Timothy Snyder | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Snyder in 2016 | |
| Born | Timothy David Snyder (1969-08-18)August 18, 1969 (age 56) Dayton, Ohio, U.S. |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | George Louis Beer Prize (2003)[4] Hannah Arendt Prize (2013) The VIZE 97 Prize (2015) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Thesis | Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905): A Political and Intellectual Biography[1] (1995) |
| Doctoral advisor | Timothy Garton Ash Jerzy Jedlicki[2] |
| Other advisor | Charles Feinstein[3] |
| Academic work | |
| Sub-discipline | History of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust |
| Institutions | |
Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969)[5] is an American historian specializing in the history ofCentral andEastern Europe, theSoviet Union, and theHolocaust. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at theMunk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at theUniversity of Toronto. From 2017 to 2025 he was also theRichard C. Levin Professor of History atYale University.[6][7]
He is a permanent fellow at theInstitute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[8][9] Snyder serves on the Committee on Conscience of theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is a member of theCouncil on Foreign Relations.
Snyder has written many books, includingBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010),On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017),The Road to Unfreedom (2018), andOur Malady (2020). Several of these have been described as best-sellers.[10][11]
Timothy Snyder was born in 1969[12] nearDayton, Ohio; he is the son of Christine Hadley Snyder, a teacher, accountant, and homemaker, and Estel Eugene Snyder, a veterinarian.[13] Snyder's parents were married in aQuaker ceremony in 1963 in Ohio, and his mother was active in preserving her family farmstead as a Quaker historic site. They had served inPeace Corps in theDominican Republic andEl Salvador before starting their family in a prosperous suburb of Dayton. While inninth grade, Snyder holidayed with them in a Quakerdairy commune inCosta Rica.[14] He acknowledges having received a Quaker education.[15]
Snyder attendedCenterville High School. He received aBachelor of Arts degree in history and political science fromBrown University in 1991,[16] and was influenced to take up European history by Mary Gluck andThomas W. Simons Jr., who was soon to becomeUS ambassador to Poland.[14] He earned aD.Phil. degree inmodern history in 1995 at theUniversity of Oxford with a thesis on the Polish MarxistKazimierz Kelles-Krauz, supervised byTimothy Garton Ash andPolish Academy of Sciences'Jerzy Jedlicki. He was aMarshall Scholar atBalliol College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1994.[17][18][19]
Snyder held fellowships at theFrench National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris from 1994 to 1995; theInstitut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 1996; and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University in 1997. He was an Academy Scholar at theWeatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1998 to 2001. He joined the faculty ofYale University in 2001.[20]
Snyder has been an instructor at theCollege of Europe Natolin Campus, the Baron Velge Chair at theUniversité libre de Bruxelles, the Cleveringa Chair at theLeiden University, Philippe Romain Chair at theLondon School of Economics, and the 2013René Girard Lecturer atStanford University.[21][22][23] During the 2013–14 academic year, he held the Philippe Roman Chair of International History at theLondon School of Economics and Political Science.[24] Before assuming the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History at Yale in 2017,[20] Snyder was the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University.
