk and being a Historical activist. We all know that the Ukrainian Government is paying you to rewrite the History of Ukraine in their vision. You stated, “5000 Ukrainian Cossacks helped lift the 2nd siege of Vienna,” which is incorrect; the correct term would be Zaporizhzian Cossack Hetmanate, neither Polish nor Russian. We know you are attempting to link Ukraine with Europe and cast all Cossacks as Ukraine; it is called Nation blending, just like George W Bush did in 2003 about the war in Iraq. GW “Saddam Hussain is giving refuge to elements of Al Qaeda and is developing weapons of mass destruction.” So according to you Iraqi Al Qaeda members helped plan and attack New York City. Yes - Nation Blending. In 1654, the Zaporizhzian Hetmanate entered the Pereyaslav agreement with Tsarist Russia, which controlled the area northwest of the Dnieper River. By the way, Ukraine never existed in 1654. Cossack roots are tribesmen that remained after the Golden Horde and resided on the banks of the Dnipro River for centuries and are not Polish Eastern Slavic, they may have had people of Polish Extraction but ethically not Polish. The Crimean Tatars Khanate has nothing to do with Ukraine, never conquered the territory and never had any influence in the Peninsula. On the 300 Anniversary of the Pereyaslav agreement, Nikita Khrushchev persuades the Supreme Soviet to transfer the Crimea Region to The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a gift. Ukraine took this gift and is trying to use it as a bargaining chip with Nato Membership. So Nikita Khrushchev would have been proud of you!

This man adds so much clarity.

Ha ha I see your brave army of nazi's has lost. Man what an intro, they really had to tell you what a beautiful person he isn't. This team are just out and out propagandists. Democracy is definitely not a happening thing in America. Wonder when Ukraine will get to have elections again. Zelensky has canceled any opposing political parties canceled elections. Closed unfavorable media. IF PUTIN HAS LIED WHY DOESNT HE TELL US THEM. The reporters not reporting is because your effn govt owns them. That why they talk about Bidens mental state. Have a good listen and ask yourself IS THIS A-HOLE MANIPULATING ME .? He won't give any examples. Do your own investigation because he is a flat out liar

The Deep State virtual superset group of Washinton DC is the go to lobbying organization of the corridors of power in Washington DC. One cannot be a member of the Deep State, which is a virtual superset. The Deep state lobbying superset of lobbyist groups has been arm twisting past successive US administraions in Washinton DC. The Deep State has colluded and conspired with Washington DC insiders to send veterans of Iraq wars who were never prosecuted for massacres committed. The Deep State on behalf of the US has been sending American veterans who massacred civilians in Iraq from 2003 to about 2009. Veterans who massacred 100 oe more Iraqi civilians in Iraq with Iraq experience in Iraq. Who has thevdeep state sent to Kyiv ? anyone who killed 100 or more Iraqi civilians or soldiers were being sent to Kyiv two years ago and well before the war of 2022. . Ethnic Russians claim that they all are originally from Kyiv. After the fall of communism, NATO group transformed itself to an anti Russian group. I understand the war in Ukraine better when I visit north west Oklahoma City. I grew up outside Edmond, Oklahoma. I learnt from Internet research for instance, that, ethnic Ukrainians wanted to hire a lot of veterans:: American war criminals who had been stationed as officers in Iraq. The Deep State group is a virtual umbrella of real lobbying groups in Washington DC which lobby to hand out 1 trillion dollar gifts to the government of Zelensky and his men. Zelensky is an ethnic Russian comedian.All ethnic Russians east of Donbass are described as Jews or Russian Jews regardless of their faith. . The Deep State in the US instance has been hiring Americans with war crime experience in Iraq. The Deep State group of Washington Dc has been sending all American war criminals with former military service in Iraq who killed 100 or more Iraqi civilians or over 100 Iraqi soldiers. Any American ex soldier who killed 100 Iraqis is hired to go to Kyiv to help Zelensky kill all ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Ukraine was created in 1783 out of Ottoman lands by Romanov dynasty queen Katherine the Great. The Deep State has also been sending American ex servicemen with Iraq experience. The Deep state has also hired members of the arsonist group Ku Klux Klan to the Ukraine to burn down ethnic Russian neighborhoods in west Ukraine and central Ukraine. KKK Trained ethnic Ukrainians have been travelling to Russian speaking cities such as Odessa and Donbass to burn down houses and farms in east Ukraine. In one UKposts video, 40 ethnic Russians in Odessa have been killed by KKK trained arsonists and young men in motorcycles who want to kill all ethnic Russians in ethnic Russian villages and towns of east Ukraine.