Following theMaidan Revolution andRussian annexation of Crimea, he co-organised theUkraine: Thinking Together conference in Kyiv in May 2014 withLeon Wieseltier ofThe New Republic (then majority-owned byFacebook's co-founderChris Hughes).[25][26] He has participated in theYalta European Strategy meetings inKyiv since September 2014 (during his September 2022 visit to the conference, he held a two-hour private meeting with the Ukrainian presidentVolodymyr Zelenskyy).[14] In November 2014, he attended the Ukrainian oligarchVictor Pinchuk's decoration with the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Medal by theJewish Confederation of Ukraine in Kyiv.[27][28] In January 2019, he addressed the initial Ukraine House Davos event (sponsored by Pinchuk and the Ukrainian-Canadian billionaireJames C. Temerty) at the annualWorld Economic Forum meeting inDavos.[29]
He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[30] On September 25, 2020, he was named as one of 25 members of theReal Facebook Oversight Board, an independent group monitoring Facebook.[31] In addition, he serves on the editorial boards of theJournal of Modern European History andEast European Politics and Societies.[32]
In November 2023, he launched adeep history project named Ukrainian History Global Initiative, conceived and funded by Victor Pinchuk. He joined the Initiative's board of trustees (chaired byCarl Bildt) and chairs its academic council featuring Timothy Garton Ash andYuval Harari.[33][34][35][36][37] He was selected as the keynote speaker for theFriends Committee on National Legislation annual meeting in 2025.[38]
In July 2025, he assumed the Chair in Modern European History atMunk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at theUniversity of Toronto, funded by the Temerty Family Foundation.[39][40]
Snyder has written fifteen books and co-edited two. He speaks five European languages and reads ten, facilitating the use ofprimary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe during research.[41] Snyder has stressed that knowing other languages is essential for his field, saying "If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing."[42]
Snyder's first book was the 1998Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz. It is a study in nationalism through analysis of the life of the Polish thinkerKazimierz Kelles-Krauz.[43]
In 2003, he publishedThe Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. The book focuses on the history of several Central and Eastern European countries during the last few centuries.[44][45]
In 2005, Snyder published the bookSketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. It is a study of theSecond Polish Republic andSoviet Ukraine between World War I and World War II, as seen through the prism of the life ofHenryk Józewski.[46]
In 2008, he publishedThe Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. The book is an analysis of the life ofWilhelm von Habsburg.[47]
In 2010, Snyder published the bookBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It was a best seller[48] and has been translated into thirty languages.[32] In an interview with Slovene historian Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič in 2016, Snyder described the book as an attempt to overcome the limitations of national history in explaining the political crimes perpetrated in Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s:
The point ofBloodlands was that we hadn't noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time. The question of the book was: 'How this could have happened?' We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.[49]
Bloodlands received reviews ranging from highly critical to "rapturous".[50][51] In assessing these reviews,Jacques Sémelin described it as one of the books that "change the way we look at a period in history".[51] Sémelin noted that some historians have criticized the chronological construction of events, the arbitrary geographical delimitation, Snyder's numbers on victims and violence, and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors.[51]
Omer Bartov wrote that "the book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments".[52] In a highly critical review,Richard Evans wrote that, because of its lack of causal argument, "Snyder's book is of no use"; Evans also wrote that Snyder "hasn't really mastered the voluminous literature on Hitler's Germany", which "leads him into error in a number of places" about the politics of Nazi Germany, including "equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin", which Evans considers "highly troubling".[53]
By contrast,Wendy Lower wrote that it was a "masterful synthesis";[54]John Connelly called it "morally informed scholarship of the highest calibre";[55] andChristopher Browning described it as "stunning".[50] The journalContemporary European History published a special forum on the book in 2012, featuring reviews byMark Mazower,Dan Diner,Thomas Kühne, andJörg Baberowski, with an introduction and response by Snyder.[56]
Snyder's 2012 book,Thinking the Twentieth Century, was co-authored withTony Judt, while Judt was in the late stages ofALS disease. The book is based primarily on material by Judt, as edited by Snyder. It presents Judt's view on the history of the twentieth century.[57][58]
Snyder publishedBlack Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning in 2015. The book, offering a "radically new explanation" of theHolocaust,[59] and it received mixed reviews.[50]
In 2017, he publishedOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a short book about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny; the book focused on modern United States politics and on what he called "America's turn towards authoritarianism".[60][14] The book toppedThe New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017,[48] and it remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021.[61][62]On Tyranny has been featured in a rap song[63] and in poster exhibitions.[64][65]
In 2018, he publishedThe Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. The book explores Russian attempts to influence Western democracies; the book also explores the influence of philosopherIvan Ilyin on Russian PresidentVladimir Putin and theRussian Federation in general.[66][67][68]
In 2020, he published a book on theAmerican health care system, calledOur Malady.[69]
In 2024, he publishedOn Freedom, a book on how the concept of freedom has been misunderstood and must be redefined.[70][71]
Snyder has contributed essays to publications includingInternational Herald Tribune,The Nation,Foreign Affairs,[72]New York Review of Books,[73]The New York Times,[74]The Times Literary Supplement,The New Republic,Eurozine,Tygodnik Powszechny,Chicago Tribune, andThe Christian Science Monitor.
Snyder is primarily a scholar of twentieth-century Eastern European history; but in the mid-2010s, he became interested in U.S. history, contemporary politics, international relations, digital politics, health, and education. He has commented on the defunding of departments of history and thehumanities since the supposed post-Sovietend of history, noting that this has led to a society without the "concepts and references" or structural tools to discuss eroding factors such as modern forms ofpopulism.[75]
In interviews withThe Guardian for the article "Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times",[14] Snyder described history as follows: "a constant, exciting discovery of things that actually happened, which weren't anticipated and which were probably considered wildly improbable at the time. (...) And once you know that, then you can have the intuition that, well, maybe in this moment right now there's something happening which people aren't seeing." Drawing on the lessons of European history, Snyder introduced two terms into American political discussion :big lie, in reference toDonald Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election;[76][77][78] andmemory laws, to describe Republican state legislators' bills that were designed to guide and control American understanding of the past, in some cases affirming free speech while banning divisive speech.[79][80]
His political views have been described as "difficult to pin down" and it has been pointed out thatHenry Kissinger was among the authors ofblurbs praising his books. Snyder entertainedlibertarian views in his high school years, which was when he developed his intellectual ambitions.[14] The title of his 2018 bookThe Road to Unfreedom is said to echoFriedrich Hayek'sThe Road to Serfdom.[81] According to one critic, Snyder advocates "a revised and sophisticatedWhig theory of history: a presentation of liberal capitalism as the embodiment of progress and enlightenment", and Snyder's ideology fitsSheldon Wolin's definition ofinverted totalitarianism.[82]
| External videos | |
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 Ukraine: From Propaganda to Reality,Chicago Humanities Festival, 57:35, November 14, 2014 |
SinceRussia's invasion of Ukraine, andthe bombing of its energy infrastructure, Snyder has spoken and written widely on related subjects: the history of Ukraine and its worldwide importance for democracy; the disastrous geopolitical effects of the invasion; and the need for other nations and individuals to stand up for the protection of territory belonging to that state. Snyder has observed that "The fact that we have democracies at all is kind of remarkable"; he warned that democracy means that "the people have to rule, and they have to want to rule", cautioning against reliance on larger historical forces to bring about democracy.[83]
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Snyder launched a $1.25mcrowdfunding initiative to upgrade Ukraine's air defenses.[84][85] According to Snyder, the only way to end the war is for Putin's Russia to "win by losing": only if Ukraine wins will it be possible for the dictator to leave the scene, and for the country to start a democratic process that will benefit Russia itself. Snyder is on the list of 200 Americans who are barred from entering Russian territory, under sanctions announced by the Russian government in November 2022.[86]
In 2015, Snyder delivered a series of lectures inKyiv,Dnipro, andKharkiv. The lectures, delivered inUkrainian, were open to the public; they focused on Snyder's historical research and the contemporary political situation in Ukraine.[87]
InThe Road to Unfreedom, Snyder argues thatVladimir Putin's government in Russia is authoritarian, and that it usesfascist ideas in its rhetoric.[88] In December 2018, during a discussion withJohn Connelly (another historian of Eastern Europe), Snyder referred to this asschizo-fascism:[89]
. . . fascist ideas have come to Russia at a historical moment, three generations after the Second World War, when it's impossible for Russians to think of themselves as fascist. The entire meaning of the war in Soviet education was as an anti-fascist struggle, where the Russians are on the side of the good and the fascists are the enemy. So there's this odd business, which I call in the book "schizo-fascism", where people who are themselves unambiguously fascists refer to others as fascists.