This guy talks in circles

He’s an excellent historian but just planning to go to mars could create indirectly the tech that will fix global warming.

Has Timothy Snyder ever once uttered a critical word about US imperialism? Has Timothy Snyder ever uttered a critical word about the post-2014 coup regime in Ukraine killing its own eastern citizens for 8 years prior to the 2022 Russian invasion? Snyder is a NATO expansionist and a Western imperial tool. Nazis in Ukraine? What Nazis? Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines donning Nazi insignia? What Nazi insignia? A portion of the Ukrainian people wants to join EU/NATO thus the entire country of Ukraine deserves a US-backed 2014 coup and the installation of Nazis in the new Ukrainian regime? Oh, the people of Eastern Europe themselves drive NATO expansion, not the imperial US state? Ok Tim. Are you also on the Lockheed Martin payroll? Since 1991, the US has relentlessly expanded its empire east, into former Soviet republics, and we're shocked that after 14 years of patience (since the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit targeting Ukraine for NATO accession), a Russian leader decided not to allow Ukraine to host Western military equipment capable of destroying Russia (after Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler, to name only a few, used Ukraine to invade Russia repeatedly over centuries). If Snyder really cared about peace in Eastern Europe, perhaps he should have considered restraining NATO expansion, and encouraging US imperial managers to negotiate with Russia and arrange a security arrangent for all of Europe, an arrangement which takes into account all concerens, including Russian concerns ... but no, it's NATO expansion, Western provocation, and a hideous war ... aggressive US neoliberalism destroys yet another country. Take a bow Tim ... and Obama ... and Biden.

1:16 Oh my God! You couldn't resist bringing Trump into the conversation. That's really the chef's kiss, isn't it, and another signal to your listeners. Gosh, am I glad my professors weren't like you. Such a stifling atmosphere, finally. I started this lecture because you were supposed to be an expert and because I had seen you in another interview and wanted to know more. If you can't tell, I gradually turned against you as you ticked off, one by one, a large number of the problems of professors and universities today. It's so sad that it's come to this in US universities. Just terrible. I think I saw the last tatters of real intellectualism when I was a student. It's gone now. 😢

1:12 Once again: WE MUST WIN! At all costs, I guess. The cost of Ukraine itself. This is the bloody-mindedness again. And how crass of you to talk about how cheap it is for us to pay for it all.

1:09 Your comments about freedom reflect Roosevelt's four freedoms--that is, they are not negative freedoms. This is not the American or Enlightenment concept of freedom. It is a neo-marxist concept of freedom.

1:07 Your student responds to you by saying some people are “insane.” This is mirroring your approach and attitude, and you reward her by saying her point is “brilliant.” This is indoctrination, sir, yes it is. If you can’t accept that, you must accept that it is poor teaching practice.

1:03 Of course your liberal politics come out. If you don't know, that's signaling to your students about where you better line up. If you don't know that, you are a very unskilled lecturer indeed, If you do, and I think you do, you are not a lecturer. You are an indoctrinator. That stuff has no place in a classroom! This points to one of the biggest problems in universities, and why they are captured. But I suppose you think you are just speaking the "truth"? Is this a gnostic attitude? I suspect yes.

56:00 Yup, there's the bloody-mindedness. The future of everything depends on this war. We have to win. Etc. It's always something like that. You haven't really defined what winning means. Your remarks on free speech were incomplete, I assume, or undeveloped. Your notion of democracy vis a vis Ukraine is rather silly. You are a scholar of Ukraine and you think it is a bastion of democracy? Really?

It's symbolic that your narrow definition of fascism, that it starts with naming your enemy, is the way you start your lecture, with identifying Putin as the enemy, and an irrational one at that. You appear to me to be either hopelessly dialectically confused or diabolical in your abuse of language and argumentative structure to influence your students.

Around 23:00 -- Professor Snyder, it is we who are willing to sacrifice every Ukrainian for a quixotic notion of defeating and humiliating Russia. Why the Left has conceived this bloody-minded attitude that we need Russia as a boogeyman is hard to define--at first--but wholly culturally debased. It's easy to understand when you see that it comes from a confluence of neo-marxism and corporatist monopoly power. You studiously avoid the fact that NATO's taking Ukraine by making it a member, or doing something just as good, is a threat to Russia, especially given the context of this bloody-minded attitude. This self-reinforces and can exist only as an increasingly extreme pseudo-intellectual idea.

Wow. This concept that Putin thinks Ukraine doesn't exist is just a linguistic construct built on a scaffolding of "clever" manipulation of shades of meaning; it is telling that he has to keep referring to notes because real experts who speak actual truth do not need to keep checking in with their self-created orthodoxy. Boo, if that wasn't clear enough. Additionally, he feels very free to insult (stupid, idiotic) in the very way that Leftist do all the time when they disagree, and he abuses his repartee with the students to use these insults as persuasive elements. This is both low and underhanded at the same time and indicative of the stereotypical professor in a bubble whose ideas are never seriously challenged and who builds up a mountain of facts not as a foundation of wisdom but as a resource for rationalization.

Professor of English who doesn't speak English? Diversity hire?

i'm grateful there are such knowledgable, intelligent people as professor Snyder in our world.

The future of the world is being decided today in Ukraine, and Biden is lagging behind and disappointing with the arms supplies to Ukraine. Too little, too late, and this prolongs the devastation.

As part of monitoring his Ukrainian History course, I began reading his books and and UKposts video in which he talks. In everything he does he drops incredible truth bombs that just gives one Eureka moment after the other. It's like the insights from being on drugs without needing the drugs.

Hard to be a cheerleader (let alone a soldier) for democracy with the hideous record of the U.S. and the idea that it is through violence that we gain or promote freedom is not a view which I share. All of the “great powers” have a sordid history and so the statement, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” appears to apply universally. The U.S. should not be policy the world according to its own blatant self interests and in clear contradiction of both its own stated principles and UN charter. More bullies with more weapons (including nuclear) is not e recipe for a true peace for our only planet. Listening to the sophistry was entertaining but not convincing.

The world owes professor Snyder a debt.

his 23-lecture course in Yale University is a must watch for everyone. great reading material as well

He is not only a brilliant scholar, but much more valuably and importantly a vital, engaged and honest thinker. Thank you for this wonderful program!

Unfortunately Snyder begins with the most colossal drivel about global warming. The reason the great majority of people believe it's happening and that it's a threat is because of the gigantic mountain of propaganda they've been fed about it, continuously, for the last twenty years.

Trump still living rent free in the minds of the left. Pity. Great points on Ukraine from a brilliant researcher. Disappointing that he used some of his precious time to smear those with whom he disagrees on domestic issues and suggest they are cowards for speaking out. Maybe that fractured mirror he talks about should be held up in front of his face.

1:05:20 you missed Ukraine proposal for global security.

47:00 DISAGREE. WE DON'T HAVE TO REINVENT THE WHEEL AND EVERY PERSON HAVE PHDS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE. ALL WE HAVE TO SO IS BE COMFORTABLE, AND INFORMED ABOUT WHAT THE OPTIONS ARE - THEN WE CAN RELAX IN DEMOCRACY.

Wasn't the language/ethnicity invented by Kremlin propaganda? Not America.