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Snyder has drawn a parallel betweenHitler's and Putin's rationales for territorial expansion. Snyder predicted Russia's invasion of Crimea, outlining specific threats in theNew York Timesop-ed piece "Don't Let Putin Grab Ukraine" on February 3, 2014. Snyder wrote that Putin's rhetoric resembles Hitler's to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical; both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade; and both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.[90]
Marlène Laruelle commented[50] that "Contrary to [Snyder's] claims, the Kremlin does not live in an ideological world inspired byNazi Germany, but in one in which the Yalta decades, theGorbachev-Yeltsin years, andthe collapse of the Soviet Union still constitute the main historical referents and traumas."[91]
On March 14, 2023, Snyder briefed theUnited Nations Security Council in a meeting called by Russia to addressRussophobia. Snyder said that the termRussophobia was used by Russia to justify itswar crimes in Ukraine. He stated that any harm done to Russians and Russian culture was primarily due to Moscow's own policies and actions; these resulted in drivingRussian emigration following the invasion, suppression of independent media, attacks on cultural assets and landmarks, and mass killings of Russian speakers and citizens. After he was challenged by the Russian representative,Vasily Nebenzya, for sources, Snyder referred to Putin's statements denying the existence of Ukraine.[92]
Snyder has written six books on Ukraine.[93] In 2022, to explain the origins and course of theRusso-Ukrainian war, he made his Yale lecture seriesThe Making of Modern Ukraine available to the general public on YouTube[94] and as a podcast series,[95] along with the syllabus and reading list.[96] As of November 2022, the course had been viewed by millions of people.[97] Snyder has spoken[98] and written about the war in the press, and he publishes history and commentary in the online newsletter "Thinking About..."[99]
Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine, met with Snyder to discuss the mental health and resilience of Ukrainians at the annualYalta European Strategy conference in September 2023.[100]
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Snyder criticized the premise behind “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” a presidential executive order on March 27, 2025, as asserting the government’s monopoly on truth, while identifying all other information as ideology or propaganda. Snyder stated that “The truth is never, never with those who hold power. The truth is with everyone else.” He cites “the need for memory and for discussion of events that make us uncomfortable — as good history always will…Loving our country means knowing about our country. And knowing about our country means learning the things that we don't know, and sometimes the things that we don't want to know.”[101]
Snyder states that Americans are negotiating on the side of aggressors, publicly conceding Ukraine's territory, NATO membership, elections timing, and basic existence before talks begin—while attempting to seize the sovereign country’s mineral resources under threat of Russian violence. In Snyder's view, Ukraine is the victim of a colonial war in which theft of resources, including children, is the goal. He mentions the Munich accords of 1938, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, and the broader history of colonialism as precedents for excluding Ukraine from talks that represent an attack on its sovereignty.[102]
On February 5, 2025, Timothy Snyder said of Elon Musk’s attempt to seize control of the U.S. Treasury system that “of course it’s a coup.” Historically, Snyder explains, centers of power were physical places, and coups consisted of armed assaults on government buildings; in the era of digital power, young men in civilian clothes with portable drives, under orders devoid of legal authority, have broken into computer systems.[103][104]
Snyder has described Trump as Russia’s "only chance of winning the war", describing their thought process as "We just need to stay on the battlefield to January 25 [2025] and then the floodgates will open for us, because we’re going to have our guy." He adds "I think the throughline for Trump, going all the way back to the 1980s...has always been submissiveness towards the power in the Kremlin...in his entire career, Trump has seemed to enjoy being bullied by Putin." Snyder notes that the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump’s return through "laughable" rulings on immunity and on the US Constitution’s third section of theFourteenth Amendment disqualifying insurrectionists from federal office.[105]
In the first chapter of his bookOn Tyranny, Snyder elaborates onvorauseilender Gehorsam [de], "obedience ahead of the command", or as Snyder calls it, "anticipatory obedience". The concept dates from Germany in 1933.[106] It is illustrated by the public haste to comply with Hitler shortly after his election, enabling him to seize additional powers; it is also seen in the 1938 Anschluss when Austrians were quicker to accommodate the joining of their country to Germany than even Hitler himself expected. Snyder's formulation of anticipatory obedience and the exhortation "do not obey in advance" have become part of international discourse. "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given", writes Snyder. "In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."
In response to a request from the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Timothy Snyder provided written and oral testimony[107][108] for the April 17, 2024, session: "Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party's Political Warfare, Part I." Snyder urged Congress to understand political warfare as "someone else trying to get you to do something you ought not to". He emphasized the role Americans play in the efforts of hostile foreign powers to exploit domestic weaknesses using divisive propaganda intended to show that democracy is impotent, hypocritical, and not worth defending. These messages are successful only when echoed by politicians, billionaires and other citizens, some unknowingly, but against their own self-interest. Financial vulnerability of politicians is an opening for psychological operations by hostile actors as it renders targets susceptible to manipulation by their foreign patrons. Political warfare conducted by authoritarian regimes where corruption is normal promotes messages that aim to normalize corruption externally in America and elsewhere.
Snyder asserted the centrality of the war in Ukraine to the general problem of political warfare. In this war, international order, the reputation of democracy and alliance structures are all at stake. While Americans may not see the connections, Beijing and Taiwan are clear that Ukraine's self-defense deters Chinese aggression in the Pacific.[109] He described the increasing conformity of Chinese propaganda methods and themes with those used by Russian disinformation campaigns designed to promote American inaction and interfere with elections, backing candidates most likely to support authoritarian regimes. Common tropes in theRussian information war against Ukraine are: Ukrainians are Nazis, the Ukraine war is all about NATO enlargement, Ukraine is corrupt, democracy is powerless to do anything about Ukraine, Americans should pay attention to the border and not do anything about Ukraine, and Joseph Biden has accepted bribes.[110]
In written testimony and during the oral hearings, Snyder and members of Congress gave examples ofMarjorie Taylor Greene, JD Vance, and Donald Trump publicly promoting foreign propaganda tropes. Snyder responded directly to Greene's oral testimony suggesting significant Nazi influence in Ukraine with the fact that no far-right party in Ukraine has ever gotten more than 3% of a national vote.[111] Snyder explained that availability of propaganda memes and messages from outlets like X (Twitter) obviates the need for direct contact between the Americans who spread them and the foreign actors and their media outlets who source them originally. When government or self-policing of hostile foreign propaganda by social media has been attempted, it is successful, but X (Twitter), notably, has refused to self-regulate.[112]
On April 10, 2024, Snyder joined with more than 35 musicians, actors, thinkers, historians, entrepreneurs, and diplomats in an appeal[113] to Congress for aid to Ukraine in defense of democracy and in the fight "for our safety and for everyone's freedom." The open letter states that Ukrainian resistance to Russian dictatorship protects the international order, makes other wars in Europe impossible, and supports American interests, deterring China without provoking Beijing.