@dnskibo Ukraine-Canadian: thank you - Prof. Snyder always amazingly insightful and informative.

Good stuff...as always, Tim.

Thank you Timothy Snyder. Just read Bloodlands, and was blown away. Thanks for taking time to talk to american students about the idea of democracy and the idea of a nation. I will use this video in my class. Thx from Denmark.

1:11:17 👏👏👏👏

1:04:00 is that Jason Stanley in the front row?? This was amazing. Glory to 🇺🇦 Слава Україні!

By your definition, nearly everyone is fascist @41:36 +

This lecture is a slipshod narrative of false generalizations devoid of any substance! No mention of NATO, EU, or "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler!

Actually, from the start, I thought that Ukraine could win, but that it was by no means certain. There were strengths and weaknesses on both side and one thing on Ukraine's side was that they were less surprised by the invasion than most of the invading troupes, who had been told right up until the last minute that they were just on a training exercise.

Wonderful lecture and thank you so much to Timothy Snyder. Truly great to hear his perspective given his deep knowledge of the cultures and historical context. Many points to call out but the one regarding equipping children to develop the ability to hear all the facts and sides and make rational choice is real freedom (sorry not his exact words but hopefully correct gist)

Dear Mr.Snyder, Thank you so much for your fantastic course on the making of modern Ukraine. I've never ever heard anything so logical, so precise, so emotional about the history of my country. I've gone through all the lectures on the fly within 3 days. Wish all Ukrainians would listen to this great story as many of the facts I'm sure are unknown to many of them. Your passion for the Ukrainian history is beyound imagination, you are true ukrainian lover. Thank you so much!

"...the fact that he (Zelenskiy) didn't go, the fact that Ukrainians chose to fight, reminds us of something essential about both social existence and democracy, which is that it depends upon working against the larger conditions, it depends upon injecting ethical commitments, and taking corporeal risks." This articulates perfectly why I have stood up against the direct taxation of personal incomes, and the lifetimes of invasive surveillance it enables, and the entire national structure of businesses as tax shelters and personal finance as money-laundering, which it requires and encourages, ALL MY LIFE. This has been a non-negotiable position on my part for decades, I have refused openly and absolutely to be spied on and extorted by a regime with zero exceptions granted, at permanent risk to myself, and to everything I ever achieved or held as precious in my own life, and I have lost much because I would not, could not and will not relent from this ethical commitment, regardless of what corporeal risks I have had to take. As Prof. Snyder says of freedom of speech, that not to defend it at risk to oneself is to be a coward, a mere consumer of freedom and not its defender, is exactly the way I view an American nation content to define itself as a nation of 'taxpayers', reducing themselves to cowardly consumers of liberties, but continually unwilling to defend them. Every single time you file a 1040 or sign a W2 or 1099, you are actively surrendering your freedom, and worse, you know you are. It has to stop, and you have to stop it by declining to participate in it, at risk to yourselves and irrespective of what that risk to anyone's laundered personal fiefdom consists of, and you all know you do. Why haven't you yet?

Mic is so bad. Questions just muzzled.

Great Stuff. This talk illustrates perfectly the value in higher education in general. Our societies, and we as humans need to access language and the ability to discuss the world in order to understand where we are and to find the way forward. The tragedy of war is that it is a manifestation of ignorance, and shows a dominance of low-tier impulses (greeds). Learning to talk and to think (for all of us) will do much to elevate society from stupid and retrograde urges.

I admire Tim Snyder. I can't speak too lowly of Donald Trump. However, I think he is wrong to suggest that Trump has played any part in the idea that the USA can't 'win'. I think that is both a broader and deeper malaise in the US political, diplomatic, military and cultural discourses. Suggesting Trump is a major factor give him too much credit.

thx a lot .. slava ukraini .. geets from germany

Electoral system in US, is a structural factor. That needs to change in order to advance democracy forward. There are many structural factors in Nepal. Rather than being an independent state, it is a satellite state. Structural factors are in play here.

I would love to see him and John Mearshiemer debate.