Snyder likenedNBC's pre-2024 election hiring of former Republican National Committee chairRonna McDaniel to the anticipatory obedience he described in his bookOn Tyranny: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked." In an interview with NBC's sister stationMSNBC, he cited McDaniel's role in trying to disassemble our democracy and said: "What NBC is doing is saying, 'Well, [it] could be that in '24 our entire system will break down. Could be we'll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we've made this adjustment in advance because we've brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down,'" adding, "If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them."[114]
Asked in early 2017 how the agenda of theTrump administration compared withAdolf Hitler's rise to power, Snyder said that history "does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation and resistance".[115] Elaborating in 2021 on the resonance of Nazi history within Donald Trump's claim to a landslide victory, Snyder recalled the German Reich's "stab in the back" lie that its army did not really lose the First World War, but rather, Jews and left-wingers betrayed "true Germans" on the home front, leading to defeat. This lie, when repeated and expanded by Hitler to a claim that Jews were responsible for everything that is wrong, fueled anti-Semitism and led to the Holocaust.[116]
Trump's "big lie" tears the very fabric of factuality, said Snyder, echoing Hannah Arendt, by denying verifiable reality and forcing believers to accept an illogical premise that Democrats rigged the 2020 election only for the presidency and not for members of Congress. It requires adoption of a conspiracy theory in which everyone is against the believer, and the high stakes of the lie demand action including violence.[117]
In January 2021 Snyder published an essay inThe New York Times on the future of the GOP in response to thesiege of the United States Capitol, blaming Trump and his "enablers", SenatorsTed Cruz andJosh Hawley, for the insurrection fueled by theirclaims of election fraud, writing that "the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. SeizingTrump's big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact, he observed, a big lie can survive the liar, and in the case of Cruz and Hawley, it expresses a wish for Trump's political death."[118][119]
In a May 2017 interview withSalon, he warned that the Trump administration would attempt to subvert democracy by declaring astate of emergency and take full control of the government, similar to Hitler'sReichstag fire: "it's pretty much inevitable that they will try".[120] He repeated the warning in Commonweal on November 2, 2020: "The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power some other way."[121] According to Snyder, "Trump's campaign for president of the United States was basically a Russian operation."[122] Snyder also warned that Trump's lies would lead to tyranny, as democracy is impossible in a society divided between true believers and everyone else, asserting that the only cure is truth.[122][123]
In 1994, Snyder married fellow academic Milada Vachudova, with whom he also collaborated on scholarly work.[124][125] Snyder's second marriage took place in 2005 toMarci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University. The couple have two children together.[126][127]
In December 2019, Snyder fell seriously ill following a series of medical misdiagnoses. While recuperating during thecoronavirus pandemic, he wroteOur Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary, about problems with the for-profit health care system in the US, and the coronavirus response to date.[77][128]
Snyder and his wife moved from the United States to Canada in the summer of 2024 because of "difficult family matters."[129] Shore wrote that their children were factors in the couple’s decision. A spokesperson for Snyder said he made his decision for personal reasons, and he made it before the election.In an emailed statement Wednesday, Snyder said, "The opportunity came at a time when my spouse and I had to address some difficult family matters....aside from a strong appreciation of what U of T has to offer, the motivations are largely that--personal."[130]
Some media reported that he, like his close friendJason Stanley, was fleeing the perceived fascism of President Trump; as he wrote, "I did not leave Yale because of anything Trump is doing; the chronology and the psychology are all wrong; I was not and am not fleeing anything."[6][131][130]
He is a friend of the Ukrainian rock starSviatoslav Vakarchuk.[14]
On November 2, 2022, Timothy Snyder became the tenth ambassador of theUNITED24 fundraising platform;[132] he completed a fundraiser for a system to counter Russianunmanned aerial vehicles in Ukraine, thereby protecting Ukraine's critical infrastructure.[14][133] On August 18, 2024, Snyder andMark Hamill jointly launched theUnited24 Safe Terrain Initiative; this funded mine-clearing robots to remove explosive ordnance from Ukrainian land, reduce risks forsappers, and allow people to return to their businesses and farms.[134][135]
Through theInstitute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, he leads the Documenting Ukraine project; this supports journalists, scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and archivists based in Ukraine in their efforts to create a factual record of the war.[136]
Starting in November 2023, Snyder began leading 90 scholars in the Ukrainian History Global Initiative to study Ukraine and its history. The initiative is a charitable foundation that will include disciplines beyond history; it will sponsor three major academic conferences, various publications, and archaeological excavations.[137][138]
State Decorations and Orders
Honorary Doctorates
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